I suppose we have to do this. Yes, Donald Trump relaunched his "coronavirus briefings" yesterday, but the new version consisted of Donald Trump, and only Donald Trump, giving a misleading slideshow largely glossing over the record number of new cases, filling hospitals, and what is now months of attempting to ignore a deadly pandemic into election-year submission. So no, it wasn't a real briefing. It had no experts. It was purely a propaganda stunt.
The major takeaway was Trump's sociopathic answer when asked about the now-in-custody Ghislaine Maxwell, the woman who assisted Trump’s longtime friend Jeffrey Epstein in acquiring children to have sex with. "I just wish her well," Trump ad-libbed, noting that he "met her numerous times." But Trump did, with about the same level of non-emotion, encourage Americans to maybe wear masks (he did not wear one) and mentioned, as a casual aside, that by the way things are probably going to "get worse."
“It will probably, unfortunately, get worse before it gets better [...] something I don't like saying about things but that's the way it is,” Trump told the assembled reporters—an admission at odds with his self-flattering slideshow, and a warning eerily reminiscent of the first time Trump acknowledged that 60,000 Americans would die, about 100,000 American deaths back. Trump's only admissions of the severity of the pandemic have been during the rare occasions when experts have been able to get through to him that things are about to get much worse, so if Trump is now begrudgingly admitting things are about to get "worse" that means he's been given new estimates so unbelievably dire that even his own malignant narcissism cannot process them into self-praise.
It seems likely, if not inevitable, that the pandemic will now end at least a quarter million American lives. That may be the number sharp enough to have driven itself through his thick skull, if only a little bit. It is not likely that Trump even remembers his prior boast that if his administration kept the number of deaths to "only" 60,000, it ought to be considered a good job, but there's little way to spin any number involving the word "million" as a similar success.
What we didn't get is any plan, at all, in any way, shape, or form, to shrink the explosion of pandemic cases we are now witnessing. We were told that the hospitals, the supplies, and the other preparatory accoutrements were in wonderful shape, thanks to him. Oh, and that you might want to wear a mask after all, disregarding his months of prior statements on that. And repeated references to "the China virus," a name used only by Trump's white nationalist base. And another claim that the virus would indeed "disappear" at some unspecified future point—the experts may have been able to momentarily convince Trump again of the severity of the crisis, but have still not been able to teach him How Viruses Work.
It's not clear if this new format, with a Nyquilized Trump as slideshower in chief, is truly going to be an ongoing thing. I would suspect not. It is a great deal of work, for Trump, to enunciate his way through that many written words, and in the past it has frequently left him pissed off and chafing for days afterwards. The past briefings began to get more and more unhinged the longer they went on; we can presume that Trump's staff is frantically looking for ways to distract him again before that happens.