President Trump said Monday that he is bringing back the daily briefings on the coronavirus that he halted in April, a tacit acknowledgment that the public health crisis he has tried to leave behind is still devastating much of the country.
With the increase in cases and deaths, Mr. Trump told reporters that he would likely hold the first of the new series of briefings on Tuesday at 5 p.m. He attributed his decision to revive them not to the growing threat from the virus but to the fact that the briefings had high television ratings.
“I was doing them and we had a lot of people watching, record numbers watching in the history of cable television. There has never been anything like this, ”Trump told reporters in the Oval Office during a previously unannounced meeting with Republicans in Congress. “It is an excellent way to get information to the public about where we are with vaccines, with therapeutics.”
The original briefings over the course of weeks, March through April, were television events, with scientific information provided by public health experts often overshadowed by a confrontational president who punished governors, lawmakers, China, reporters and others he considered insufficiently grateful. For his leadership he used them to defend his administration’s response to the virus and to promote a pet medication as a possible treatment on the advice of his own experts.
He eventually stopped holding the briefings after he was widely teased for suggesting that people could counter the virus by ingesting or injecting bleach, a casual comment he sent to public health agencies to warn the public not to try such an approach because It could be fatal Singed, Trump stated that the briefings “were not worth the time and effort.”
But in recent weeks, the surge in cases, particularly in the south and west, has frustrated Trump’s effort to lessen the severity of the ongoing pandemic. The United States now records more than double the number of cases each day than during the heyday of daily briefings, and the number of deaths, which had decreased substantially, has also begun to increase again.
The decision to revive the briefings offers a kind of substitute for campaign rallies that Trump hoped to restart now. His initial attempt to return to the campaign failed when only a third of an arena was filled in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and his second, an established rally for New Hampshire, was erased amid concerns about low attendance, with the campaign. citing the weather as a reason to cancel.
