Let’s drop all pretenses, shall we? The president has decided he’s had enough of running the country and is running full time for re-election instead.
One could argue that this has been Donald J. Trump’s approach from the start — the last three years of shriek-tweeting, Fox-bingeing, and stadium rallies have had little to do with governance — but it’s much more obvious now that we’re in the midst of a global emergency. The moment Trump declared that it was up to the states to decide when to reopen — and to scale up their own coronavirus testing, and to scale up their antibody testing, and to get their own personal protective equipment — he was implicitly saying, I’m out.
It’s important to make this distinction. Trump’s nightly news conferences, propaganda from the very beginning, are now aimed almost entirely at his base. They are campaign events. And if they are campaign events, the cable news outlets, which still carry the bulk of them live, ought to balance their programming. They ought to check in with the Joe Biden camp before, during and after each one.
