There are around 40,000 new COVID-19 cases per day in the United States, and the country is bracing to find out what level of deaths they’ll bring in the coming weeks. Donald Trump’s White House, meanwhile, is approaching it as a messaging problem.
The big question in Trump’s inner circle is how much to talk about the coronavirus. But the inner-inner circle of Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, son-in-law Jared Kushner, favored new Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, and longtime Trump-whisperer Hope Hicks is reportedly opposed to the White House talking too much about the virus, because, Politico reports, they “want to keep the White House focused on the path forward and the nascent economic recovery—without scaring too much of the country about a virus resurgence when infections are rising at different paces in different regions.”
Unnamed other advisers, as well as Vice President Mike Pence and his people, think maybe the White House should be talking about the pandemic that’s defining life in the United States right now.
Donald Trump is the big problem here. When the White House was talking about the coronavirus, Donald Trump was talking nonstop, saying the most outrageous, ignorant things, endangering lives, drawing a steady string of bad headlines, and tanking in the polls. So they got him to stop talking. But he loved the attention, and if the White House is talking, Trump’s going to want to be talking.
Trump’s briefings have “no end goal and just focus on the political issue of the day,” an unnamed senior administration official told Politico. “A large group of advisers in the White House think it would be more effective to do more regionally focused press than national briefings.” On the other hand, according to a different senior administration official: “Cutting back on the briefings left a void that was filled by the media and the president’s political opponents in order to mislead people, and it resulted on the administration being put on the defensive.”
In other words, there is no good messaging strategy available to an administration in which messaging will always be taken over by Donald Trump.
The thing is, a pandemic that’s killed more than 125,000 people should not be tackled as a messaging problem. It’s a public health problem. A science problem. Yes, an economic problem, but not one that can be answered by ignoring the public health and science. And that’s where no team assembled by Donald Trump will ever be able to handle this—because his people will always be concerned above all else with message.