They're back ...
President Trump announced on Monday that he and the White House coronavirus task force will resume daily briefings on Tuesday.
"We're going to give you a lot of briefings in the next week and the next few weeks," Trump said in the Oval Office. "I’ll do it at 5 o’clock, like we were doing. We had a good slot. A lot of people were watching.”
Though the task force, led by Vice President Mike Pence, has held an occasional briefing in recent weeks, the press events have not been convened regularly or with Trump since late April. Back then, the president was accused of using the briefings as campaign rallies at a time when much of the country was shut down and political events were being canceled.
The announcement about resuming the briefings comes as cases of the coronavirus have spiked in many parts of the country, prompting local and state officials to stop or reverse their plans to reopen. All the while, Trump's poll numbers in response to his handling of the coronavirus pandemic have steadily dropped.
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At the time the White House stopped the daily briefings, FiveThirtyEight's average approval rating on Trump's pandemic response was 50.2%, while 45.8% disapproved. After a three-month hiatus, only 38.5% approve of Trump's handling and 57.9% disapprove.
Kellyanne Conway, an adviser to the president, said last week while noting the drop in the polls that her boss should resume the daily briefings.
“The president’s numbers were much higher when he was out there briefing everybody on his day-by-day basis about the coronavirus,” she said in an interview on Fox & Friends. “Just giving people the information. They were out there every day when we had at some point 2,500 deaths in one day, at the highest level, and I guess it was April or so, March and April, and the president and the task force were there most days, giving the information. I think the president should be doing that.”
