The whirlwind news conferences were becoming “almost like a rally to him — almost like what’s more important is winning the election in November,” Morgan said.

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“No it’s not, Donald Trump. What is more important right now is saving American lives,” he said.

The British tabloid fixture, whose brash commentary has courted a fair share of outcry over the years, made sure the president saw his critical CNN interview by reaching out directly to him on Twitter, where he probably has a better chance of catching the president’s attention than most people in the world. Morgan is one of the 47 people or companies, among them the Trump properties, that the president follows on Twitter.

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“Mr President @realDonaldTrump, you won’t want to watch this, but I hope you do,” Morgan wrote. “Please drop your angry, petty, disingenuous, blame-gaming, self-aggrandising daily briefing antics & start being a proper wartime president.”

Morgan is the latest critic of Trump’s briefings, which sometimes last 90 minutes or longer as Trump’s top doctors and coronavirus task force members sit in chairs waiting for a turn to speak. He has often berated reporters if they ask questions he doesn’t appear to like, sometimes calling their questions “nasty.” He has interrupted Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, to block him from answering a medical question about a drug Trump had been touting. He has played misleading, propaganda-like videos that praise his coronavirus response or attack the media.

His behavior has drawn criticism from both Democrats and Republicans, some of whom particularly spoke out after Trump claimed during one briefing that the presidency gave him “total” authority over states, or that coronavirus testing was a local responsibility.

Other Republicans expressed concern in a New York Times story earlier this month that Trump was hurting himself by constantly taking center stage instead of his medical experts. Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a close Trump confidant, said the president “sometimes drowns out his own message,” while Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) said the briefings were “going off the rails a little bit.”

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The criticism did not appear to have any effect, as the president returned to the same behavior in the days that followed, including on Sunday, when he told CBS reporter Weijia Jiang to “lower your voice” and “just relax” after she asked a question he disliked.

But Trump’s relationship with Morgan is different from Republican politicians in that it goes back to his days as a reality TV star. Their friendship began when Morgan, following stints as an “America’s Got Talent” judge, won the seventh season of Trump’s “Celebrity Apprentice” show in 2008. Morgan supported Trump throughout his campaign for president, becoming the president’s first international TV interview after he took office. He has criticized the president’s positions on various issues in the past, including gun control and the travel ban, issuing pleas to the president to change course like he did Sunday on Stelter’s show.

So far none of that past criticism has crumbled their friendship, or appeared to have had much of an effect. But Morgan told Stelter on Sunday he did not “really care about the niceties about whether Donald Trump is going to be offended by what I’m saying.”

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“He has to put the country before himself. He has to put Americans before electioneering,” Morgan said. “He has to remind himself every day, what can I do today to prevent more lives being killed? Not how can I score more petty points, and stand here for two hours … and try to have arguments with the media.”

Morgan appeared on Stelter’s show after attracting attention for his relentless “Good Morning Britain” interviews with public health officials and members of parliament in the United Kingdom, demanding answers about shortcomings with a style some described as almost “uncomfortable” to watch.

He told Stelter that he saw a key similarity between Trump and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, in that their talents as populist politicians have not translated well amid the greatest global crisis since World War II. Trump, he said, needed to show empathy for the pain so many thousands of families are enduring, needed to present accurate information and to be calm and decisive, but “on almost every level of that, Donald Trump at the moment is failing the American people.”

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“Donald Trump’s approval ratings are falling, and the reason for that — he needs to understand this — they’re falling because people don’t trust him,” he said. “They think he’s turning these briefings into self-serving rallies, and they don’t understand why he can’t just do the basics of crisis leadership."