Imagine that when you woke up in the morning, you knew that at 5:30 pm you would be in the White House giving a joint press conference with the president of the United States. If it makes it easier to visualize, you don’t have to imagine that the president is Donald Trump. It could be anyone. Now, ask yourself, how much other work do you think you’d get done that day?

Wouldn’t you want to make sure you were prepared for such a high profile and high pressure appearance? Wouldn’t you want to visualize all the questions you might be asked and try to anticipate what the president might want you to say? That kind of stuff takes time and preparation. There are facts and statistics to ascertain. Presumably, there will be a meeting at some point in the afternoon to prep for the press conference, and you need to be ready for that meeting, too.

It’s important that the public gets daily briefings on the Covid-19 outbreak from the White House, but the people doing those briefings shouldn’t be the same folks who are expected to manage the federal response. Trump could do it himself, like several of the governors do, but he isn’t conversant with the facts and needs to rely on others to communicate the actual information. In any case, he’s got his own agenda, which is rarely in tune with what the public health experts want the public to know or believe.

Trump has decided that he can compensate for his inability to hold campaign rallies during a pandemic by appearing at these conferences everyday for two or more hours. Precisely because the subject matter is vitally important, the media are compelled to televise these appearances, and so Trump takes advantage of that and hijacks the proceedings to communicate with his base.

There have been many complaints about this, but few of them have focused on the way it monopolizes the time of Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx. These two doctors should be focused on the crisis rather than spending all their time worried about making appearances with Donald Trump. A competent spokesperson should be found, and that person could be brought up to speed during the afternoon prep meeting.

But that is not going to happen, and even if it did, it wouldn’t solve the problem of Trump utilizing these meetings for purposes that have nothing to do with the public’s health, and that often run the complete opposite direction.