As the U.S. death toll from the novel coronavirus nears 56,000, President Donald Trump is reportedly less concerned with how many Americans have perished and is instead “tormented” by the way the pandemic has tanked his poll numbers, according to CNN correspondent John Harwood.
Harwood noted that Trump’s lashing out on Twitter all weekend against the media — including Fox News — is due to the president’s frustration with the COVID-19 tragedy and his inability to change the narrative:
“What’s going on is you have a president tormented by how bad this is going. Remember, he is stuck on the idea that, just a couple of months ago, he was running for re-election with this robust economy. All that has been blown out of the water. You’ve got a public health catastrophe, an economic catastrophe, and look what happened to his poll numbers over the last couple of months.”
Indeed, Trump’s poll numbers have indeed been falling precipitously in recent weeks, with some showing him behind presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden in key battleground states such as Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Those polls, combined with patently absurd musings from Trump last week that COVID-19 might be cured by injecting disinfectants into the human body or using ultraviolet light to kill the virus, have left the president isolated and feeling under siege, according to some reports.
All of this, Harwood concluded, has left Trump in a precarious position:
“We’ve seen that he harmed himself by saying things that don’t make any sense, like he did last week… that performance on disinfectant last week has almost made it toxic for him to talk about the virus itself.”
Over the weekend, Trump tweeted out that he likely wouldn’t participate in the daily Coronavirus Task Force press briefings, proclaiming they simply aren’t “worth the & effort!”:
What is the purpose of having White House News Conferences when the Lamestream Media asks nothing but hostile questions, & then refuses to report the truth or facts accurately. They get record ratings, & the American people get nothing but Fake News. Not worth the time & effort!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 25, 2020
No matter what he does, it appears that the pandemic may have wrecked the one thing the president was planning to run on for a second term — the economy — and left a majority of Americans wondering if the incumbent needs to be replaced.
Featured Image Via NBC News
