Trump offers new testing proposal and then shifts focus to himself

President Donald Trump couldn't resist the stage -- despite warning he was done with his contentious White House briefings amid the uproar over his musings last Thursday about injecting disinfectant.

So he was back with a new, sweeping promise to revolutionize the testing that America needs to safely open its economy -- though on closer inspection the initiative looked as underwhelming as many previous vows on overhauling the dysfunctional system for diagnosing the coronavirus.


Trump celebrated saving more than a million lives with his "good decisions" and boasted that "there's a hunger for reopening" the nation and it's "happening faster than people would think," while leaving a misleading impression that the virus is all but defeated in the nation's great cities.


"We are deploying the full power of the federal government," Trump said even as he unrolled a plan complete with a glossy power point presentation that falls well short of the level of testing -- several million a day -- that some experts say is needed to keep the pathogen at bay.

While stepping up federal involvement, the blueprint also enshrines ultimate responsibility for testing with states that have struggled to get sufficient test kits, swabs and reagents to perform diagnoses.

That was the "news" of Trump's appearance. Apart from a few brief walk-ons by top public health officials, the rest of his monologue in the fading sunlight of a spring evening was back to the Trump show.
It was not his wildest moment in recent days -- after all he spent the weekend on Twitter tears that included retweeting a baseless conspiracy theory that suggested Trump opponents were inflating the virus' mortality rate to "steal the election."


But it was a lesson -- if one was needed -- that Trump is unlikely to heed the anxiety of friends that his refusal to cede the spotlight in out-of-control appearances at daily coronavirus news conferences was damaging his reelection chances.

Trump's new White House communications team, which reportedly wants to ration his time on television and declared that there would be no briefing on Monday, before reversing itself in embarrassing fashion, might want to bear that in mind.

Trump still thinks the best way to navigate out of the worst domestic crisis since World War II for which his administration has been exposed as unprepared and behind the curve is more Trump.

But his routines of misrepresentation and overly optimistic assessments of the fight against the virus are doing little to build a convincing impression the President can find an exit strategy, or even is capable of keeping the nation heading in the same direction while one -- probably based on an elusive Covid-19 vaccine that is months away -- is found.