The journalists at BuzzFeed News are proud to bring you trustworthy and relevant reporting about the coronavirus. To help keep this news free, become a member and sign up for our newsletter, Outbreak Today .

If you close your eyes and sit still for a few minutes, you can remember a time when things weren’t so strange — the daily flood of people dying alone, the fear of those forced to venture out, the millions who have lost their jobs, the fact that many (though far from all) of us are taking this in while sheltering at home, staring at the same four walls.

If you try this exercise around 5 p.m., however, you will be quickly shaken from your pre-coronavirus nostalgia. For that, give or take 45 minutes, is the witching hour. In addition to the myriad adjustments Americans have made to try to survive a deadly pandemic, they have also allowed Donald Trump into their homes on a nightly basis. No matter if he has an announcement or not, a message to the nation or not, there he is, riffing on whatever enters his mind. And there we are — millions of us — to take it in. It sets a rhythm to the day: breakfast, lunch, Trump press conference, drink, dinner, drink.

It’s obvious why Trump, obsessed with attention, has settled into the routine. The question is why we do this.

For journalists, it’s our job — and there’s a raging debate over the how and why of it. But millions of Americans are tuning in to watch the president splatter his id all over the White House briefing room. It’s exhausting. Last week, a stream of consciousness riff about reopening the US economy took him from talking about the fourth fiscal quarter to comparing the September 11 death toll with that of COVID-19 (“we’ve more than doubled it, and it’s still going”), then sideways into the stock market (“we’re going to have the best stock market week — shortened week — in 50 years, almost broke the all-time record”), around to airlines, into one of his favorite new lines (“we’ve learned a tremendous amount”) before ending, finally, with ventilators (“we have a lot of very exciting things taking place”).

The mental energy it takes to follow his train of thought, let alone suss out new or important information and flag the lies, is enormous. Since self-isolation has stripped away the romance of things, I’ll admit that sometimes, during particularly long sessions, I find myself falling asleep — as if my brain is saying, I can’t take this anymore.

Even Martha Joynt Kumar — the director of the White House Transition Project who has made it her life’s work to study presidents’ interactions with the press — calls the daily briefings “overwhelming.”

“I think at any time the president speaks, one needs to listen, because what he is saying forms the record of his presidency,” she said.

Despite growing calls for reporters to dismiss the briefings, it is hard to turn away when you have such unfettered insight into the mind of the most powerful person in the world — lies, insecurities, and all. One day, centuries from now, historians will read the White House record and find that in the midst of a global pandemic, Trump was delivering untested medical advice from the podium. They will see him calling reporters “fake” and “third-rate.”

They’ll hear him, three weeks after his address to the nation, using the Coronavirus Task Force briefing to brag: “I have, you know, hundreds of millions of people. Number one on Facebook. Did you know I was number one on Facebook? I mean, I just found out I’m number one on Facebook. I thought that was very nice.”

Never before has a president seized the public White House podium nearly every single day for so long. Trump has spoken for more than 20 hours in the White House briefing room since the crisis began. Since regularly joining the task force briefings on March 13, there have only been three days when he has not addressed the public. Several of his press conferences, including one on Friday that clocked in at 2 hours and 13 minutes, beat his previous “single-day record for talking to the press,” which came during a NATO press conference in London on Dec. 3 when he spoke to reporters for 2 hours and 1 minute — and even that one was spaced out in three sessions of Q&As, according to a study by Kumar.

A red-letter day came on March 24, when he held a Fox News town hall on the virus during the day, then called into Fox to clarify his comments, and then decided to hold a previously unplanned briefing that evening, which ran for 1 hour and 50 minutes. For the 18 press conferences that Trump attended fully, rather than handing it over to the actual task force chief, Vice President Mike Pence, the average running time was 91 minutes.

“He needs one of two things: a group who loves him or a group who doesn’t like him, so he can get energy from either one of them,” Kumar said. No mass gatherings like public rallies? Cue increased attacks on reporters in the room. “These are different,” Kumar said. Trump is up there surrounded by experts who often contradict what he has just said, when he hasn’t contradicted himself. “It’s very confusing for people. Do we have to stay inside or don’t we? Is the president the one setting the tone or the governors and mayors?”