At The Washington Post, Aaron Blake was motivated to go through Donald Trump's COVID-19 press event from yesterday to see how much content was included and how much was fluff. The answer was obvious from the get-go, but Blake took the time to color code the transcript and do a word count. Of the words Trump word-burped, about 25% were self-promoting or blaming others.
For example: "We’re the ones that gave the great response, and we’re the ones that kept China out of here, and if I didn’t do it, you’d have thousands and thousands of people died—who would have died that are now living and happy."
Uuuuugh.
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You might think, if the charts show little to no useful information is conveyed after the first few minutes, that these now-daily Trump pressers are pointless exercises that dispense more damage in misinformation than they provide in help. This may be the case, but they are not pointless. They are the only things that hold Donald Trump's brain inside his head. If Donald had to go multiple days without either going to his golf clubs or being gaudily praised for his supposed boldness in a crisis in large part of his own incompetent making, he would lose every remaining marble. He would be on the White House roof in his underpants by the end of the week, screaming about the press and waving for his Space Force satellites to come pick him up.
But this exercise by Blake would seem to lend support to calls that the networks need to stop running these events live. The content-filled parts of each briefing are the first initial bits where Trump reads from a paper someone else gave him describing mostly truthful, if highly selective, developments. Once reporters start asking questions, it turns into defensive gibberish.
This is exactly the sort of thing that can be covered with a few brief clips. Trump needs these praise-fests because he is a malignant narcissist who cannot function without them. The rest of us just need to know whether we remain boned by the White House's incapacity to take any action until it is already too late, or are slightly less boned because somebody did something useful.
Learning for the umpteenth consecutive day that Donald still believes he is God's own gift to government and that the experts surrounding him are wrong—in everything from prescription drugs to what the hospitals will look like in a week—is not, in itself, helpful.
