Despite the coronavirus revealing just who Trump really is, the electorate is still not swaying Biden’s way

John T Bennett, The Independent

Donald Trump did something this week that seemed unthinkable: he got rather boring. Well, almost. As his now nightly coronavirus briefings plodded on, the only excitement came from the reporters in the room. If you studied them closely, you could see the stresses of covering a global pandemic and a reality television president in plain sight.

They asked more pointed questions. They were more willing to interrupt the commander-in-chief, discarding the deference for the office – not its incumbent – that typically hovers over a White House news conference. A few even allowed their exasperation at a Trump claim or blatantly false statement to show as he uttered them, mouths agape and heads shaking in disbelief.

But then, for a few days, Trump came to the briefing room with little to announce. Mostly, he came to fight. More than once in the last two weeks, this correspondent has informed his usually disinterested cat – a mischievous lad who has made a surprisingly solid quarantine mate – “Trump’s got nothin’ tonight”.

The feline would respond with a wide yawn. By minute 45 or so of this week’s White House briefings, I unleashed a few of my own. That changed on Wednesday evening. The Donald was back. In a big way.

Former First Lady Michelle Obama once said this of the US presidency, after watching her husband, Barack Obama, do the job: “Being president doesn’t change who you are, it reveals who you are.”

Here was Trump in peak Trump mode on Wednesday night. “It is estimated it might not come back at all, Jeff. It may not come back at all,” he told Reuters White House correspondent Jeff Mason of the coronavirus.

When Mason asked how the president could be so sure “it won’t come back on a big scale”, Trump responded with another stunning denial of something he had just said. “I didn’t say it’s not,” he said. “I said if it does, it’s not going to come back on anything near what we went through.”

He soon informed journalists, many yelling questions in exasperated tones, that the United States is the “king of testing already” because “there’s no country in the world that’s done more. Not even – not even close.”

Never mind that public health experts say what matters is per capita testing rates. The United States trails Italy almost two-to-one in that category, with around 11,000 tests per million people.

The coronavirus pandemic is revealing just who Donald John Trump is.

Many Americans don’t seem to mind any of this. It’s just Trump being Trump. On paper, the president should be trailing former vice president Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, by double digits.

Some polling data even suggests the president should be trailing Biden big. Let’s go live to six key battleground states: Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. When it comes to the virus outbreak, things look bleak for Trump. The president is underwater among voters in those half-dozen states for his response to the pandemic, with 52 per cent expressing displeasure compared to 48 per cent who approve, according to a poll conducted by Change Research.

Yet, Americans seem willing to look past it all. Trump might really be, as the vice president, Mike Pence, said near a hot mic earlier this year, “unstoppable”.

In those six battleground states, which political experts say will decide November’s election, Trump actually leads the former VP, though his lead is just a single point. Voters in the six key states prefer Trump over Biden 48 per cent to 47 per cent.

That suggests a dead heat in the states that will matter most, spelling trouble for Biden. The president is benefiting from many Americans’ appreciation that he is, as one southern conservative wrote in a Facebook comment this week, “telling it like it is”, and from the incredible power of incumbency.

Meantime, Biden is left to try punching back from his home in Delaware, where he is riding out the COVID-19 outbreak. It’s quite clear to see how Trump can use the bully pulpit of the White House to secure a second term.

But there’s just no precedent for even a popular former vice president taking down an incumbent president from his living room – no matter how nice the lamps and carefully arranged bookshelves look on television.