Trevor Noah
When confronted with a crisis, said Trevor Noah on Thursday’s Daily Show, Trump has a standard pattern of moves – he’s like a “video game character” in his predictability: “First, he pretends the problem doesn’t exist, then he pretends he’s already solved the problem, and if that doesn’t work, he blames the media and the Democrats for the problem he probably created.”
But none of these deflections have worked with coronavirus, Noah continued, and so on Tuesday, for the return of his daily White House briefing on coronavirus, Trump “pulled out his superpower: changing his tone”.
We’ve seen this before: Trump pretends to take coronavirus seriously, then two days later he's tweeting that it's all a hoax and we should eat our cereal with bleach. pic.twitter.com/ytxcOcAhZQ
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) July 23, 2020
In other words, after months of rejecting face masks and downplaying the virus, Trump (mostly) read a prepared statement in which he acknowledged the pandemic “will get worse before it gets better”. “It is actually a little scary to hear Trump talk like this,” Noah admitted.
“Because when a scientist says it, it’s because those are the facts. When Trump says it, it’s because reality is so awful that it’s somehow cut through the thousands of layers of paranoid delusion. Like you know shit is bad when even Trump breaks character.”
Whatever the reason for the sudden shift in “strategy” – sinking polls, a disastrous interview on the usually friendly Fox News – “it should be obvious to anyone with a memory better than a goldfish that this change of tone isn’t actually a sincere change of heart,” Noah said. “Because, let’s just say, we’ve all been here before.”
Noah played a series of news clips which focused on Trump’s “dramatic shift in tone”, his “sobering sense”, when he read another prepared statement in mid-March.
“We’ve seen this trick before, people,” Noah concluded. “Trump decides to pretend he’s taking coronavirus seriously again, and then two days later he’s doing what? He’s tweeting that it’s all a hoax and we should just eat our cereal with bleach.
“So if the past is any indication, Trump’s somber new tone is as real as his skin tone. Because deep down, no matter how much he wants to hide it, he’s still Trump.”
Stephen Colbert
Stephen Colbert also covered Trump’s return to the coronavirus briefing, in which the president boasted that “we are in the process of developing a strategy that is going to be very, very powerful.”
“Wait, you finally have a strategy, and your strategy is to develop a strategy?” the Late Show host retorted. “Well now we know why you never wear a mask, because all you care about is covering your ass.
“You don’t get credit for a thing you should’ve done half a year ago,” Colbert added.
Newfound “serious” tone aside, Trump insisted on using the racist nickname “China virus” for the disease during the briefing. “OK, sure, the virus came from China, but the country you govern leads the world in the number of cases and deaths,” Colbert said. “Calling it the China virus doesn’t make you less responsible for totally blowing the response here. That’s like blaming Mexico for getting your ding-dong stuck in a bottle of Tequila.”
Seth Meyers
On Late Night, Seth Meyers lamented how major news networks reacted to Trump’s briefing, in that they “fell for this act simply because his team dosed his Diet Coke with Nyquil and got him to read a prepared statement pretending to take the crisis seriously”.
ABC, for example, wrote “the president is displaying a new tone and a new level of engagement.” CNN called Trump expressed a “relatively sober tone”, while Bloomberg said: “Trump reboots virus briefings with warning and a shift in tone.”
“Good Lord, I really think you could duct-tape a spatula to a golden retriever’s paw and half of the media would say, ‘Oh my God! That dog’s a chef.’” Meyers said. “What’s wrong with you guys? How can you keep falling for this? It’s been five years of this BS and still, every time President Werewolf over here manages to Novocaine his way through a prepared statement without passing out at the podium, you act like he’s a totally different person all of a sudden.”
Samantha Bee
And on Full Frontal, Samantha Bee took a state-by-state tour of Covid-19 government malpractice called “Deniers, Dimwits, and Lies”. First stop: Georgia, whose governor, Brian Kemp, banned city and county governments from mandating the wearing of masks. “Brian fucking Kemp, you absolute nob,” said Bee. “I wish we never didn’t elect you,” a reference to the voter purge scandal just before his election over Stacey Abrams in 2018, when Kemp was in charge of overseeing the election as Georgia’s secretary of state.
Bee also visited Arizona, the state with one of the highest Covid-19 infection rates in the nation this summer, where Governor Doug Ducey refused to mandate face masks, and barred cities and counties from imposing any stricter measures. “It’s not surprising that Arizona would drag its feet on mandating masks,” said Bee.
“After all, in 1992, it became one of the last states to make Martin Luther King Day an official holiday, nine years after the US government. I know that seems racist, but you’ve gotta remember: it’s a dry hate.”
