Today, Explained - The trouble with Trump’s daily briefings

Episode Date: March 31, 2020

Part rally, part media-bashing, part critical updates on the coronavirus crisis, President Trump's daily press briefings are muddying the message. (Transcript here.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's Tuesday, March 31st, 2020, the last day of March sadness. I'm Sean Ramos-Firm, and this is your coronavirus update from Today Explained. The numbers of new infections appear to be stabilizing in places like Spain and Italy. Italy's new cases just hit a two-week low. Unfortunately, the United States is bracing itself for a surge in cases. New York's confirmed cases jumped something like 14% just overnight. Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx from the president's coronavirus task force are expected to provide more details this evening, but it seems like the country was just a little too late to the social distancing thing,

and as a result, hospitals across the country will be overwhelmed, leading to more cases, more deaths. This is not to downplay the importance of social distancing. According to Politico, doctors and state leaders in California are saying that the Bay Area's early moves to lockdown residents have prevented a surge of coronavirus patients from overwhelming the region's hospitals so far. The entire Washington, D.C. area imposed similar lockdown measures on Monday after seeing cases

continue to rise in this region. And employees from Whole Foods across the country planned to call in sick today to protest unsafe working conditions at the grocery stores. This was an effort to press its parent company, Amazon, owned by the richest person in the world, to provide more protection and higher pay to employees. After a colleague at another store tested positive for COVID-19, one employee told the LA Times, We are scared to come in. We didn't really ask to be at the front lines of this pandemic.

And this was after a group of workers at an Amazon warehouse in New York City walked off the job on Monday to protest safety conditions and wages there. But it's not all bad news for booksellers. Powell's Books in Portland, Oregon, had to hire back over 100 workers after laying 400 of them off earlier this month. With full-time schedules and benefits, the staff are returning to help ship books sold online. It's true what the bumper sticker says. Think global, act local. You can hit us with your coronavirus questions via email todayexplained at vox.com.

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to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. The president is speaking used to mean something. It meant like, stop what you're doing. It meant you need to hear what's about to be said. But with this president, the president is speaking means something else. It means maybe he's blasting the media. Maybe he's talking about how great he is. Maybe he's trying to make the case that there's very fine people on both sides.

But now we are in a crisis and the president is speaking every day. He gets up with his task force, practices unsafe social distancing, and talks off the cuff for an hour, an hour plus. And it's all over the TV, and people are watching. At Sunday's briefing, the president even bragged about how many people are watching. But even they said that the ratings are like Monday night football ratings, and that these are like Bachelor finale. That's their end. When the big deal happened, I have no idea what happened,

because I'm too busy working on this. Somebody will tell me what happened. While toasting your own ratings while the country you lead braces to lose 200,000 of its own citizens might feel like a new low, it actually gets lower. At his press briefings, President Trump is misinforming the public about the science of this coronavirus. So some people are concerned that there are things said in the briefings that can't be fact-checked in real time and that the briefings are potentially

putting information out there that may not be true or could be misleading or without context is not useful. Nell Greenfield Boyce has been watching the briefings for NPR, where she's a science correspondent. So, for example, the president will say that testing is going very, very well. In eight days, because we kept hearing about South Korea, they had a very tough time at the beginning, if you remember. In eight days, we're doing more testing than they've done in eight weeks. That's a tremendous turn. And, you know, if you're just carrying the briefing live, you can't jump in there and sort of offer some context and say, well, you know, on a per capita basis, it's not testing the most of any other country in the world. Or, for example, President Trump will say, you know, he's thinking of reopening the economy on, you know, Easter.

And, you know, somebody will ask him. Who suggested Easter? Who suggested that? I just thought it was a beautiful time. It would be a beautiful time, a beautiful timeline. And so, you know, these things that are sort of floated out there. For example, another one was the drug hydroxychloroquine. It is known as a malaria drug, and it's been around for a long time.

And it's very powerful. But the nice part is it's been around for a long time and it's very powerful but the nice part is it's been around for a long time so we know that if it if things don't go as planned it's not going to kill anybody when you go with a brand new drug you don't know that that's gonna happen you have to see and you have to go long test but this has been used in different forms, very powerful drug in different forms. And it's shown very encouraging, very, very encouraging early results. And then, you know, medical experts will have to say then, well, you know, it hasn't been tested and controlled trials, like we really don't know

how useful it will be. And so, you know, some places have said maybe it's not so useful to carry these briefings live. Maybe it would be better to just report on what's said and then, you know, things can be put into some sort of context. The president, of course, also has a historically contentious relationship with the media. Has that been an issue at these press briefings? Yeah. I mean, so he'll have responses to reporters that, you know, will generate their own headlines. Why don't you act in a little more positive? It's always trying to get you, get you, get you. And you know what? That's why nobody trusts the media anymore. My question is, how is that going to impact? Excuse me, you didn't hear me. That's why you used to work for The Times and now you work for somebody else. Look, let me tell you something. Be nice. Don't be threatening. Don't be threatening. Be nice. Go ahead.

My question is, how is that? And that can become like a major headline from a news briefing. And the news briefings that the coronavirus task force are giving sort of cover the whole gamut of subjects. you know, you'll have discussion of testing and ventilators, but also discussion of political concerns, international concerns, economic concerns, legislation. And so what it means is that, you know, none of these subjects gets delved into very in-depth. Like a whole bunch of things are kind of touched upon, and then there's some brief questions, but then the briefing is over. And then people sort of come up with headlines based on what was said, and then the briefing is over. And then people sort of come up with headlines based on what was said. And then everybody waits around until the next briefing the next day. I guess this isn't really a normal situation, but how are these things normally done?

This is not a normal situation, okay? So this is really a very unusual health threat that the United States is facing. And so, you know, one could say, of course, people want to hear from the White House. On the other hand, the White House briefing room is traditionally kind of a politically based scene, you know what I mean? As opposed to a place like, for example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, which in the past has really taken the lead on informing the public about infectious disease outbreaks. So think about Ebola, think about Zika. Yeah, we do think that if you come back from an area where Zika is spreading and you're pregnant,

we recommend that you be tested whether you were symptomatic or not. We recommend testing in the first trimester and then again in the third trimester. In terms of people who don't have symptoms, we don't think they need to be tested who aren't pregnant, but we think that they do need to take precautions with sexual contact, particularly in terms of sex with a pregnant woman. In those kinds of situations, it was the CDC that was continually updating the public on the numbers, talking with the public about what's known, what the science is suggesting, what they're looking for, you know, what the best measures might be for mitigation or addressing the problem. And yet with these White House briefings, you haven't seen anyone from the CDC on the stage in days, if not weeks. I mean, there's a member of the task force, Dr. Robert Redfield, who's the director of the CDC,

but he's not appearing at the podium. It's not the CDC this time speaking out to the public from this sort of high-profile briefing. Why is that? Why isn't Dr. Redfield around? For a while at the beginning of this outbreak, the CDC had been having regular teleconferences with reporters, and that's very similar to what they've done in past outbreaks. So every day, you know, they'd make some of their subject matter experts available to the press in conference calls. And with those calls, they would be focused on the epidemiology and the science. We expect we will see community

spread in this country. It's not so much a question of if this will happen anymore, but rather more a question of exactly when this will happen and how many people in this country will have severe illness. And the people who called in were typically experienced health and medical reporters who had covered lots of outbreaks in the past, and the questioning would be focused on scientific questions. So in this kind of case, you could imagine questions about treatments or questions about testing or questions about, you know, how exactly the virus is transmitted. But the CDC hasn't been having those kinds of press briefings. The last one was on March 9th. And, you know, I asked the CDC in an email why

those had been suspended and if they were going to be resumed, and I didn't get any response. And, you know, you see that, at least I see it, because I've been noticing in articles, reporters will say they reached out to the CDC and didn't get any response. And the CDC is normally a very accessible organization. And in the last few days, you know, I have been seeing a few interviews here and there. So like Anne Schuchat spoke with a paper in Israel, for example, and with the newspaper The Hill. But you're not seeing them speaking out in the public like Anthony Fauci is, for example. And you're also not hearing from them when you ask why you're not seeing them, just to be clear? Yeah, I didn't get a response to that question. So if we email the CDC and ask why they're being quiet, you think we'll end up with nothing? You can give it a shot. If they say

something to you, I'd really be interested. Editor's note, we gave it a shot. The CDC didn't get back to us either. I'm just like stunned by, I'm stunned a little bit by the fact that they haven't even responded to you. Like it just sounds, I don't know, off the either. I'm just like stunned by, I'm stunned a little bit by, by the fact that they haven't even responded to you. Like, it just sounds, I don't know, off the record. I'm just trying to work through this. Like I, sometimes I find myself going through an interview with someone and there's like just this one big question that we're not answering. And it just seems like the one big question we're not answering is why aren't they talking to reporters that's bizarre right yeah i mean i think again you know that this is on the record you know i think that um i was watching one of uh governor cuomo's briefings from new york and in his briefing he was very clear to separate out

like here's what i know as facts and here's just my personal opinion. Do you know what I mean? Like, he made it very clear, like, first I'm going to give you a series of facts, and then I'm going to tell you what I think about them. But he was very clear to say, you know, this is just me talking. This is, like, you know, what I'm taking from this. And I think that kind of communication can be really helpful where you just sort of make it clear to people what's known, what's not known, you know, what we surmise. And I think that, you know, you know, at the state level, you're seeing people take that approach. And I think that at the state level, you are seeing the kind of communication that crisis management experts suggest, which is consistent message sort of repeated over and over again by trusted voices and authority whose messages are basically compatible with each other.

But we don't get that from the White House briefings. We have President Trump on one planet and then people like Dr. Birx and Dr. Fauci on another. Will that be enough? I mean, Dr. Fauci is highly respected and people think he is a great communicator and he has a lot of experience. But the institute that he runs is primarily a research institute. You know, they're doing things like, you know, helping set the research agenda on the virus and looking at the development of vaccines. It's the CDC that is our nation's foremost public health agency that is involved in the prevention of disease transmission. It's the CDC that's traditionally been the one that is in close contact with all the state departments of public health. And so, you know, it's the CDC that has the disease detectives who go around, you know, investigating outbreaks and helping states

devise mitigation plans. So, you know, I think people are really happy to hear from Dr. Fauci. And in fact, if Dr. Fauci doesn't appear at a briefing, it makes some people worried. You know, you see people on Twitter saying, where is Fauci? There's this fear that his occasional willingness to contradict the president might lead to President Trump, you know, not wanting him at the press briefings. I don't see any reason why there couldn't be briefings from the White House that would cover things like the economy and, you know, the sort of political response and also have briefings from the CDC that are focused more on the science and what's happening, you know, with regards to transmission at the state level and that kind of thing. But so far that hasn't been happening. It's just been from the White House task force.

After the break, Matthew Iglesias argues the cable news networks should get together and cancel the Trump show. It's Today Explained. Thank you. designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained, r-a-m-p.com slash explained.

Cards issued by Sutton Bank, member FDIC, terms and conditions apply. Okay. Matthew Glacius Vox, it looks like we're caught between a Trump and a quiet place on this one. Trump is very loud. The CDC is quiet. Trump has misinformation. The CDC has science. What do we do? I think that cable networks, television networks need to say they're going to stop taking these press events live. Every president throughout the television era has sometimes asked for the opportunity to address the nation live on matters of urgent national importance, and every president has

been extended that courtesy. All the things we believe in are in great danger. This danger has been created by the rulers of the Soviet Union. Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts. Good evening. Tonight, I'd like to talk to you about the end of our combat mission in Iraq, the ongoing security challenges we face, and the need to rebuild our nation here at home. At the same time, you've never had a president who just has sort of his every word, his every remark broadcast live into America's living rooms, because that would be ridiculous. And at this point, I think you've got to look at these things and say, for the most part, they are Donald Trump political rallies. They are not real scientific public health briefings.

And of course, professional journalists should watch them and should cover them if anything newsworthy happens. But that would encourage the president to start putting actual content up there or perhaps himself not do it and let scientists and experts speak instead of having these sort of rambling discourses in which he does some misinformation, some public health stuff, and a lot of stuff that's frankly just politics, talking smack about his enemies, bragging about his ratings, and other things that have nothing at all to do with public health or informing people. Our president gave us so much hope where just a few short months ago, we had the best economy, the lowest unemployment, and wages going up. It was amazing.

With our great president, vice president and this administration and all the great people in this country praying daily, we will get through this and get back to a place that's stronger and safer than ever. Is there a counter argument here that this is an unprecedented event in our country's history and therefore the response and the sort of traditions also might be new and unprecedented, that the president would get up in front of the country every day and just speak, maybe even off the cuff, to reporters and the public? I mean, look, it's great that the president wants to speak to reporters, right?

I mean, I'm a journalist. I'm never going to say it's bad for the president to want to engage with the media and have a dialogue. But the question is, is like, what do you air live, right? There was a time during the 2016 primary when cable networks, CNN in particular, were just carrying Trump rally footage sort of unedited as a kind of spectacle, right? And nobody really took him seriously as a candidate. But we look back in retrospect and we say all that free media is a huge reason that he managed to win. Then when he first took office as president, it was such a strange situation. Donald Trump is president that like every tweet he sent, everybody would rush, like scramble the jets, like, hey,

we got to cover this. At a certain point, though, the media as a whole sort of learned. And they're like, look, like, this is a guy, he says a lot of stuff. A lot of the stuff he says isn't true. A lot of the stuff he promises doesn't come to pass. And so we're going to pay attention. It's not like you ignore the president, but you tone down the Trump show a little bit, and you try to cover what is the government actually doing, right? Then coronavirus hits and we switch back into this different kind of emergency mode. Okay, we got to see what the president's going to say. He did that Oval Office address. Of course, the networks took that live. But we've now had a lot of experience, right? And we can say, I know that this afternoon there will be a Trump press conference. And I know that this afternoon, the press conference will not be a substantive, factually accurate, science-filled presentation by leading experts, because I've seen

him do them over and over and over again. And it's going to be just this kind of rally-style thing where he brags, where he puts supporters up to praise him, where he kind of like rags on his enemies, where he gets in these little mini fights with journalists. And, you know, if he wants to come out and do that, like, that's fine. And everybody should take notes and see what happens and write stories about it. But if he's not actually providing urgent factual information, there's no need to take it live. So in the past week or so, you've come out and said this thing that the media should stop running the Trump show. And you're not alone. Opinion columns in The Times and The Post have made similar arguments.

Has it worked? Have people stopped running the Trump show? They have not. I mean, we have heard Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes, who are sort of important cable news personalities, say this on their respective shows. If the president does end up saying anything true, you can run it as tape. But if he keeps lying like he has been every day on stuff this important, we should, all of us should stop broadcasting it. Honestly, it's going to cost lives. You know, CNN, their president, Jeff Zucker, said very forcefully that he has no intention of doing that. And, you know, that's too bad. He spoke very frankly in the wake

of the 2016 campaign about his network's programming decisions and how they were sort of just motivated by ratings and his sense of finances. And, you know, I understand that, like journalism is a business, your podcast is a business. Everything Vox does is a business. But we're also journalists. We wouldn't be in this business unless we cared about journalism. And you have to consider, are you helping the public understand what's happening by having the president stand up and rant and rave and get into a weird fight about what's the population of Seoul in South Korea? That's very right. I know South Korea better than anybody. It's a very tight, you know how many people are in Seoul? Do you know how big the city of Seoul is?

38 million people. That's bigger than anything we have. 38 million people all tightly wound together. Like that to me is not informative. How's it working out for him though? I mean, he's bragging about how many people are watching, right? Well, so, you know, this is a mixed bag, right? His polling is up. He's reached what's really his all-time high in Gallup surveys and other sort of frequently done opinion. He's getting a nice rally around the flag effect. But if you compare it to what you're

seeing from other leaders, right, his balance is much smaller than what Emmanuel Macron has gotten in France, Boris Johnson in the UK, Giuseppe Conte in Italy has an approval rating in the 70s. And you look at home, Andrew Cuomo has gained about 30 points and is up in the 70s. Gretchen Whitmer has a big balance in the one poll we've seen of her. Even the governor of North Carolina, who hasn't been sort of particularly a high profile figure during this, he's gotten a huge bounce. So Trump is up, which I think from his perspective shows that this is working. But he's up much less than other leaders are. And I think that reflects the sort of basic reality that he doesn't behave in a normal presidential way in these circumstances. So where does that leave us? He's failing to manage the crisis. He's talking a lot of

trash on TV and his approval ratings are up. Does anything matter, Matthew? You know, for Trump, what I will say is that people are very fickle. Things come in and out of the news really, really fast. When the government was shut down because of the border wall, his numbers were really in the toilet. Then when that ended, they bounced right back up. And they did so very sort of quickly. So Trump is kind of riding high now on this mini rally. And, you know, good for him. But fundamentally, the question he should be thinking about more is what is the actual situation in the United States of America in October and November of 2020 going to be? Is our economy going to be in ruins or are people going to be doing OK?

Will there have been a horrific death toll or will we have mostly survived? How is this unemployment insurance really going to work? How are people going to be able to sign up for loan programs? Is this enough? What are state and local governments going really going to work? How are people going to be able to sign up for loan programs? Is this enough? What are state and local governments going to need to do? And I know it's sort of boring to focus on the details and try to do your job well as opposed to posture for the cameras. But what's going to matter in the fall is going to be how do things actually go in the

real world? I would much rather see us navigate this in a good way, and then Trump gets reelected on the strength of his leadership, then see him sort of flail. But I do think, you know, the most important thing to know about the politics right now is that his bump has been real. People have looked at this and they like him more than they did a month ago. But it's been small compared to what other leaders have managed to deliver. And the sort of aberrant Trump behavior does not benefit him.

And I wish he would recognize that and try harder to act in a more normal and appropriate way. Matthew Iglesias is the host of The Weeds. It's a podcast from Vox. I'm Sean Ramos from This Is Today Explained. It's also a podcast from Vox. © transcript Emily Beynon