Trump’s Press Conferences Are Just Infomercials Now

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President Donald Trump doesn’t like to talk about the human toll of the coronavirus pandemic. For a long time, he wouldn’t even acknowledge there was one. When the first positive tests started showing up, he predicted that within a couple of days” the number of cases in the country “is going to be down to close to zero.” Later, when the outbreak was very much happening, he predicted that it would just disappear one day “like a miracle.” We’d be back to normal by Easter. We’d come back better than ever—we might even be better for it.

The president has nodded, in recent days, to images he’s seen on TV—of body bags, for instance, being loaded into a refrigerator truck outside a hospital in Queens—and admitted that hundreds of thousands of Americans will likely die as a result of the pandemic. More than 16,000 Americans have died thus far, but few if any of these victims of the pandemic have been mentioned by name from the White House podium. It’s an invisible tragedy.

The crisis does have a human face in Trump’s telling, but it doesn’t belong to a victim or a doctor or an essential worker—it’s the face of a CEO. Over and over during the pandemic, Trump has used his platform to hype corporate America’s products, tout his relationships with its executives, and promote their bottom lines. He’s even invited the heads of those companies to speak from behind the presidential seal about the “patriotic” work they’re doing for the country. He has turned a daily briefing into something halfway between a quarterly earnings call and an infomercial.

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