Trump’s coronavirus briefings to get ‘new look’ as focus shifts

The White House signaled Monday its coronavirus briefings will have a “new look to them” and “a new focus to them” as President Trump retools how he wages America’s “war” against the coronavirus from the White House podium and curbs his minutes at the microphone.

Mr. Trump took the weekend off after a near-daily run of briefings since early March and didn’t speak for long on Friday, one day after his comments about the curative powers of disinfectants caused an embarrassing news cycle.

The White House decided not to brief reporters Monday but at midday abruptly scheduled a session to discuss testing. Mr. Trump held court in the Rose Garden for about 45 minutes, instead of the nearly two hours he has logged in the past.

Mr. Trump relishes the televised sessions — he didn’t even take Palm Sunday off — but new polling suggests the public doesn’t always trust what he’s saying and that fewer people are tuning in these days.

He contradicts his own experts in real-time, and facts about the pandemic compete for airtime with his grievances. After the president’s scripted remarks, Americans hoping to learn about the once-in-a-century crisis are eventually treated to verbal sparring between reporters and the leader of the free world.

“It’s kind of like being in a bar after 2 a.m.,” said Ari Fleischer, press secretary to former President George W. Bush, told The Washington Times.

The president would be better off holding the briefings three days a week and allowing Vice President Mike Pence and other officials to take the lead on other days, Mr. Fleischer said in a phone interview last week.

The White House appeared to be heading in that direction Monday.

It decided to cancel Monday’s briefing and open Mr. Trump’s closed-door meeting with CEOs instead, only to reinstate the evening session within hours, citing new testing guidance.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said the president will continue to hold briefings but might shake things up.

“This has been an opportunity to speak directly to the American people, we think they’ve been great,” she told reporters. She said future briefings “might have a new look to them, a new focus to them.”

“But I would not read into that that we see them as negative,” she added. “We think that they have been a very positive, helpful opportunity for the president to speak to the American people.”

Asked why briefings might change if they’re going well, she said it’s because the fight is entering a new phase of reopening the economy.

She said there aren’t immediate plans to get Mr. Trump traveling again but noted Vice President Mike Pence is starting to hit the road regularly.

Mr. Trump’s briefing on Monday wasn’t much different than previous ones. He boasted about his efforts to build a great economy and tacitly blamed China and the World Health Organization for the early spread of the virus, though he did pay more attention to those who have died from the disease.

The tangle with the briefing schedule comes as Mr. Trump faces some challenges in running for reelection in November.

Polls show him slightly trailing to presumptive Democratic nominee Joseph R. Biden in key states and his main selling point — the economy — has been devastated by the pandemic, with more than 26 million Americans filing for unemployment benefits.

The president argues he made America great and will do it again after the virus is defeated.

Yet only 28% of Americans say they’re regularly getting information about the coronavirus from Mr. Trump and less than a quarter, 23%, say they have high levels of trust in what he’s telling the public, according to a recent poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Only half of Republicans in the poll said they have a lot of trust in Mr. Trump’s information, but more than eight in 10 approve of his performance overall, keeping his general approval rating steady at 42%, the poll found.

A survey from Firehouse Strategies and Optimus Analytics says approval of Mr. Trump’s handling of the virus is at 48%, down from a high point of 52%, and the share of Americans watching his briefings is down 10 points, from 64% to 54%, from the start of April.

Mr. Trump seized control of the virus narrative with a rare appearance at the White House podium on Feb. 26, telling reporters he had tapped Vice President Mike Pence to manage the fight and musing the 15 known cases could drop back to zero.

That didn’t happen, but as the U.S. case count rose, Mr. Trump made his briefings a nightly fixture and boasted about statistics suggesting its ratings rivaled that of “The Bachelor” finale or Monday Night Football.

Mr. Trump does have a captive audience each night — everyone’s at home, anyway — and a lot of people pay attention to what he says. Most Americans haven’t seen a crisis like this in their lifetimes, so Mr. Trump has cast himself as a wartime president taking on an invisible enemy.

Because of social distancing, however, “it does restrict the extent to which he can connect with the country,” said Mr. Fleischer, who noted Mr. Bush was able to rally the country after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks by visiting the State Department to thank diplomats and a mosque to denounce discrimination against Muslim Americans.

Mr. Trump’s briefings typically begin with prepared remarks about the news of the day on testing, efforts to assist states or guidelines for localities looking to restart their economies.

Things get hairy when the president goes off script. He mused aloud Thursday about whether it would be possible to inject disinfectant as a treatment last week, prompting him to say Friday he was being sarcastic after widespread criticism and a statement from Lysol’s parent company that it shouldn’t be injected.

And Mr. Trump spars openly with reporters who are critical, saying they should be more positive or disputing the premise of their questions and follow-ups.

At one briefing, he shamed reporters in the room by playing a video of people praising the administration and media pundits downplaying the coronavirus’ threat to America around the time Mr. Trump restricted travel from China to head off more cases.

The president’s base of rock-solid support eats it up, especially when he tangles with CNN or other favorite targets. Yet the tone can be jarring, especially as the case count in the U.S. approaches 1 million and the death toll exceeds 55,000.

CNN reporter Jeremy Diamond this month asked Mr. Trump to explain his self-congratulatory video clips while millions are newly unemployed and tens of thousands are dying. Mr. Trump said he’s standing up for heroes in the federal government.

“Those people have been just absolutely excoriated by some of the fake news, like you. You’re CNN, you’re fake news,” he said.

Former gatekeepers of the White House podium say the sessions tend to lose their focus when it pivots to Mr. Trump’s skirmishes with local leaders or a “gotcha” game, as reporters run out of their best questions. After all, most people are tuning in to be informed about their health and security.

“The risk that you take is that people want their leaders to talk about the solutions. I think they don’t necessarily want to see the unnecessary infighting, whether that’s versus governors or the media,” said Sean Spicer, Mr. Trump’s first press secretary.

Mr. Spicer last week said he viewed the press conference as a “net benefit” for the president. He is projecting himself as a leader and bringing in the relevant officials at the relevant times.

While Mr. Trump grabs up most of the airtime, some of those officials have become national stars.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, a top scientist at the National Institutes of Health, had to introduce himself to a reporter at the late February briefing, but now people are fawning over a bobblehead created in his honor.

Dr. Deborah Birx, a physician, diplomat and HIV/AIDs expert, has gone from relative obscurity at the State Department to a White House mainstay known for breaking down complex charts and a never-ending supply of silk scarves.

The president has been willing to broadcast his own take on the science, even if it doesn’t match what his experts are saying.

Mr. Trump last week told reporters the virus “might not come back at all” in the fall. At the same briefing, Dr. Fauci said: “We will have coronavirus in the fall. I am convinced of that because of the degree of transmissibility that it has, the global nature.”

Mr. Trump had railed against reporting that made it sound like Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, predicted an even worse “second wave” of the virus in the fall.

Dr. Redfield said he meant any second wave would coincide with the flu season, so the overall response would be more complicated. Yet he acknowledged that he was not misquoted in The Washington Post article that started the dustup.

Dr. Redfield and other members of the CDC aren’t regulars at the briefings, even though the agency is the nation’s premier disease-fighting force.

Once a regular occurrence, the agency stopped doing media calls in early March, as Mr. Trump’s briefings took over, and the White House was reportedly unhappy when a top CDC official, Nancy Messonnier, warned about severe disruptions to daily life in the coming weeks.

The pronouncement shook the markets as Mr. Trump was coming back from a quick trip to India.

Former CDC Director Tom Frieden said he is surprised not to see Dr. Redfield more often or Anne Schuchat, the principal deputy director who appeared at the first briefing in February.

The CDC has played a central role in messaging in “every prior health threat,” said Dr. Frieden, who was front and center during the Ebola and Zika crises under President Obama.

“For the last few months if there had been consistent communication from public health professionals about why distancing is important and what it is and why it’s the strongest weapon we have and what we need to do during the distancing to be prepared,” he said, “I think people would understand it more and there would be perhaps less confusion about it.”