Trying to hold American politicians to account has become 10 times harder in the time of coronavirus

Veteran reporters can feel it coming, the madness that is the frequent deluge of coronavirus news – or what passes for it. There is no lockdown on Washington chaos, especially with Donald Trump in the White House.

Monday and Tuesday this week provided a collective prime example. In short, the president would not stop talking – or tweeting.

First came his two-hour press conference when he doubled down on morning tweets and re-tweets, his first public signs of becoming fed up with the situation. Having based his reelection campaign largely on a strong economy, he was holed up inside the White House as hundreds of thousands of Americans lost their jobs and US stocks lost substantial value.

So Trump did what Trump has done since taking office: he took the wheel and decided to be himself, to follow his instincts. And, to be sure, for a man who once cooked up a fake persona (“John Barron”) to call up New York reporters and plant stories and information about himself as a real estate executive there, that always includes a robust messaging effort.

In fact, robust is putting it mildly.

Once the president is dead-set on an idea, there is nothing very little anyone can do – certainly not his White House staff – to slow him down.

Monday evening’s press conference would not end. Trump blurred the lines of science and logic, and uttered more false statements. He contradicted his own public health experts seconds after they spoke, and even took over the questioning at one point.

Tuesday brought more tweets, then a Fox News town hall from the Rose Garden, during which he joined some on the far right in calling for all or parts of the country and economy to be, as he put it, “open for business.” After filing off that news-filled hour, it was all a reporter could do to grab some lunch to refuel for what was to come: Trump continuing to relish the camera and spotlight.

He had a message to get out to the American people, and anyone who got in his way be damned. By the time he arrived in the White House’s James S Brady Briefing Room just shy of 6pm, the president was doing nothing to hide his mindset.

He confidently announced that he had instructed his administration to “ease the guidelines and open things up to very large sections of our country as we near the end of our historic battle with the invisible enemy.”

This correspondent has been on the Trump beat since before he was elected in November 2016. What came out of his mouth next was jaw-dropping, as the number of US coronavirus cases and deaths continued to climb with projections of many more: “It’s been going a while time, but we win. We win.”

As if such stunning declarations by the 45th president of the United States isn’t enough during this wild and unprecedented time, all other elected officials feel a need to respond to just about every Trump utterance. New York governor Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, is chief among them. But the same goes for other state chief executives and even some big-city mayors.

What results is a daily war of words that makes it hard to keep up, and even harder to do those journalistic basics of checking every statistic and claim or holding all of our elected (and appointed) leaders accountable. That’s intensified by an utter lack of clarity on any piece of guidance from just about any national, state or local official in the so-called “hotspots”. Their proclamations and advice only leave more questions than answers. And there’s no consistency. That goes for Republicans and Democrats.

Though it surely will sound antithetical to what a journalist should say, since elected representatives answering questions is always supposed to be a good thing, this veteran reporter would just like them all to agree to a national day of silence.

Enough. Just for one day.

Enough with the insults and personal shots. Enough with the vague guidelines that are instantly contradicted by tweets and well-meaning-but-confusing documents released by officials’ staff members. Enough with governors chasing Cuomo’s every move, only to water down their enforcement of their half-measures.

Let’s all just breathe and regroup, take a real shot at digesting all the information we’ve been fed through a firing squad of firehoses for weeks. For one day.

Yours,

John T Bennett

Washington bureau chief