CNN’s Dana Bash on Trump’s Coronavirus Tone Shift: One Reason Is He’s ‘Had Less Time to Consume Conservative Media’

CNN’s Dana Bash attributed President Donald Trump’s noticeably changed and more somber tone about the coronavirus outbreak to his having less time to indulge in his typical news diet of conservative media and talk with his circle of personal friends.

Speaking with anchor Wolf Blitzer, Bash followed up on her earlier comments praising Trump for showing more leadership and adopting a very different public attitude about a deadly pandemic that he had dismissed for much of the winter.

“The president, his tone has dramatically changed,” Blitzer noted. “Today, he spoke of ‘a war that the U.S. has to win.’ What do you make, first of all, of his news conference earlier today and the words he uttered?”

“Very, very different. There’s no question that this is a different president in every single way, how he’s communicating and how the administration is responding than just a couple of days ago,” Bash noted. “One of the things I was interested in, obviously is why. What happened behind the scenes? A couple of sources who are familiar with the answer to that who say that — one of the things that is most interesting I’ve heard is he has had less time to consume conservative media. He’s had less time to talk to people who used to call him or typically call him all the time and say, you know, things like, in this situation: ‘Oh, this is no big deal. I went to people’s funerals who had the flu. What’s the big deal?’ His focus has been in these task forces, around people like the people we have seen at the podium every single day giving him actual data as the data have finally started to come in. That, combined with the reality of the test numbers going up, of the dire situation, has really changed the way he’s approaching this. Let’s see how long it lasts.”

Mediaite has documented the widespread skepticism and, at times, outright mockery, of the coronavirus outbreak that major pundits across the right-wing media ecosystem pushed for months. This cavalier narrative routinely implied Democrats and the media were intentionally hyping the outbreak to attack Trump, and ended up both feeding and echoing Trump’s many outlandishly sunny predictions and obviously false claims that he deployed to play down the threat to public health from COVID-19.

“Are we on the verge of some badly needed bipartisan cooperation up on Capitol Hill in the White House?” Blitzer asked commentator Kirsten Powers, who alluded to this Trump-right-wing media feedback loop for having hamstrung the country’s testing and other responses to the pandemic.

” I mean I hope so. I think so. I don’t think the problem has necessarily been the lack of bipartisanship,” Power explained. “I think the problem has been how the president has been handling it. In the past, we always were talk about how he misleads people and says things that aren’t true. It’s finally caught up with him is what’s happened. You can’t keep convincing people that things are going well when you’re having one of the worst days on the stock market in the history of the country. You can’t convince people there’s not a problem when people are contracting this illness and dying all over the world and including in the United States.”

Watch the video above, via CNN.

from Mediaite https://ift.tt/3da02jN