Six Long Weeks ⇥ theintercept.com

Robert Mackey, the Intercept:

Donald Trump grinned broadly on Monday as he tricked the news networks into broadcasting a taxpayer-funded testimonial to his own leadership, in the form of a video highlight reel of presidential statements on the coronavirus crisis, set to stirring music, unveiled during the president’s 29th daily briefing on the pandemic.

[…]

The centerpiece of the video was a timeline of actions by Trump and his administration, highlighting the partial ban on travel from China he ordered on January 31, and his declaration of a national emergency on March 13.

But, as CBS News correspondent Paula Reid pointed out to Trump after the video ended, there was a huge gap in the timeline: It mentioned absolutely no action by him in February and there was, as the Times had noted, a period of “six long weeks” after the travel restrictions until he “finally took aggressive action to confront the danger the nation was facing.”

The president did not simply fail to answer Reid’s questions; he threw a tantrum while dodging the premise. There is nobody less equipped to take charge of a response to this pandemic than this guy — no person so self-obsessed, so quick to gloat, so thin-skinned, and so deliberately ignorant.