Read The New Yorker’s complete news coverage and analysis of the coronavirus pandemic. And it’s lucky that you have this group here right now for this problem or you wouldn’t even have a country left.”
When asked to assess his own performance, he said, “I’d rate it a ten.” This Wednesday, with members of his coronavirus task force joining him onstage, he added, “We’ve done one hell of a job. “I don’t take responsibility at all,” Trump insisted, two weeks ago. Since Trump began making the press conferences a daily ritual, a couple of weeks ago-an eternity in the pandemic era-his more memorable lines are already featuring in political attacks against him. There will be much material for them the transcripts from just the first three days of this week run to more than forty thousand words. Just as the Vietnam briefings became a standard by which the erosion of government credibility could be measured then, historians of the future will consult the record of Trump’s mendacious, misleading press conferences as an example of a tragic failure of leadership at such a critical moment. We now have the Trump Follies, the nightly briefings at which President Trump has lied and bragged, lamented and equivocated, about the global pandemic that poses an existential threat to his Presidency.
Brady Press Briefing Room, in the White House. Richard Pyle, the Associated Press’s Saigon bureau chief, called the press conferences “the longest-playing tragicomedy in Southeast Asia’s theater of the absurd,” which, minus the “Southeast Asia” part, is not a bad description of the scene currently playing out each evening in the James S. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.ĭuring the Vietnam War, the United States had the Five O’Clock Follies, nightly briefings at which American military leaders claimed, citing a variety of bogus statistics, half-truths, and misleading reports from the front, to be winning a war that they were, in fact, losing.
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