Bait and switch

| 10:31 pm EDT April 27, 2020
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Donald Trump said over the weekend that he wasn’t doing any more coronavirus press briefings. Then his White House announced today that there would be a briefing after all. Then it announced there wouldn’t be. Then it announced that there would be a different kind of briefing, focused on reopening the country.

This kind of thing points to some kind of internal power struggle in the White House, as various Trump handlers push different agendas on him throughout the day and convince him to keep changing his mind about what he’s going to do. Even though it may have simply been a byproduct of all the chaos, the result was that today’s briefing was a bait and switch.

The media and the public were told that this briefing would be an economic one. Instead it was the same old thing as ever: Trump reading propaganda about how well he’s supposedly handed the crisis. Idiotic back and forth with the reporters in the audience. The only thing different was that a few CEOs gave brief speeches for no apparent reason.

CNN doesn’t usually air the opening segment of Trump’s briefings. But, perhaps egged on by the promise that this was going to be something new and different today, CNN went ahead and aired it – only to cut away within a couple minutes. The thing about a bait and switch like this is that it only works once. Now Trump and his people have used up that space on the bingo card today, for no good reason. They’re in total chaos.