As the number of coronavirus cases in the U.S. skyrockets, and the economy plummets, Donald Trump has continued to use the White House’s daily coronavirus press briefings to boast about how well he believes he’s handling the crisis, and take pot shots at his enemies. This “let Trump be Trump” strategy—the administration’s go-to, considering Trump has fired anyone who might preempt it—was applied to the pandemic just as one of the president’s most trusted aides officially returned to the fold. While Hope Hicks now holds a nebulous White House title, the communications strategy she has crafted for Trump’s emergency messaging is perfectly clear: let him address the nation in his own words while taking the briefing room’s centerstage on a near daily basis.

At first, this proved to be effective. Despite the president’s personal role in downplaying the dangers of the coronavirus, and the White House’s severely delayed mitigation efforts, Trump saw a sizable favorability boost in March. Forty-nine percent of Americans voiced their approval of his leadership at the time, which marked just the second time his presidency has enjoyed such ratings in Gallup’s national survey. But as the pandemic and its economic devastation have dragged on, the president has also used his position to brag about the ratings of his pressers beating out ABC’s The Bachelor and riff about his past sexual encounters with “models.” His approval bump has proved to be temporary, as an April 14 Gallup poll found a six-point drop.

From the Archive: Hope Hicks and Change

Hicks, who officially works under senior adviser Jared Kushner, no longer holds the communications director title, but has assumed many of her former duties from her current scheduler’s office in the West Wing, according to a Politico report on Monday. Two such duties include engineering the president’s daily talking points amid an ever changing news cycle, and managing his supposedly slam-packed schedule (in a widely ridiculed anonymous statement, a White House official told the New York Post over the weekend that Trump is so busy these days he often has “no time for lunch or there is 10 minutes for lunch.”) But her main function is encouraging Trump to face the cameras and start talking—sometimes off the cuff, other times scripted, but very often a combination of the two. According to Politico, she “urged the president to act as a frontman for the coronavirus crisis,” rather than delegating the task to Mike Pence, his coronavirus task force leader, or to medical professionals.

While past presidents might have been expected to offer up attempts at empathy for Americans reeling from a global health and economic crisis, Trump’s “attempts to display empathy or appeal to national unity…amount to only a quarter of the number of times he complimented himself or a top member of his team,“ according to a New York Times analysis of every White House coronavirus address between March 9 and mid-April. The Times report found that Trump’s most common public refrain had been self-congratulations, which accounted for approximately 600 of his remarks. It is not unusual for these comments to be based on drastically embellished notions, including his recent insistence that “Everything we did was right.”

The 360 times he has credited administration staff, private companies, local leaders, and others make up Trump’s second-most frequently used lines; however, the Times tallied 110 times that he has thrown blame at others, sometimes in the same breath as kudos. “What we inherited from the previous administration was totally broken, which somebody should eventually say. Not only were the cupboards bare, as I say, but we inherited broken testing,” he said April 13, before praising his team for achieving “great testing” capabilities. Two of his biggest targets have been the press, as he has fallen back on his old threats to open up “libel laws,” and Democratic governors, whom he has blamed for “complaining” too much, even as thousands of their constituents die. Trump has also frequently rolled out unproven treatment methods, primarily obsessing over fast-tracking the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine, despite its potentially dangerous side effects. Though, most recently, he wondered aloud about using “disinfectant” as an “injection inside or almost a cleaning” on COVID-19 patients.

Still, the White House maintains the importance of Trump speaking honestly and “directly to the American people about the challenges” of the coronavirus. “A lot of other people would not have done that,” added White House Deputy Press Secretary Hogan Gidley in a statement to Politico on the president answering questions from reporters. “But it is a testament to his leadership that he was the one who wanted to deliver that news, so he could be honest with the American people but also offer a message of hope.”

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