President Trump today said he will resume giving regular coronavirus briefings this week, reviving a practice that is controversial among some aides as infections surge across the United States.
Trump told reporters in the Oval Office he would deliver a briefing at 5 p.m. tomorrow.
It would mark his first time participating in a coronavirus briefing since late April.
Trump, who fixates on media coverage, hinted that he was motivated to lead the briefings once again in part because of the attention they drew in the early days of the pandemic.
“We had very successful briefings. I was doing them, and we had a lot of people watching. Record numbers watching,” he said. “In the history of cable television — television — there’s never been anything like it.”
Trump enjoyed an initial boost in his poll numbers in the early weeks of the pandemic as voters rallied around him.
But the bump was short lived, and he has seen his approval numbers for his handling of COVID-19 dip over the last three months in particular.
An ABC News/Washington Post poll released Friday showed that 38 percent of respondents approve of Trump’s response to the pandemic, down from 46 percent in late May and from 51 percent in late March, when there were relatively few confirmed cases domestically.
Trump gave daily briefings from the White House through March and April, providing updates on the administration’s response to the pandemic.
But the question-and-answer sessions regularly devolved into Trump bashing governors, sparring with the press and making factually inaccurate statements that undercut the federal government’s overall messaging.
The appearances abruptly ended in late April days after Trump sparked widespread backlash by suggesting scientists study whether the injection of light or disinfectants into the body could be used as a cure for the virus.