Trump Has Not Shifted His Views On The Coronavirus

A couple of times recently, Donald Trump has actually worn a mask, and even said he's not opposed to the public wearing them (even though he still refuses to support a mandate requiring the wearing of masks). Some talking heads in the media are reporting that this marks a change in Trump's view on the Coronavirus epidemic in this country.

It does not! Trump just read the polls and got scared, so he's trying to show a bit softer view. But he hasn't changed. He's incapable of change. That would require he admit he was wrong, and he would never do that. He's just telling more lies to try and make himself look good, and some in the media fell for it (again).

Here's part of how Jennifer Rubin puts it in The Washington Post:

It has happened so many times that one wonders how reporters — like Charlie Brown running up to the football that Lucy snatches away every time — can keep trying to spot President Trump’s “change in tone.” They drag out the nonsensical analysis whenever Trump sounds slightly less paranoid, incoherent and narcissistic than usual.

Last Tuesday, many in the media charged up to the football once more, straining to perceive a change in tone when Trump admitted the coronavirus pandemic will get worse before it gets better and cheering mask-wearing, which he had assiduously mocked for months. (This was the same news conference in which he sent well wishes to accused child-sex-ring conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell.)

A week later, Trump said as he departed for North Carolina that he wouldn’t pay his respects to the late civil rights icon John Lewis. (We hope this finally puts to bed the hogwash about his outreach to African American voters, another trite media trope.) Once in North Carolina, Trump declared: "I really do believe a lot of the governors should be opening up states that they are not opening. And we’ll see what happens with them.” Back to square one — the same deadly advice he has been doling out that contributed to the deaths of 145,000 Americans. . . .

Trump never changes because, as his niece and best-selling author Mary L.Trump has told one interviewer after another, he is incapable of self-reflection, admitting fault and growing as a person. The media’s fetish with “tone” seems to tell us more about the media than Trump. It is part of the mainstream media’s collective determination to avoid spelling out how irrational and impulsive he actually is. (If someone can change tone, he is capable of deliberate reflection and self-control, right?)

Trump never really shifts or changes; he never “grows into the job,” because he is emotionally damaged, his niece — a psychologist — says in her book. “Fred [Trump] destroyed Donald. ... [H]e short-circuited Donald’s ability to develop and experience the entire spectrum of human emotion," she writes. "By limiting Donald’s access to his own feelings and rendering many of them unacceptable, Fred perverted his son’s perception of the world and damaged his ability to live in it.”

We have routinely observed Trump and his Republican enablers trying to gaslight the country by asking us to disregard what is in front of our noses. But the mainstream media engages in its own gaslighting by disingenuously presenting Trump as a rational president. If the media were to let go of the “tone” change routine, it might have to eschew phony balance (“Trump said ‘X.’ Everyone outside the cult said, ‘Not X’”) for a stark and inarguably accurate portrait of a president whose temperament, intellect and character make him entirely unfit for his office and a threat to the republic. The media’s acknowledgment of the frightening reality we have lived with for four years will come, I suspect, only after Trump leaves office.