Over the weekend, Donald Trump’s critics and his advisers were, possibly for the first time, on the same page: The president’s daily coronavirus briefings, which stretch on longer than Grateful Dead sets, were causing more harm than good. All it took for everyone to reach that conclusion was the president suggesting, in front of millions of viewers, that injecting bleach could cure Covid-19.



These briefings were both public health and political disasters, damaging the president’s already thin credibility and harming his reelection chances. The White House scrambled to come up with new briefings, now with reduced Trump. On Sunday, officials told Axios’s Jonathan Swan that the briefings would transition away from discussions of public health and instead highlight economic “success stories.” New White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany teased that the briefings might not always feature the president, though they would always “showcase” his “great entrepreneurship.”



Trump appeared to have finally learned a lesson that had eluded him for more than seven decades: More is not always better.



But as usual, Trump wasn’t actually with the program. On Monday, he appeared in the Rose Garden, as opposed to the White House Press Room. Otherwise, it was the same old Trump, this time denying he had suggested administering bleach with an “injection inside.”

The episode illustrated what we all should know by now: Every attempt to constrain or change the president inevitably ends in failure and a return to the chaotic norm.

