With a slimmed-down public schedule, Trump has spent much of April meeting — virtually or otherwise — with business groups, including his reopening council of more than 200 people. And he has relished the settings when he gets to promote the business leaders stepping up for the cause, showing them off at the White House coronavirus task force briefings or inviting reporters into the meetings to lavish praise, as he did on Monday.
Vice President Mike Pence has taken on the task of traveling across the country in recent weeks, visiting manufacturers and retail warehouses, while Trump has stayed at the White House for more than a month now, save for a trip to the Federal Emergency Management Agency headquarters and to Norfolk, Va., to send off a Navy hospital ship headed for New York.
There are indications that a role reversal could be ahead, as Trump has urged aides to start adding official events back to his schedule, including photo ops and site visits that would allow him to ditch Washington for a few hours. He has already announced plans to deliver the commencement address at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point in June.
For a president obsessed with media consumption, nowhere is the shift clearer than the format of the administration’s media appearances.
In that vein, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany on Monday teased a “different look” for coronavirus task force briefings going forward, even as she denied that the changes had anything to do with the president’s missteps during them.
Despite McEnany’s assertion that the briefings have been “excellent,” for others in Trump’s orbit the daily events — while at first viewed as an opportunity for Trump to take center stage — have come to represent a potential liability for the president, leaving him overexposed while aides search for new ways to showcase him.
The task force held no briefings over the weekend, with Trump proclaiming in a tweet on Saturday that he didn’t see the utility of his being there.
This came after an abbreviated briefing on Friday evening, when the president took no questions from reporters amid widespread condemnation for having floated the ingestion of disinfectants as a potential coronavirus treatment.
The new approach has been whiplash-inducing: After initially notifying the news media on Sunday night that task force briefings would resume the next day, Monday’s briefing was abruptly canceled late in the morning, replaced by a press availability during Trump’s meeting with retail and medical executives.
Hours later, though, McEnany tweeted that the briefing was back on, in order to go over “additional testing guidance and other announcements about safely opening up America again.”
In the midst of the back and forth, McEnany offered a window into how the White House views Trump’s briefings — apart from serving as a source of new information for the public.
She acknowledged a reorienting of the White House strategy, telling The Associated Press that the administration was “entering a phase of looking to reopen the country and with that, the president will be focusing a lot on the economy.”
And in an interview with Fox News, McEnany maintained that the White House’s new approach was “absolutely not an effort to cut back but an effort to showcase [to] the American people the great entrepreneurship of this president.”
Rather than learning the latest updates on the administration’s response to the pandemic from health experts, McEnany said, the public will “be watching the president interact with these great CEOs.”
Source: politico.com
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