About that presser...

DONALD TRUMP GRINNED broadly on Monday as he tricked the news networks into broadcasting a taxpayer-funded testimonial to his own leadership, in the form of a video highlight reel of presidential statements on the coronavirus crisis, set to stirring music, unveiled during the president’s 29th daily briefing on the pandemic.

[...]

The compilation of clips, selected by the White House social media director, Dan Scavino, attempted to create an alternative history of the first months of the crisis, according to which the American media initially “minimized the risk,” but the president “took decisive action” nonetheless, only to be unfairly maligned by his political opponents, before the nation’s governors came together to sing his praises.

The centerpiece of the video was a timeline of actions by Trump and his administration, highlighting the partial ban on travel from China he ordered on January 31, and his declaration of a national emergency on March 13.

But, as CBS News correspondent Paula Reid pointed out to Trump after the video ended, there was a huge gap in the timeline: It mentioned absolutely no action by him in February and there was, as the Times had noted, a period of “six long weeks” after the travel restrictions until he “finally took aggressive action to confront the danger the nation was facing.”

In fact, the only entry on the video timeline for February — the month Trump held mass campaign rallies and described criticism of his handling of the virus from Democrats as “their new hoax” — was February 6: “CDC Ships First Testing Kits.” The fact that those test kits were defective, a massive failure at a critical moment, seems like an odd thing to brag about.

[...]

Trump looked stunned by Reid’s observation that its timeline showed the period of inaction the Times had described. “The argument is that you bought yourself some time,” by imposing the partial travel ban from China, Reid noted. “You didn’t use it to prepare hospitals, you didn’t use it to ramp up testing.”

As Trump interrupted to denounce her as “so disgraceful,” the correspondent pressed on to ask what, exactly, Americans were supposed to take away from his gauzy video tribute to himself? “Right now nearly 20 million people are unemployed. Tens of thousands of Americans are dead. How is this sizzle reel or this rant supposed to make people feel confident in an unprecedented crisis?”

Trump had no response but to shift back to praising himself for restricting travel from China in January. “But what did you do with the time that you bought?” Reid asked. “The month of February… the video has a gap.”

[...]

The inadvertently revealing timeline was not the only flaw with the propaganda video produced by Scavino, Trump’s former caddie.

  The Intercept

Jesus wept...his caddie.  I had forgotten that about Scavino.

[The] opening montage [...] includes a misleadingly edited clip of Hannity asking Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and presidential adviser, in January if American experts might go to China if the coronavirus outbreak there was worse than expected. In March, Hannity tried to claim that this was proof that he had “warned” of a pandemic. In fact, before that clip was edited, it showed that Hannity had just been asking Fauci about sending American experts to China to “help them out to try to contain this” there. Like Trump, Hannity had spent all of February comparing Covid-19 to the seasonal flu, and by the end of March, he too was backpedalling furiously.

Another bizarre aspect of that sequence is that it ends with Dr. David Agus, a CBS News medical correspondent, stating that “coronavirus is not going to cause a major issue in the United States.”

[...]

The third section of the video — about Trump’s supposedly unfair treatment by political opponents — takes audio of Times correspondent Maggie Haberman out of context to distort its meaning. Haberman was one of six reporters who wrote the article that angered Trump. In an interview with “The Daily” podcast in March, Haberman did call Trump’s order to slow travel from China “a pretty aggressive measure against the spread of the virus,” but the White House edit omitted what she said immediately after that. “The problem is, it was one of the last things that he did for several weeks.”

[...]

Moments later in the video, as Haberman said, “He was accused of making a racist move,” an image of Nancy Pelosi appeared, over a citation to The Hill from January 31. However, as the report in The Hill makes clear, Pelosi had, in fact, been referring to another travel ban issued by Trump that day — “adding Myanmar, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Tanzania and Sudan to the travel ban that the President instituted three years ago” — when she denounced him for imposing “such biased and bigoted restrictions.”

The news conference on Monday, which brought the president’s time in the briefing room in the past month to more than 40 hours, was yet another example of Trump hijacking for his own ends what was previously a news conference dedicated to conveying vital information about a public health emergency.

Hang on a minute. I don't believe it was EVER dedicated to that purpose.

That was made clear at one stage when Trump told reporters that, after watching the video, “Most importantly, we’re going to get back on to the reason we’re here: which is, the success we’re having.”

That's better.