We begin today’s roundup with Josh Berman’s analysis at CNN of Donald Trump’s erratic, misleading campaign rally yesterday at the White House, where Trump lashed out at the media, Democrats, and even featured a taxpayer-funded campaign video:
“A thousand people are dying every day from the coronavirus, millions of Americans are trying to hold on without a paycheck,” Berman opened. “Every ounce of energy from every public official should be focused on them, on saving lives, on saving Jobs. Every minute, every resource spent on something else is squandered.” [...]
“And it’s a choice, the CNN anchor continued. “The president is choosing to use a press conference to focus substantially on himself. The president is choosing to use government resources on a tax-payer funded propaganda-style video that ignores or tries to row frame his own history and statements is one thing but the decision to spend so much time, so much energy, so much emotional investment on it is something else entirely.”
More from CNN’s Stephen Collinson and Maeve Reston:
With 23,000 Americans dead and millions without a paycheck, President Donald Trump dimmed the lights in the White House briefing room, fired up a misleading propaganda video and boiled over. In one of the most unchained presidential tantrums ever captured on television, Trump's Monday display flouted every notion of calm leadership by the commander in chief in a crisis
Tom Jones at Poynter notes that even FOX News cut away from what turned out the be Trump’s longest coronavirus briefing:
Only C-SPAN showed Monday’s entire press conference, which went well beyond two hours. Fox News showed a little more than two hours before going to Tucker Carlson. CNN and MSNBC showed most of the first 90 minutes before cutting out. The major networks — NBC, ABC, CBS — showed none of it.
Meanwhile, Nick Paumgarten at The New Yorker analyzes the money side of the crisis:
For Trump, the economy is basically the stock market. He’s obsessed with it, much the way he fixates on television ratings. The stock market is, among other things, a great mood indicator. But it isn’t the economy—not even close. As we’re now discovering, to more horror than surprise, the cessation of commercial activity—travel, tourism, entertainment, restaurants, sports, construction, conferences, or really any transactions, in significant volume, be they in lawyering, accounting, book sales, or sparkplugs—means no revenue, no ability to make payroll or rent, mass layoffs, steep declines in both supply and demand, and reverberations, up and down the food chain, of defaults on debt. That’s the economy.
On a final note, don’t miss James Fallows’ profile of Dr. Anthony Fauci at The Atlantic:
Anthony Fauci has been different from any other prominent official Donald Trump has dealt with in his time as president. The difference is that Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is not afraid. To put it in terms Trump might recognize: What the hell does he have to lose?
