Why White House coronavirus week worked better than infrastructure week

On Monday, a newly somber president introduced tough social-distancing guidelines. A day later, he announced details of a stimulus package, while Wednesday brought an appeal to wartime unity and a call for sacrifice. By Thursday, it was an effort to speed up approval of potential medicines, and Friday was border security.

A senior White House official said: “As the president’s policy priorities come online, there was more for the White House to communicate to the American people, and we’re doing it in a more organized and systematic way.”

For a staff that still grimaces at the memory of “infrastructure week,” a permanently postponed diary of big announcements about roads and similar things, it is the sort of joined-up strategy the staff thought would never be possible under a president who can blow up the day’s agenda with a 6 a.m. tweet.

This time, they say, the gravity of the moment has focused minds and kept Trump himself fully engaged in plotting a course through the crisis.

Announcements for Saturday and Monday have already been planned as part of an effort to demonstrate an administration at full steam. Price gouging is understood to be one of the problems to be addressed soon.

The approach has emerged since Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner joined the coronavirus effort and after the return of Hope Hicks, one the president’s most trusted advisers, to the White House.

The messaging has still not been perfect. The president has at times gotten ahead of his officials. On Wednesday, he announced on Twitter that the border with Canada would close to nonessential travel while the details were still being discussed.

And he at one point said that chloroquine would be available on prescription for COVID-19 patients when it must still undergo clinical trials.

But Jason Miller, a communications adviser on the president’s 2016 campaign, said it was no surprise the messaging took some time to coordinate. The world had been caught off guard by the pandemic, he said.

“In many ways, we are building the plane that is this response effort while we are in the air,” he said.

“It took them a little while to get on the same page and caught up to speed, but I think you see the synchronization and coordination that the task force is moving with right now, and I think they’re in a very good place.”

This week marked a stark change from the figure at the top who was criticized by public health officials for delivering optimistic messages even as the death toll grew around the world.

Barely three weeks ago, he claimed the number of cases in the United States would soon drop to zero. “It’s going to disappear,” he said two days later. “One day, it’s like a miracle. It will disappear.”

Matthew Seeger, a crisis communication expert at Wayne State University, said Trump had fallen into a common error that risked undermining his credibility when things turned out differently.

“Overreassurance is a natural tendency of leaders in this circumstance,” he said. “They want to show that things are going well. They want to show they are making progress. It is a very dangerous tendency.”

However, he said the briefing room updates, with a wide range of experts on the podium and actions to announce, were a welcome improvement, even if the president was still prone to getting ahead of his experts. And some things, such as a row with a reporter on Friday, were never helpful, he said.

The moment came after an NBC reporter asked the president whether his tendency to put a positive spin on things was giving false hope to the public.

He said: “What do you say to Americans, who are watching you right now, who are scared?”

Trump replied: “I say that you are a terrible reporter, that’s what I say.”

Seeger said the exchange would do nothing to reassure a viewing public coping with uncertain times.

“It’s a pretty obvious question in many ways. Be prepared to give a response,” he said.