By: Evan Mei

Recently, the cases for COVID-19 have been surging to all-time highs, as the U.S. government scrambles around like mice. Trump announced on Monday that he would bring back the daily COVID briefings. Unfortunately, these briefings have been reincarnated for the sole purpose of high television ratings.

With cases and deaths becoming increasingly high, Trump said the first briefings would be on Tuesday at five in the afternoon. “I was doing them and we had a lot of people watching, record numbers watchin in the history of cable television. There’s never been anything like it,” Mr. Trump said to reporters in the Oval Office. “It’s a great way to get information out to the public as to where we are with the vaccines, with the therapeutics.”

The original briefings from March to April were specially tailored for the TV crews, with science and public health experts basically silenced with a confrontational president rambling on about governors, China, reporters and others that were not grateful enough for his leadership skills. He also used the briefings to promote his administration’s response to the virus and promoted a pet drug as a treatment rather than actually listening to the real experts.

In the end, the briefings were stopped after he was mocked for suggesting that people should inject or ingest bleach or other cleaning products, a statement that sent numerous corporations like Lysol along with public health agencies furiously scrambling to warn people that this approach could potentially kill someone.

The revival of the briefings has also given Trump a loophole for more campaigning, as most of his rallies have died down. Initially, he tried to return to the campaign, but the campaign only had a one-third of an arena in Tulsa, Oklahoma to its name. In New Hampshire, the whole campaign was canceled since there were concerns about low attendance, using bad weather as an excuse to cancel.

White House officials claim that Trump has recently been too busy, and therefore cannot attend virus task force meetings, with Trump working “around the clock.” Even as hospitals fill to the brim with patients and governors quietly backing away from the logical decision of staying closed, Trump is adamant that this virus will magically disappear.

“It’s going to disappear and I’ll be right,” stated Trump on “Fox News Sunday” over the weekend. “Because I’ve been right probably more than anybody else.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/20/world/coronavirus-updates.html