NOTE: This article is provided free by Vanity Fair.
The “let Trump be Trump” strategy is flaming out, with the president’s poll numbers dropping amid criticism of his daily grievance fests.
As the number of coronavirus cases in the U.S. skyrockets, and the economy plummets, Donald Trump has continued to use the White House’s daily coronavirus press briefings to boast about how well he believes he’s handling the crisis, and take pot shots at his enemies. This “let Trump be Trump” strategy—the administration’s go-to, considering Trump has fired anyone who might preempt it—was applied to the pandemic just as one of the president’s most trusted aides officially returned to the fold. While Hope Hicks now holds a nebulous White House title, the communications strategy she has crafted for Trump’s emergency messaging is perfectly clear: let him address the nation in his own words while taking the briefing room’s centerstage on a near daily basis.
At first, this proved to be effective. Despite the president’s personal role in downplaying the dangers of the coronavirus, and the White House’s severely delayed mitigation efforts, Trump saw a sizable favorability boost in March. Forty-nine percent of Americans voiced their approval of his leadership at the time, which marked just the second time his presidency has enjoyed such ratings in Gallup’s national survey. But as the pandemic and its economic devastation have dragged on, the president has also used his position to brag about the ratings of his pressers beating out ABC’s The Bachelor and riff about his past sexual encounters with “models.” His approval bump has proved to be temporary, as an April 14 Gallup poll found a six-point drop.
Hicks, who officially works under senior adviser Jared Kushner, no longer holds the communications director title, but has assumed many of her former duties from her current scheduler’s office in the West Wing, according to a Politico report on Monday. Two such duties include engineering the president’s daily talking points amid an ever changing news cycle, and managing his supposedly slam-packed schedule (in a widely ridiculed anonymous statement, a White House official told the New York Post over the weekend that Trump is so busy these days he often has “no time for lunch or there is 10 minutes for lunch.”) But her main function is encouraging Trump to face the cameras and start talking—sometimes off the cuff, other times scripted, but very often a combination of the two. According to Politico, she “urged the president to act as a frontman for the coronavirus crisis,” rather than delegating the task to Mike Pence, his coronavirus task force leader, or to medical professionals. Continue reading.