Trump Is the Star of the Coronavirus Show, and He’s Loving Every Minute of It – By Ashley Feinberg (Slate) / April 7 2020
Who needs rallies?
There is nothing Donald Trump loves more than a rally. It’s where he gets to hear hordes of people screaming his name in ecstasy, where he gets to call for the downfall of his enemies, and where he gets to talk, uninterrupted, for hours at a time about any passing thought he chooses. He loves his rallies so much he’s done 96 of them since being elected president. The rally is perhaps the only place Donald Trump is truly happy. Or at least, it was.
In mid-March, however, with the coronavirus spreading ever more rapidly, Trump reluctantly announced that he’d be canceling his campaign rallies for the foreseeable future, depriving himself of the closest thing our president has to a sanctuary. To make matters worse, Trump’s sole source of self-soothing was being ripped from him by the thing he hates more than anything: his job. The country was being ravaged by a pandemic that he was in charge of containing, and a failure to do so could be catastrophic to his reelection chances.
Trump’s second instinct—his first instinct having been to pretend the outbreak wasn’t happening and to tell people the virus would go away—was to find someone else to take responsibility. And so, just as things were beginning to get too bad to ignore, Trump appointed Mike Pence to lead the White House Coronavirus Task Force.
Not only would his vice president happily obey orders, but any blame for the administration’s response efforts could easily be offloaded on Pence and away from Trump. As NBC reported, “Trump thought being the public face of the daily White House briefings on the pandemic would come with an onslaught of criticism, people familiar with the matter said.”
Then Trump saw how much attention the vice president was receiving, and he decided to start regularly leading the televised daily updates himself. Since March 9, Trump has held 27 coronavirus task force briefings.
Continue to article: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/04/trump-star-coronavirus-show-press-briefing.html
