Donald Trump’s first State of the Union in 2017 should have served as a lesson for many in the media. CNN’s Van Jones declared his milquetoast calls for unity the moment he “became president of the United States.” The New York Times’s Glenn Thrush deemed it “the most presidential speech Mr. Trump has ever given—delivered at precisely the moment he needed to project sobriety, seriousness of purpose, and self-discipline.” Here was the long-awaited moment when Trump stepped into his role, leaving behind the poisonous, polarizing figure of the campaign trail. It lasted less than 24 hours.

And yet, more than three years later, some in the media are once again hyping a presidential pivot. On Monday, the president appeared on television and did not call the coronavirus a “hoax,” as he had for weeks. He did not appear to be on a heavy dose of tranquilizers or say anything that tanked the markets. This, some concluded, could only herald the emergence of a New Trump.



Axios’s Mike Allen “could hear new urgency” in the president’s remarks. CNN’s Stephen Collinson went even further, writing a wet kiss of a column. “This version of Donald Trump will save lives,” he wrote, before describing the president in Churchillian terms: His “steely and inclusive temperament was an appropriate match for a day in which the coronavirus crisis darkened by the hour.”



A day later, after another surprisingly somber press conference from Trump in which he nevertheless absurdly claimed that he “felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic,” CNN’s Dana Bash marveled at what she was seeing. “This was remarkable from the president of the United States,” she said. “This is an important thing to note and to applaud from an American standpoint, and from a human standpoint—he is being the kind of leader that people need, at least in tone, today and yesterday.”



Never mind that Trump spent the hours in between attacking the governors of New York and Michigan for criticizing his own bungled response to the coronavirus. Never mind that he has taken to calling it the “Chinese virus” and labeled The New York Times a “disgrace to journalism” for good measure. A Washington press corps obsessed with the aesthetics of governance is rushing to award gold stars to Trump for clearing the lowest of bars, while threatening to shove the real story—the administration’s failure to adequately prepare for the coronavirus—down the memory hole.

