For the president's opponents, the news conference has become a daily hate-watch...
For the president’s opponents, the news conference has become a daily hate-watch, a blaring infomercial in which Mr. Trump claims credit, demands gratitude, spreads false information and attacks the press.
“He’s not qualified to answer that! What does he know?” Irma Sindicic, 50, a second-grade teacher who lives on Staten Island, yelled at her computer screen the same night as she listened to Mr. Trump deliver a vague answer about the availability of tests while she cooked pork chops. “Where’s Fauci? I want Fauci,” she said, referring to Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, one of the leading health experts on the president’s coronavirus task force.
The briefings make her blood boil, but Ms. Sindicic said she continues to tune in, night after night. “You need a debrief from the briefing because you have to weigh what is fact and what is fiction,” she said. “But I find if I want to be informed in the world, I have to have it on. It’s hard.”
Then there are less partisan daily viewers like Tim Bray, 49, a schoolteacher from Austin, Texas, who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 but is willing to give credit to the president when he thinks it is deserved.
“It was a good performance,” he said of Mr. Trump’s Thursday evening news conference, which the president uncharacteristically kept to just 20 minutes.
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Democrats and Republicans alike in the group described watching Mr. Trump as something close to a civic duty, even while they agreed that he was probably appearing at the briefings to help him in a re-election year.
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In interviews, Democrats and Republicans alike conceded that the president appeared to be in over his head in dealing with the coronavirus, and that Dr. Fauci and Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House’s coronavirus coordinator, were the more reliable voices to listen to for accurate information.
Supporters of the president viewed the crisis as so overwhelming that they were willing to forgive Mr. Trump if he was floundering, because who wouldn’t be, they said. His opponents by and large said they couldn’t think of a person less suited to the moment.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/12/us/politics/trump-coronavirus-briefings.html
