Trump's Coronavirus Press Conference More In Control—But the Blame-China, Blame-The-Blame Obama Strategy Is Clear

Donald Trump addressed the press Saturday to discuss the ongoing coronavirus crisis and, for a long stretch, he was relatively calm and mature, at least by Trump standards. It was not a repeat of Friday’s temper tantrum, in which he responded to NBC’s Peter Alexander‘s reasonable question about the American public’s worries by calling him a “terrible reporter.” He applauded Governors Andrew Cuomo of New York and Gavin Newsome of California, two individuals he rarely showers with praise.

To start, he mostly painted a picture of our glorious 500-million mask future (definitely not our present), then let FEMA head Peter Gaynor and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony Fauci take the reins to give answers about equipment availability and testing rates. (Short answer: we’re working on it.) Trump congratulated himself on the bold economic initiatives he’s enacting (“nobody’s ever done a package like this!”) and applauded private businesses for stepping up. He gave two shout-outs to Hanes, reporting that they are going to start making surgical masks. (Start hoarding boxers, I guess.) He also joked about personally taking Dr. Fauci’s temperature, which was a borderline human moment. Fauci’s facial expressions in these press conferences have become a real-time fact-check—when Trump started to talk about China’s culpability, Fauci’s eyes darted.

Trump mostly kept a lid on the raw rage on display on Friday. But his political strategy—blame China, blame the press, tout his China travel ban, blame previous administrations—was clear. He doubled down on the phrase “Chinese virus,” invoked “Sleepy Joe Biden,” wouldn’t say whether he’d talked to Pelosi. Then a reporter from OAN, the same outlet that recently asked if Chinese food is racist, set the President up, wondering what he thought of recent coverage in the Washington Post.

This was the kind of softball Trump couldn’t resist taking a swing at. He called the paper “a disgrace that we have to live with.” When reporters spoke up he barked “quiet! quiet!” and lectured that “fake news” is something he is personally inured to, but insults the great people “standing behind me.”

Trump went on to chastise China for being secretive and for not letting “people like Dr. Fauci” know about the severity of the coronavirus threat, and then praised himself for closing off the border as early as he did.

“I was called xenophobic,” the President said, citing, among others “Sleepy Joe Biden.” “I took a lot of heat. I didn’t act late, I acted early.”

He also put much blame for the current state of our medical crisis on previous administrations, saying “we inherited an obsolete and broken system.”

A better effort, without question—but the buck still apparently stops with Barack Obama.