President Trump is rebooting his reality tv-style coronavirus briefings, months after backing away from them and as COVID-19 cases spike across the country.
Trump announced on Monday morning that he is bringing back the White House briefings, which came to a halt after he suggested during one in April that people infected with COVID-19 should take an “injection” of disinfectant to recover from the virus. Since then, Trump has repeatedly downplayed the coronavirus and complained that increased testing is to blame for spiking cases (it’s not).
Speaking to reporters during a pool spray at the White House Monday, Trump spoke of the briefings like a seasoned television producer. Trump claimed the briefings, which were held nearly every day for weeks at the beginning of the pandemic, were “very successful” and garnered record ratings.
“There’s never been anything like it,” Trump said. “And we were doing very well and I thought it would be sort of automatic and a lot of positive things were happening.”
The President went on to outline his plan for the briefings.
“So I think what we’re going to do is I’ll get involved and we’ll start doing briefings whether it’s this afternoon or tomorrow — probably tomorrow,” Trump said. “And I’ll do briefings. And I think part of the briefing much more so than last time because last time we were nowhere with vaccines and therapeutics. And let’s say that ended six weeks ago and we’ll start them again.”
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During the first season of Trump’s briefings, the President often went on bizarre and unrelated tangents. He also often used the briefings to attack the assembled journalists in the room. At one briefing, Trump almost completely ignored the coronavirus threat and instead detailed his administration’s operations to go after MS-13. Cable news networks often cut away from the briefings altogether, in search of actual news on the pandemic.
Trump added Monday that the new briefings will be “a great way to get information out to the public” when it comes to the status of vaccines, therapeutics and “generally speaking where we are” on the COVID-19 outbreak.
The President reiterated the briefing will start “probably tomorrow” during the “good slot” of 5 p.m. and predicted that a lot of people will tune in. Trump said that White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany will continue her briefings separately, but that his briefings will discuss the coronavirus and “perhaps some other things.”
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Trump’s issue is with House and Senate base-renaming provisions in the pending National Defense Authorization Act.
President Trump continues to threaten veto legislation that would rename U.S. military bases named after Confederate figures, despite having support from Congress and the military.
The president appeared on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace saying “I don’t care what the military says. I’m supposed to make the decision.”
“Fort Bragg is a big deal,” Trump said, referring to the huge military base in North Carolina. “We won two World Wars … out of Fort Bragg. We won out of all of these forts that now they want to throw those names away.”
Trump’s issue is with House and Senate base-renaming provisions in the pending National Defense Authorization Act, which authorize $740 billion for defense spending in fiscal 2021.
The president has remained adamant, appearing concerned in the Fox interview that history would be lost if the names of military bases were changed. “We can’t forget that the North and the South fought,” he said. “We have to remember that, otherwise we’ll end up fighting again.“
The president went on to pepper Wallace with questions over a new name for Fort Bragg. “We’re going to name it after the Rev. Al Sharpton?” Trump asked. “What are you going to name it, Chris?”
The pending defense policy bill was not the only measure Trump threatened to veto during the wide-ranging and oftentimes combative Fox interview. He also said he would consider rejecting any new coronavirus stimulus bill with no provision for a payroll tax cut, which he has repeatedly touted despite little congressional support.
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“I want to see it. I want to see it,” Trump said of the payroll tax cut, adding if it weren’t included in a new bill, “I would consider not signing it.”
Trump also spent a portion of the interview laying into Joe Biden, incorrectly claiming his presumptive Democratic rival wanted to defund and abolish the police and attacking his mental fitness.
“Joe doesn’t know he’s alive, OK?” the president said, claiming he also could best Biden in a mental fitness test.
Wallace responded, “I took the test too. It’s not the hardest test.”
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Accusing Wallace of misrepresenting the test, Trump then told Wallace: “I’ll bet you couldn’t even answer the last five questions.”
“I’ll guarantee you that Joe Biden could not answer those questions,” Trump said.
Finally, near the end of what Trump allowed had been a tough interview by Wallace, the president chided, “Let Biden sit through an interview like this, he’ll be on the ground crying for mommy. He’ll say, ‘Mommy, mommy, please take me home.'”
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The Trump White House was forced to halt its plan to deport international college students who only use online classes to study in the fall. U.S. District Court Judge Allison Burroughs announced the plan during a teleconference hearing.
The decision comes a little over a week after Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced that students at schools offering only online courses due to the coronavirus pandemic would need to either leave the US or transfer schools.
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Some with knowledge of the White House, that the President felt the blowback to the proposal with some believing it was poorly executed. The White House is now considering applying the rule to only new students, and not those already in the U.S.
Harvard and MIT sued both DHS and Immigration and Customs Enforcement last week, days after the government warned schools it would begin to reinstate tight restrictions on the number of online classes foreign students are allowed to take while they study inside the U.S.
For now, though, the move to drop the policy is a reprieve for more than 1 million international students in the US. In the last week, students had expressed frustration and concern over their next steps, as universities and colleges announced decisions to move all courses online.
Students had already been bracing for the possibility of having to suddenly depart the US or transfer to a university offering a mix of online and in-person courses.
Visa requirements for students have always been strict and coming to the US to take online-only courses has been prohibited. ICE maintained that prohibition in its July 6 guidance, while providing some flexibility for hybrid models, meaning a mix of online and in-person classes.
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“If a school isn’t going to open or if they’re going to be 100% online, then we wouldn’t expect people to be here for that,” acting Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli told CNN’s Brianna Keilar last week.
In a major speech at Mount Rushmore, President Trump said that the goal of nationwide protests is not, quote, “a better America.” Their goal, he said, is the end of America.
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The month of June was pretty calamitous for President Trump politically and in terms of his legacy. It began with the federal government having protesters forcibly cleared using chemical irritants from Lafayette Park across from the White House, so that the president could then take a photo op. To mass protests across the country. To a huge spike in coronavirus cases in areas of the country where it really had not been that prevalent, and where the governors in those states were looking toward reopening.
So the president tried for a reboot of his campaign with a rally in Tulsa on June 20. That rally was sparsely attended compared to what they had advertised as their likely attendance. And so Mount Rushmore and this event was supposed to be the reboot of the failed reboot. This was going to be an effort by the president to show he was in charge and trying to look toward the general election.
So the president needs an enemy to fight against. In 2018 during the midterms, you saw the president try to galvanize support against a looming threat, as he put it, of a caravan that was headed across the southern border with Mexico. And this was basically a threat of a foreign invasion. And he talked about this a lot and he tweeted about it a lot. And the main enemy that the U.S. is dealing with right now is the coronavirus, which is spreading rapidly. That’s an issue on which his polling is pretty bad. And his advisers know it. And another force that the country is dealing with right now is police brutality. Neither of those are issues that Donald Trump is seen as particularly strong on, or areas where he has shown he wants to lead.
President Trump aimed his speech at left-wing culture
So instead, looking for this enemy, aides described in his speech he was going to go after a left-wing culture coming after people who don’t agree with it. Now the threat is other Americans. The threat is people who don’t think like you.
I would start just understanding what it looked like. He was standing at this podium, surrounded by flags, in front of this historic monument. And that was supposed to underscore this current conversation about monuments and statues around the country.
Much of the conversation has been around Confederate totems, Confederate statues, the Confederate flag. The president has resisted those conversations. But even members of his own party have said that it is time to remove some of those monuments. Where he is drawing the line is when the conversation moves to George Washington or Thomas Jefferson. Those are two of the faces on Mount Rushmore. And that’s part of why he’s choosing to have this conversation there.
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What he is suggesting is that the political left is trying to rewrite history by calling into question those men, by suggesting that their legacies need to be thought about again. And the reason that people are saying that their legacies need to be reconsidered is because they were slaveholders, and that you can’t have an honest conversation about race if you do not acknowledge that.
What he’s really trying to do is convince Republicans who are feeling shaky about him — and he hopes some independent voters — that the protests around the country have gone too far. He is trying to get them to see it the way he sees it, which is, this isn’t just a movement about the Confederacy. They’re coming for our whole history — “our.” They are coming for the history of white America.
President Trump continues to attempt to appeal to older white voters
It is in keeping with what President Trump has done for many, many years now, which is an ‘us versus them’ approach to his base of older, white voters. So the president very quickly went on to talk about how a, quote unquote, political weapon of the Americans he is talking about in this speech is so-called “cancel culture.” He is describing it as anyone who disagrees with certain folks are going to get chased out of polite society. And that’s not really what this.
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So in part, this is appealing to a longstanding sense among conservatives that they are being attacked by the left for their beliefs. Also notice his emphasis on our values and our culture. He has used the words culture and values repeatedly to appeal to his base since 2017. This is the thing that he shares with his voters. It certainly is not geography — in many cases they’re in the Deep South. And he is a man from Queens. But this sense of our way of life is being taken over is what he has used time and again to appeal to people.
So keeping up with these themes, the president went on and said —“This left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution.” And then he went on a little bit later to say their goal is not a better America. Their goal is the end of America. You would think that he was talking about the British the way that he’s describing this as opposed to talking about primarily Black people in this country, but not only, who have been trying to right historic wrongs. He is making it sound, once again, as if something is being taken from him and his supporters.
I think it more than feels that way. I would argue it is race baiting. Look, I don’t think that Donald Trump is suddenly a different person. I think this is who he has been for a very, very long time, going back decades. But I do think he is getting explicit in what he is saying, both as protests are growing in the country and as his own poll numbers are sinking.
Trump comparing one America from another America
He is not explicitly using the words black and white. But he is explicitly describing one version of America versus another. And that, I think, is different, along with the fact that we have really not seen a president before use an Independence Day speech to be so divisive and to pit Americans in two, the way he is here.
What most surprises me about this speech, and the fact that it is supposed to be a reset of a presidential campaign, is that the message seems to fly in the face of polling that shows Americans don’t agree with this version of how to deal with race.
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I read the polls. They all make clear that the president is wildly out of step with where the majority of voters are right now, where conservative voters are, where independent voters are, where a broad spectrum of voters are. This is a president who likes to do things his own way. He has ideas that he wants to put out there, regardless of how much it upsets his advisers, regardless of how scared senators are about losing their seats because his rhetoric is making things very hard for them. But he is not where the majority of Americans are in those polls.
Many of the people in the president’s campaign believe the direction that the polls are taking, even if they argue with some of the margins. Some of the people around the president share with him a belief or theory, or whatever you want to call it, that people are not being honest with the pollsters when they talk about how much support they have for these protests, and that the numbers will come around in President Trump’s favor when we get to the fall.
Trump campaign blowing off poll numbers
They think that people are inclined to lie to pollsters on matters of race. Now there have been campaigns where that has happened. The margins that we’re talking about are so large that it would be really hard to fathom that. But that is the bet that some of his advisers are making. Now are they making that on science? Not necessarily. Are they making that on political research? Only on the margins. For the most part, this is wishcasting that the president is not doing himself the damage he seems to be doing.
Because there’s the way the president wants to campaign. And they try to shape it around that. This is what Donald J. Trump thinks his campaign message should be. Now, there are areas where his advisers have gotten him to stick to that script that was written out and say things that they consider to be less potentially divisive. So for instance, he spoke broadly about culture and history. But he did not explicitly give a defense of Confederate statues, which really turns off suburban voters, in particular suburban women. And his advisers were very pleased with that, that he stuck to the script and didn’t say Confederate.
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But then on Monday morning, he tweets support of the Confederate flag being aired at NASCAR events. So it undoes a lot of what had taken place before. There is no evidence that this message is going to help the president win again. There is no evidence that this is a successful approach to the voters he needs in order to win. But advisers are pretty candid that he thinks this is how he won last time. And he is convinced he can do it again.
The president is of the opinion — and again, this is not his campaign. There are people in the campaign who understand this is not the same electorate. But the president has convinced himself that nothing has changed, that he can turn Joe Biden into Hillary Clinton. And so far there is no reason to believe that either of those things is true. The campaign itself, I think, would like to be delivering a less blunt instrument version of what the president is saying. But because the president is able to speak only the way he’s comfortable, he will not change. And so yes, I think this is what you will see for the next few months.
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President Trump says the White House plans to pressure governors to reopen schools in their states this fall during a roundtable discussion. On Tuesday, Trump said the move is necessary for both mental health and academic reasons and repeated claims that Democrats want to keep schools closed for political reasons rather than public health.
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It’s very important for our country. It’s very important for the well-being of the student and the parents. So we’re going to be putting a lot of pressure on open schools in the fall.
Trump’s comments came after Secretary of Education Betsey Divorce criticized plans by some local districts to do in-person classes only a few days a week. During a call with governors last month, the CDC put out guidance for schools that included staggered schedules, distanced desks, physical barriers between bathroom sinks and increased disinfecting measures.
And the Trump administration has formally notified the United Nations that it’s withdrawing from the World Health Organization to move cuts off one of the WHO’S biggest sources of aid and comes amid months of criticism from the White House over how the organization has handled its response to the Corona virus pandemic, particularly when it comes to influence from China.
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Public health officials and political opponents have heavily criticized the decision, including some Democrats who say it will cost the U.S. global influence. The withdrawal won’t take effect until next year, so it could be reversed under a new administration.Joe Biden has said if he were to win the presidency, he’d undo the decision on his first day in office.
The Washington Ledger 