“It has never been like that,” he said, calling them “very successful.”
As coronavirus cases increase across the southern and western United States, President Donald Trump said Monday that he had decided to bring back the White House coronavirus briefings that he halted amid widespread criticism, including to bring them himself, probably starting Tuesday at 5 p.m. ET.
“Well, we had very successful briefings,” Trump told reporters in an Oval Office photo shoot, when asked to clarify whether briefings were coming back amid polls showing declining approval ratings of how he handled the crisis.
“I was doing it and we had a lot of people watching, record numbers watching in the history of cable television – television, there has never been anything like that. And we were doing it very well, and I thought it would be something like, automatic and a lot of positive things they were happening and frankly much of the country is fine, “he said.
In particular, the president has been criticized by members of his own party for holding free-wheel sessions, some lasting almost two hours, during which he frequently promoted misinformation and falsehoods.
The announcement comes immediately after poor poll numbers on how Trump has handled the coronavirus crisis.
Americans, by almost a two-to-one margin, are suspicious of what President Trump says about the pandemic, and six out of 10 in a new ABC News / Washington Post poll disapprove of how he’s handling it, since the early days of outbreak. .
Polls also show that a minority of Americans currently trust him when it comes to COVID-19 compared to the nation’s health experts.
Trump said that while, in his opinion, “much of the country is fine,” he acknowledged “this great outbreak in Florida, Texas, elsewhere.”
“So I think what we will do is get involved and start doing briefings,” he said. “Either this afternoon or tomorrow, probably tomorrow, and I will do information sessions. And part of the meeting I think much more than the last time, because the last time we were nowhere with vaccines or therapies and let’s say it ended six weeks ago ” We will start again and I think it is a great way to get information to the public about where we are with vaccines, with therapeutics and, generally speaking, where we are. ”
“I think we will probably start tomorrow,” he added. “I will do it at five o’clock as we were doing.”
He said White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany would continue to report periodically at an earlier time.
“I will discuss, as I call it, the China virus, the plague of China. I will discuss it and perhaps also debate some other things,” he added.
In late April, after Trump discussed the possibility of injecting disinfectants into the body to treat COVID-19, the once-daily public task force briefings began to dwindle.
In May, the White House announced plans to dismantle the task force around Memorial Day, but a day later it revoked them, and Trump said he had “no idea” that the “respected” task force was so popular.
Around this time, Trump stopped meeting with the task force, according to the nation’s leading infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci, who told the Financial Times in July that he had not informed the president of the pandemic during two months.
After a two-month hiatus in public briefings, although the group was still meeting but drastically shrunk, the task force held its first public briefing on June 26, chaired by Vice President Mike Pence. President Trump was not present.
The coronavirus task force held another briefing on July 8 to discuss reopening schools, a favorite topic of the president, but once again, Trump did not attend.
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