Trump says coronavirus will ‘get worse before it gets better’
WASHINGTON — Faced with a seemingly intractable surge in coronavirus cases, as well as low approval ratings for his own handling of the pandemic, President Trump sought to strike a new tone of solemnity, one that sharply contrasted with his assertions that the virus had been largely beaten back, reduced to just a few “burning embers.”
Speaking on Tuesday, he described parts of the country — singling out Florida in particular — as suffering from “big fires.” Those were the very states he praised only weeks ago for moving quickly to lift lockdown orders.
“It will probably, unfortunately, get worse before it gets better,” Trump said of the pandemic, which has killed more than 143,000 Americans. The self-described cheerleader-in-chief acknowledged that the dour prediction was out of character for him: “Something I don’t like saying about things, but that’s the way it is, it’s what we have.”
Trump also said that additional unemployment benefits would be reduced in the next coronavirus stimulus package. He did not say how much money would be devoted in that package to coronavirus testing, though his administration has reportedly moved to block additional testing-related funds. Trump has both praised the nation’s testing capacity and minimized the important of testing.
It was a return to the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House, where in March and April the presidential coronavirus task force held near-daily briefings that sometimes topped two hours in length. The briefings sputtered out by May, as the Trump administration turned its focus from pandemic response to economic reopening.
Trump has repeatedly predicted that the virus would disappear. “You know I said, ‘It's going to disappear.’ I'll say it again,” he reiterated as recently as Sunday in a Fox News interview.
But the virus had ideas of its own. After first devastating the New York City metropolitan area, the coronavirus appeared to take a brief pause before alighting next on Florida, Texas and Georgia. There, younger people are becoming infected.
Fewer people are dying today than in March from COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. Still, the pandemic has remained persistent enough to frustrate Trump’s plans to reopen schools and restart the economy. His return to the briefing room podium, where he engaged in no attacks on the press or on his Democratic opponents, appears to reflect a growing consensus among top campaign advisers that unless he is able to display a measure of crisis leadership, the presidency will go to his likely Democratic rival, former vice president Joe Biden.
The president could not suppress his natural optimism, praising the nation’s supply of protective equipment and promising that both treatments and vaccines would be forthcoming. But the assertions lacked their usual Trumpian bombast.
Trump did maintain some old habits, notably calling the pathogen “the China virus,” in reference to the country where the coronavirus originated in December. That branding of the disease has been denounced as xenophobic, but Trump appears to see little risk in blaming his favorite geopolitical foe for the disease.
The culture war over face masks that Trump had been fueling for months, on the other hand, is no longer engaging Trump, at least for now. “When you are not able to socially distance, wear a mask,” Trump said, in contrast to earlier assertions that wearing a mask should be a personal decision. “Get a mask, whether you like the mask or not. They have an impact, they’ll have an effect, and we need everything we can get.”
Asked about his own intermittent mask-wearing by a reporter, Trump pulled a face mask out of his pocket and displayed it to the socially distanced press corps seated before him. “I have no problem with the masks,” he said. “I’m getting used to the mask.” He said that wearing a mask was “patriotic,” reprising a new message he’d tested out on Twitter the day before.
Trump previously eschewed masks in public and once shared a post mocking Biden for wearing one.
At only about half an hour in length, the Tuesday briefing was much shorter than those of early spring. “We’ll be doing these quite often,” Trump promised.
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