Read the new ending to this post. Trump tweeted a response.
The Wall Street Journal offered some useful advice to Trump. Given his ego and vanity, he is unlikely to heed the editorial, even though it comes from his cheering section. His narcissism shields him from any criticism. He thinks that his base loves his attacks on the press. It is always surprising to see any member of the press defend this hater of the free press.
Trump’s Wasted Briefings
The sessions have become a boring show of President vs. the press.
By The Editorial Board
April 9, 2020, Page A16
A friend of ours who voted for President Trump sent us a note recently saying that she had stopped watching the daily White House briefings of the coronavirus task force. Why? Because they have become less about defeating the virus and more about the many feuds of Donald J. Trump.
The briefings began as a good idea to educate the public about the dangers of the virus, how Americans should change their behavior, and what the government is doing to combat it. They showed seriousness of purpose, action to mobilize public and private resources, and a sense of optimism. Mr. Trump benefitted in the polls not because he was the center of attention but because he showed he had put together a team of experts working to overcome a national health crisis.
But sometime in the last three weeks Mr. Trump seems to have concluded that the briefings could be a showcase for him. Perhaps they substitute in his mind for the campaign rallies he can no longer hold because of the risks. Perhaps he resented the media adulation that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has been receiving for his daily show. Whatever the reason, the briefings are now all about the President.
They last for 90 minutes or more, and Mr. Trump dominates the stage. His first-rate health experts have become supporting actors, and sometimes barely that, ushered on stage to answer a technical question or two. Vice President Mike Pence, who leads the task force, doesn’t get on stage until the last 15 minutes or so. That becomes the most informative part of the session, since Mr. Pence understandably knows details the President doesn’t.
Mr. Trump opens each briefing by running through a blizzard of facts and numbers showing what the government is doing—this many tests, that many masks, so many ventilators going from here to there, and what a great job he’s doing. Then Mr. Trump opens the door for questions, and the session deteriorates into a dispiriting brawl between the President and his antagonists in the White House press corps.
One of the ironies of this Presidency is that Mr. Trump claims to despise the press yet so eagerly plays its game. Every reporter knows the way to get a TV moment, and get a pat on the back from newsroom pals, is to bait Mr. Trump with a question about his previous statements or about criticism that someone has leveled against him. Mr. Trump always takes the bait.
On Tuesday Mr. Trump was asked, in a typically tendentious question, why he had compared the coronavirus to the flu. Instead of saying he had been hoping for the best but was wrong when he’d said that, he got into a fight over the severity of the flu. This sort of exchange usually devolves into a useless squabble that helps Mr. Trump’s critics and contributes little to public understanding.
The President’s outbursts against his political critics are also notably off key at this moment. This isn’t impeachment, and Covid-19 isn’t shifty Schiff. It’s a once-a-century threat to American life and livelihood.
The public doesn’t care who among the governors likes Mr. Trump, or whether the Obama Administration filled the national pandemic stockpile. There will be time for recriminations. What the public wants to know now is what Mr. Trump and his government is doing to prevent the deaths of their loved ones or help the family breadwinner stay employed.
If Mr. Trump thinks these daily sessions will help him defeat Joe Biden, he’s wrong. This election is now about one issue: how well the public thinks the President has done in defeating the virus and restarting the economy. If Americans conclude he succeeded in a crisis, they will forgive him for reacting more slowly than he and many others might have in January. But on that score, voters will be persuaded by what they see in their lives and communities come the autumn. They will judge Mr. Trump by the results, not by how well he says he did.
If Mr. Trump wants to make his briefings more helpful to the country, here’s our advice. Make them no more than 45 minutes, except on rare occasions. Let Mr. Pence lead them each day, focusing on one issue or problem. Mr. Pence can take the questions, and Mr. Trump can show up twice a week to reinforce the message. Maybe then our friend who was a Trump voter might start watching again.
###
—————-
Who will tell the president?
President Trump should thank The Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Board for good advice,
(Trump’s Wasted Briefings,” Review & Outlook, April 9).
The Journal provides advice that the president would certainly not get from his 2020
Re-election Campaign staff or from his loyal followers. Who among them would speak
truth to power for fear of the president’s wrath upon being criticized?
How could anyone in the president’s orbit possibly question a campaign tactic that
serves as a free-of-charge substitute for his expensive political rallies and where the
president stars in a well-staged, daily show with high ratings?
The Journal’s editors were able to tell their readers why the Trump-led briefings are wasted.
Now who will tell the president?
Frank G. Splitt
Mount Prospect, Ill.
Trump responded to the WSJ in a tweet at 3:59 pm today:
“The Wall Street Journal always “forgets” to mention that the ratings for the White House Press Briefings are “through the roof” (Monday Night Football, Bachelor Finale, according to @nytimes) & is only way for me to escape the Fake News & get my views across. WSJ is Fake News!”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I suppose this is progress, at least for the Wall Street Journal. But it will not make an ounce of difference as long as FOX News and its journalistic pals instigate and amplify Trumps blatant lies and meaningless recitals of how hard he is working, how great the economy was, how he can be trusted to oversee trillions being pushed through offices staffed by “acting” deputies and friends, while prohibiting oversight from Inspector Generals and applauding voter suppression schemes. The nation is in deep trouble. He is not part of path forward.
All briefings are straight up propaganda at best and a waste of time at worst, Trump’s are just an extremum. Journalists should recall how they did their job half a century ago, a century ago, digging up information instead of relaying to public whatever they are being fed and calling it news.
I’m no fan of Cuomo but I think his briefings are honest and straightforward, not propaganda or self-praise. You are very cynical and too fast to condemn others. An occasional display of humility would be welcome.
This is why IQ45 needs to wear a mask.
& gloves, as well…might keep it from Tweeting.
IQ45 probably doesn’t even now that the Wall Street Journal of Corporate (and Trump) Apologetics is owned by his boyfriend Morloch Murdoch, the same fellow who owns the Faux new State Propaganda Channel. LMAO!!!
It isn’t just the briefings, of course. For Trump, EVERYTHING is ABOUT TRUMP.
Nothing else matters to him. Nothing and no one else.
cx: Faux News
As the great Oren Lyons puts it, far better than I ever have, “We’ve broken the rules for living on Earth. And there will be hell to pay. If you don’t understand that, you will.”
Trumpty Dumpty calls an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal fake news proving that his IQ is not +45 but a minus 45. An OpEd is never news but sometimes an OpEd becomes the news when someone reacts like the tainted Orange Sherbert in the White House did.
Compare this intelligence with the nonsense that Trump continues to spout about how great a job he is doing.
Congress Needs a Plan to Confront the Coronavirus. I Have One.
Government action is essential to save lives and to rescue our economy. Let’s get back to work.
April 8, 2020
Congress has passed three coronavirus packages aimed at providing immediate relief to families, workers, hospitals and small businesses, but with more than 12,000 dead and 10 million out of work, the scale of this tragedy demands we do much more — much faster.
Communities across the country are entering a critical stage.Illnesses are mounting and our health system is stretched to the brink. Early data shows people of color are infected and dying at disproportionately high rates. Unemployment is approaching Depression-era levels. No clear end is in sight for social distancing. The next round of policymaking must squarely address these hard realities — not with a few new nibbles, but with the kind of broad, direct action needed to save lives and save our economy.
Containing the health crisis must be our first priority. I have outlined immediate steps to accomplish a federal surge in testing capacity. In addition to using the powers under the recently invoked Defense Production Act, we must act now to have the government manufacture or contract for the manufacture of critical supplies when markets fail to do so — to produce tests, personal protective equipment, drugs in shortage and any future vaccines and treatments that our scientists develop — not in the thousands, but in the tens of millions. This will ensure swift production and build a stopgap against shortfalls moving forward. We must also use public programs to provide health care free for all who don’t otherwise have it.
As workers lose their jobs, small businesses close and household incomes plummet, we must extend economic relief beyond cash payments to families and individuals. This includes suspending consumer debt collection, enacting a universal national moratorium on evictions and foreclosures, stopping water and utility shut-offs, providing as much broad student loan debt cancellation as possible and finding money to keep child care providers afloat. With older Americans and those with underlying health conditions among the most vulnerable, we must also increase monthly Social Security and disability benefits…
There is a method to Trump’s madness.
“Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth”, is a law of propaganda often attributed to the Nazi Joseph Goebbels. And, according to a 1990 Vanity Fair interview, Ivana Trump once told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that her husband, real-estate mogul Donald Trump, now a leading Republican presidential candidate, kept a book of Hitler’s speeches near his bed. In the Vanity Fair article, Ivana Trump told a friend that her husband’s cousin, John Walter “clicks his heels and says, ‘Heil Hitler,” when visiting Trump’s office.
His death toll in NY (just NY) due to inaction, politics, and indifference exceeds bin Laden’s death toll in NY.
Handled well or not under W, the nation came together after the terrorist attack; the president is dividing the nation before and DURING the virus attack.
The man actually tweeted about his ratings in a national/international crisis. He compared his reality show press conferences to a football game and a however you describe that other show. HE TWEETED ABOUT RATINGS WHILE THOUSANDS ARE DYING.
And look at this – a couple of dissenting comments from the right? Holy Cow.
NYT Trump Keeps Talking. Some Republicans Don’t Like What They’re Hearing. (put in search line – didn’t want to take up space with that big picture that shows up with the link).
FINALLY.
As far as repeat it often enough… yup.
And, as long as he slips in “we’re making progress” and some empty optimistic comment – that’s all his base hears and fox reports.
Still betting he goes to Easter Services – not to pray for anyone’s health and safety – but to smirk and show the billionaire boys and nationalists that the virus is some liberal California/NY problem.
Very good news, today, from a study conducted in a city in Germany that shows a high rate (15 percent) of people with antibodies to SARS-CV-2, suggesting that the fatality rate of this disease is far lower than was previously thought. The study suggests that a lot of people had the virus but never developed symptoms. If this is so, it is very, very good news indeed.
INT. DAY. Coronavirus Press Briefing Room, the White House
FAUCI, BIRX, PENCE, and two GENERALS stand to either side of the Presidential podium, waiting. An AIDE comes through the door, right. Pence motions to him. The AIDE comes to PENCE’S side.
PENCE (to AIDE): Is the President ready for the briefing?
AIDE: Yes, he’s on his way. I just got confirmation of wormsign down the corridor.
This is why this country needs leadership. Each state decides for itself whether or not to close down. They are bidding against each other for needed products. The lack of coordination is maddening. Different ‘facts’ come out everyday. What you believe depends upon your news source. Faux, Patriotic Times, Trump’s ‘news briefings’ vs. everything else.
…………………….
THE SKEPTICS — Eight governors, all Republicans, have yet to impose stay-at-home orders for everyone in their states. Surgeon General Jerome Adams has publicly pleaded with the holdouts — Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming — to order residents to stay home, and White House chief of staff Mark Meadows privately called them urging them to lockdown their states. Health care workers have started petitions urging South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem and Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds to reverse course.
Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson defended his decision in his Wednesday state of the state address, citing low case counts and saying that existing public gathering bans, school closures and messages on social distancing are enough to keep the virus at bay. In Iowa, Reynolds said she would institute a stay at home order when certain metrics are hit, such as elevated case counts among the elderly or in nursing homes.
That will be too late, said Ali Mokdad of the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. “Not detecting cases doesn’t mean that there isn’t a case,” he said. “We have learned this the hard way in the United States.”
Mokdad’s group has been modeling projected Covid deaths across the country. He is particularly worried about Florida, which has a large elderly population and was slow to order a lockdown, and other Southern states.
His model paints a dark picture in holdout states, projecting 300 deaths in Nebraska, with a population of almost 2 million people — and the same number for Kansas, which has 1 million more people and where Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly did issue a stay at home order. North Dakota, which has fewer than a million people in it, could see 500 deaths, about the same number as North Carolina — which has 10 million people and where Republican Gov. Roy Cooper ordered a statewide lockdown. The model assumes all states will implement stay-at-home orders, so the picture in holdout states could be even more grim.
Sioux Falls, S.D., could be an emerging hotspot. The virus is quickly spreading through the city’s Minnehaha County, which has recorded nearly 300 cases and rising. Smithfield Foods announced today it was shutting down its Sioux Falls pork processing plant after 80 employees there tested positive for the virus.
Trump the Magnificent has Tweeted. Now we can all rest in peace knowing our country is out of danger from coronavirus.
…………………………………………………..
Donald J. Trump
✔
@realDonaldTrump
Once we OPEN UP OUR GREAT COUNTRY, and it will be sooner rather than later, the horror of the Invisible Enemy, except for those that sadly lost a family member or friend, must be quickly forgotten. Our Economy will BOOM, perhaps like never before!!!
212K
9:52 AM – Apr 8, 2020
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From the constant awkward gesticulations to the reflexive disavowal of any substantive criticism as “fake” – we are all hostages to an impetuous traitorous clown for billionaires and dictators.
The Glorious Way Church in Houston initially moved services online… but, “We can’t do what God called us to do on livestream.” The Rev. John Greiner.
“And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.” Jesus Christ.
Some Churches Plan To Challenge Coronavirus Restrictions On Easter
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (AP) — At the holiest time of year for Christians, churches are wrestling with how to hold services amid the coronavirus outbreak, and in some cases, that has set up showdowns with local governments over restrictions that forbid large gatherings.
Many churches are offering parishioners livestreaming options so they can observe Good Friday and Easter on TVs, smart phones and computers. Others are sending worshipers to drive-in movie theaters for services.
Governors in several states have deemed church an “essential service,” allowing Easter worship to proceed even as public health officials warn that large gatherings could be a major setback amid a pandemic that has killed more than 14,000 people in the U.S.
The restrictions have created conflicts with state and local authorities. Kansas lawmakers on Wednesday threw out an order by the governor that limited church gatherings to 10 people. A Georgia church where more than 30 people congregated inside a small building on Palm Sunday, prompting a visit from state troopers, plans to move forward with normal Easter worship…
Article: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/churches-easter-coronavirus-restrictions_n_5e8f8d16c5b6458ae2a604e2?ncid=engmodushpmg00000006
Thanks for that verse, Carol. I have often swallowed hard as I had to pray in public. Contrast the ideal of the mega church: thousands assembled to watch a religious superstar tell them things that make them feel good, with the Cistercian ideal: to be placed in a hermitage where, alone, the individual can approach his God. This contrast shows the remarkable diversity in what we often refer to monolithically as Christianity. Like monolithic Communism, a creation of the Cold War, Monolithic Christianity is a lie that gets everyone in trouble.
‘Extremely Alarming’: Coronavirus Stimulus Law Allows the Federal Reserve to Hold Secret Meetings on Corporate Bailouts
“That provision’s a body blow to transparency when we need it most.”
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/04/09/extremely-alarming-coronavirus-stimulus-law-allows-federal-reserve-hold-secret?cd-origin=rss&utm_term=AO&utm_campaign=Daily%20Newsletter&utm_content=email&utm_source=Daily%20Newsletter&utm_medium=Email
While Gin Rummy is one of the most popular forms of Rummy, they seem to be
playing their version… Din Dummy.
T plays his “know-that” card,(daily fifing) in turn, they play their “know-that” card.
The shrill, of the daily fifing, numbs the ears. Hearing above the din of concocted notoriety (electoral saviors or the unelected “know-that” cabal) is not in the cards.
The house of cards is built on Din Dummy…
While I’m glad that the WSJ wrote this–and it must have hit a nerve for it to be called “fake news” by trump–I cringe that this editorial reinforces the idea that reporters are simply playing gotcha during these briefings. The media SHOULD be reporting the lies, the inconsistent messages, the vagueness, and the crazy word salad that trump says. It’s not a matter of getting “a pat on the back” from cronies, but trying to hold this administration accountable.
There IS a difference between fact-based journalism and pumping out lies and propaganda and I appreciate the news media for fact-checking, reminding the public of past remarks and decisions made by this administration, and for trying to ferret out what is going on.