On air, CNN’s Kate Bolduan said the death toll presser marked “a shift in [Trump’s] tone,” while MSNBC anchor Brian Williams said of the president’s comments, “For his part—and this gets to the tone and demeanor change—Trump warned that the next two weeks would be tough,” before also noting the president “veered off into other topics, including what sounded like a bit of revisionist history.”
This latest round of coverage in the changed Trump genre was met with a levy of criticism from journalists and Democratic figures alike. “When I advocate for basic human rights, people will dismiss the substance of what I say due to my ‘tone,’” tweeted Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in response to Politico’s Sherman. “But if you’re Trump, some of those same folks will cite ‘tone’ to minimize his reckless flu comparisons, science denial, and lagging response costing 1000s of lives. Wild.” MSNBC host Chris Hayes sarcastically wrote it all off, tweeting, “Wait: Trump said a thing today and had a new tone!?! Fantastic. I’m sure it will last!” Daily Beast political editor and MSNBC contributor Sam Stein acknowledged “Trump’s tone is different today. But are we all forgetting that he had a two day stretch where he was super somber before declaring that he wanted the country to reopen by Easter?” Stein added that he’ll be ready to cover Trump’s “new tone when he acknowledges how wrong his old tone was.” Ben Rhodes, a former Barack Obama adviser, suggested that coverage of Trump’s actions are far more important than his verbal demeanor: “I wish Trump’s tone would provide sufficient tests, ventilators, and other life saving equipment that should have been adequately distributed weeks ago.”
During Wednesday’s Morning Joe, MSNBC’s Willie Geist flashed back to the president’s previous short-lived attempts at a somber tone, saying, “We’ve learned, and I think the public has learned, over the last couple of years to be wary of a perceived pivot or change in tone. What looks like a change in tone of one moment is a series of tweets the next moment and he’s pivoted back to where he was.”
While Trump did use podium time to emphasize the seriousness of the pandemic, and even contradicted past comments by assuring the public that “it’s not the flu. It is vicious,” he also made sure to include shots at his usual political targets, like Cuomo, whom he accused of “complaining” about his state’s lack of ventilators. “The problem is with some people, no matter what you give, it’s never enough,” he said. “It’s never enough.” Despite addressing the nation amid a pandemic, the president made sure to air out his past grievances against former FBI officials Andrew McCabe and James Comey—who were both name-dropped while he asked reporters to read their 2016 report on Russian interference to “see how horrible it was”—and Democratic lawmakers, of which he claimed, “Their whole existence was to try and get me out of office any way they can.”
