Then the opposite happened.

“I disagree, strongly, with his decision to open up facilities which are in violation of the Phase I guidelines,” Trump said at his briefing Wednesday. “It’s too soon. They can wait a bit longer.”

Making it all the more shocking, just that morning Trump had tweeted that “States are safely coming back. Our Country is starting to OPEN FOR BUSINESS again.”

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Kemp is not the first person to do what they think Trump wants, only to see him turn on them. Just a few weeks ago acting Navy secretary Thomas Modly resigned after giving a Trump-esque speech to sailors in which he attacked their former captain, whom Trump himself had gone after. Like Kemp, Modly probably found himself asking, “Wait, what did I do wrong? Isn’t this what you wanted?”

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Kemp couldn’t have known that just before Trump’s briefing, the scientists on his coronavirus task force had informed him that if they were asked about Kemp’s order, they’d say it was a mistake. That would have been a newsworthy conflict, one Trump decided to avoid.

Which illustrates an important principle of this presidency: While Trump may have temporary policy preferences, there’s one thing he will always care about more than anything else: his media image.

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That’s something that’s constantly shifting, both in reality and in Trump’s perception. Which can leave people like Kemp and Modly tripping up when they’re trying so hard to satisfy the president.

When Modly gave that angry speech to the sailors aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt, the result was an immediate wave of negative press coverage in which Modly was criticized from all sides. When that happens, Trump will rid himself of you even if you thought you were doing what he wanted.

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Similarly, Kemp stuck his neck out by being the first governor to announce a dramatic (if partial) lifting of restrictions, allowing businesses such as gyms and hair salons to reopen. The result was a huge volume of negative media coverage. You can bet Trump, an avid consumer of news, was watching closely.

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For all his eagerness to “reopen the economy,” Trump is surely aware of polls showing that only a tiny fraction of Americans think we should rush to reopen. The anti-lockdown protests he encouraged against Democratic governors are also turning out to be a PR disaster; in a new CBS News poll, the number of Americans who said Trump should be encouraging the protests was just 7 percent.

Trump may not be doing much to actually manage the crisis, but he is utterly consumed with how his management of the crisis is playing in the media. And when something isn’t working, he’s quick to change (and to deny he ever did or said what he did and said before).

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So while you can never go wrong by offering embarrassingly sycophantic praise of Trump’s boundless strength and glorious leadership, when you try to act on what you think he wants, if circumstances shift — especially in the media — you can find yourself hung out to dry.

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That creates endless confusion and delay for the creation and implementation of policy. When Trump announces a new policy in a late-night tweet, it leaves aides scrambling to figure out how to implement his latest impulsive idea. But if it becomes too controversial, he may abandon it with equally little warning.

A Republican governor is only slightly less dependent on Trump’s favor, and subject to his changing whims, than officials in his administration.

It was less than two weeks ago that Trump said the reopening of the country might begin before May 1. For some states, he said, “we think we’re going to be able to get them open fairly quickly, and then others will follow.” He even closed with a threat "to come down on them very hard.”

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Today, the president seems as worried about how the public will react if we resume activities and see a new wave of the virus as he is about how the public will react to keeping the lockdown in place too long.

Kemp’s biggest mistake may have been not keeping a close enough eye on media coverage and anticipating how Trump would react to it. He thought he could be the leader in carrying out Trump’s wishes, but by the time he did, Trump had changed his outlook.

So if you’re a Republican governor, you could try to guess how Trump will feel in a day or a week or a month, and do what you think he’ll want. Or you could just do what’s in the best interest of public health.