Showing posts with label Daily briefings without the president. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Daily briefings without the president. Show all posts
Monday, April 27, 2020
CORONAVIRUS DAILY BRIEFING: THE PRESIDENT STEPPED ON IT REALLY BADLY.
ICHEOKU says the first mistake which the president made was to appoint a coronavirus task force and still personally micromanaged the daily briefings about the job they are doing. He wouldn't let members of the task force and their chairman handle the daily updates about the task for which they were constituted. The president thereby turned it into a combustible issue with the media rather than a uniting national event to update the American people on the effort being made by the government to tackle the coronavirus.
The president is not a politician and he is not well versed in the art of broader messaging, which would have appealed to the entire nation rather than just his usually cloistered MAGA base. He would have let the more astute politician, his Vice President Michael Pence, handle the daily briefings. Michael Pence would have known the right words to use and the proper tone to deploy to reach the broader spectrum of the American people and thus been able to create a more nationalistic embrace of the effort, instead of the Trump problem which the current narrative reads.
The president also was utterly defensive and tried too hard to fight off attacks on him for a botched preparation for the coronavirus. He first tried to cuddle the media thinking that he could woo them, but he forgot that the media are Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party's sympathizers who still seethe with anger that he is still in the White House. They pounced on the president like a pack of wild dogs and the rest is now history, as the president has in frustration, suspended the daily briefings.
ICHEOKU says suspending the briefings is not the answer, the president just needs to extricate himself from it and let Michael Pence and his team Taskforce handle it. Whatever the president needs to communicate in addition should be made through issued press releases or better still with his tweets or he can even hand it over to Micheal Pence as he goes to make the daily briefings as an announcement from the president. The media does not like the president and this feeling is mutual; so their mere sighting of the president is like flashing a red cloth before a bull and they always go into a ruinous frenzy in their attempt to hurt and ridicule the president. They are in an intractable battle with the president and they will never rest nor call for a truce until they see his back from the White House. This is why the daily briefings no longer briefs on anything but has since turned into a fighting ring.
It is not a secret that the media does not like the president's audacity and the fact that the president won the election despite their antagonistic posture against him and his being in the White House still makes them mad till today. Then add the constant face off which the president gives them, calling them fake news and the temperature continuously boils over. Their operation bring the president down is never ending and it manifests in the way they frame their questions at the daily briefings, not necessarily to find out what is being done about the coronavirus, but to trap the president into what they will later use to bludgeon him, in continuance of their anti Trump narrative.
However, the president failed to shield himself from his critics by continuously stepping into piles of dungs while the daily briefings lasted. He saw it as a medium with which to constantly push back criticism in defense of what he felt was a good job which his White House was doing. But the high number of deaths and infections in the country, the worst throughout the world, did not help convince anybody that a good job was being done by the White House. This was where correct messaging was very important but the president failed to adjust and adopt the appropriate messaging, specifically tailored for the sombre moment.
The president was unable to and could not separate himself from his campaign style messaging and morph into a consoler in chief messaging which was required at the present moment of great grief in the land where thousands are dead and thousands more are afflicted with the contagion. This failure to adjust properly messed things up badly for the president and many people saw him in different lights. He was constantly protesting, too combative and overly defensive, refusing to even take some responsibility for some things which were done wrong or which did not pan out well as planned.
Yes, the president issued an order banning flights from Wuhan China but he failed to ensure that the order was effectively carried out immediately and without delay. He also failed to recognize that the people in Wuhan China were routing their flights through Europe and then to America and in that way circumvented his order. A politically more astute president would have admitted that there could have been few lapses here and there in implementing the order, but that he timely acted in the best interest of the country and when relevant information became available.
The president should have left the issue there, but instead, he continuously rehashed it as if it was the silver bullet that stopped millions of Americans from dying. ICHEOKU says 50,000 plus dead Americans are simply too many and it made a nonsense out of the Chinese air closure, but the president did not advise himself properly on this consequential fact. As it turned out, the closing of air border with China apparently was not good enough to starve off the disaster and the president should have admitted to it, as one of the few flaws in the effort. But not President Donald John Trump who feels he can do no wrong and is seemingly above reproach.
Nobody is infallible and American people would have understood as they wanted him to admit to the lack of total success with the stoppage of flights from China, but the president failed to see the needed contrition. This lack of responsibility for some role in the huge number of deaths and infection suffered, despite all his best effort which turned out not to be good enough, is a negative for the president. It will count against him when the election comes, admitted he did enough overall to help him win a reelection; and he will walk all over Joe Biden come November 3rd, 2020. But winning the election is not the reason for this piece, only that some mistakes were made for which the president ought to have made some mea culpa.
Further, the president somewhat personalized the effort at tackling the coronavirus pandemic, frequently using the first person pronoun "I" in referring to the efforts being made to contain the virus. It should not have been so, as members of the Taskforce are in fact the people who were doing the actual work and they should have been allowed to take whatever credit and deficit that came from the effort. It would have been acceptable if the president took credit for his excellent choice of the people in the Taskforce. But to take credit for everything this Taskforce people did by always prefixing his statements with "I did this, I did that" somewhat became a real turn off for many people.
Unfortunately, the president saw the daily briefings as an improvisation for his MAGA campaigns and forgot that millions of Americans who who are not members of the Republican Party or Team MAGA, who were similarly afflicted and concerned about the coronavirus, were equally tuning in, listening and watching the daily briefings. These people would rather they are not bothered with the president's reelection campaign and would have preferred the daily briefings were strictly honed in on the coronavirus to disseminate necessary information about what the government is doing to combat the virus. It is possible too that some members of the Taskforce are not the president's fans either and were disturbed to watch the president sometimes veer off into politics.
It was a huge mistake for the president to have said things about his reelection campaign or against Joe Biden and the Democratic Party concerning the November election during the daily briefings. Many people were not interested and on nerves over the affliction ravaging the land to want to hear anything about an election. These are more important things than the November election or even reelecting the president. Thousands of people were dying and thousands more were being infected and the president was talking about his reelection. That is a no no and time inappropriate as too many people were so scared and too worried about their fate and that of their loved ones to be interested in any election politics talk.
So, it was a mistake for the president not to strictly stay on the message of coronavirus and dabble into the November 2020 election. The president should have stayed laser-focused on the coronavirus message and never allow himself to be distracted with Joe Biden or the Democratic Party or even his chances on November 3rd. The president would have allowed his action to speak for him and they were beginning to do this until he delved into politics, even touting his high poll numbers in the middle of the crisis when every effort were being marshaled to combat the unseen enemy. It was an otherwise avoidable needless distraction as many of the mobilized people possibly don't like the president, did not vote for him in 2016 and probably will not vote for him on November 3rd. It was an opportunity to unite the country, albeit for the duration of the coronavirus endeavor, but which the president failed to rise up to the occasion.
The president also made a big goof with his demand that his name appear on the stimulus checks which led to the delay in getting those checks to the people who needed it most. It was a big mistake as nobody really cares what is written on the checks except for the dollar amount. Most people will not even read what is written on the check before they present them in check cashing stores to get their money paid. Some people will even be angry that the president's name was put on their checks and you ask yourself what then was the wisdom behind delaying the checks from getting to the people just to put the president's name on them.
Most people do not care and it will not make any difference in how they see the president, nor will it make anyone who never wanted to vote for the president to change their mind on November 3rd. As far as they are concerned, the money does not belong to the president but the American people, so why should the president take credit for giving it to them by putting his name on the checks. Meanwhile all those people who got direct deposit payments did not have the president's name written on their deposit slips, so why on the checks. It only confirms the vainglorious nature of the president who always wants to be adored but he is only succeeding in putting many people off by such action. Some people see him as being too full of it an such action helps cement this stereotype.
As if the president has not done enough already to damage himself with the daily briefing, the final nail on the coffin was the comment about injecting disinfectants which will live in infamy as the president's worst words ever uttered. ICHEOKU was shocked beyond recompense and so did millions of people in America and world wide that a president of the United States of America was this bereft of knowledge about toxicity. It does not matter under whatever subterfuge it was said and sarcasm does not cut it either, to suggest or even think that such a toxic compound like disinfectant could be injected into the human body.
The goof merely added impetus to the president's critics who accuse him of having very shallow knowledge, lacking in brain thrust and capacity. But who wouldn't following such inexplicable comment and instead of apologizing as a misspeak, the president piled on by trying to explain it away as sarcasm. ICHEOKU says what manner of a person would be making a humor faced with the biggest challenge of our time, when thousands of people have perished and thousands more are afflicted and dying. A misspeak may be, but a sarcasm, hell no. Therefore, going forward, when it comes to matters of life and death or any other thing requiring specific expertise and professional knowledge, the president should beat it and allow the people with requisite knowledge to take the center stage. It is not politics and in that way he would have some people to put the blame on if things goes awry and did not pan out well.
Enough is enough, the president should beat a retreat from the daily briefings but allow Michael Pence and his Taskforce to carry on with it. The Taskforce should be allowed to do what they were constituted to do - work on the coronavirus and brief American people on what they are doing to combat the pandemic through the daily briefings. The president should not because he is being pilloried by the media cancel the daily briefings because it is important for the American people to know what they need to know about the coronavirus. He should just extricate himself from it, period. Mr President should not seize the ball and carry it away just because you fumbled it, he should let the rest of he team carry on with the play. So, Mr President please restore back the daily briefings but without yourself being present. Allow the Taskforce to do their job.
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