TRUMP IS A TALKER
‘COVID’ briefings a campaign reboot
President Trump’s re-election team says his rebooted nightly coronavirus briefings are the new campaign-trail stump speech — crediting them with a recent surge in his poll numbers.
“We know that every time the president is able to speak directly to the American people, it’s a needle mover,” one senior campaign official told The Post.
“They want to see the president is out front and leading, and they can see that’s exactly what he’s doing,” they added, pointing to the fact that opponent Joe Biden hasn’t been seen outside his Delaware bolthole for weeks.
The freewheeling, hours-long nightly coronavirus briefings introduced at the peak of the pandemic were scrapped in late April after Trump suggested he wished Americans could inject disinfectant as a treatment — a comment he later clarified was a joke.
But with the November election fast approaching and COVID-19 putting an end to traditional campaigning, Trump returned last month to the briefing room podium, where he has been holding more restrained and succinct briefings to update the public on his efforts to combat the pandemic.
His re-election campaign says it’s a winning strategy.
“Our data has long showed that any time the president can speak straight to Americans without the filter and without the news media telling them what he said, if they can see what he said, they respond much more favorably,” the official said.
When asked if the president would continue holding the briefings until the election, the insider said: “It’s up to him. The campaign loves them.”
Trump’s poll numbers dropped after the virus, which has so far killed more than 160,000 Americans, reached US shores in late February, and Biden began pulling away both nationally and in battleground states.
The president’s campaign floundered and held an ill-fated rally in Tulsa, Okla., which generated a string of negative headlines after then-campaign manager Brad Parscale wildly overestimated how many people would attend.
A reset last month saw Parscale demoted and replaced with veteran GOP operative Bill Stepien, who has been credited with bringing a new discipline and energy to the campaign.
“We’ve had a few weeks that I think are really, really strong,” the official said, describing a “game day attitude.”
An average of national polls by RealClearPolitics shows Trump gaining ground on Biden — with the Democratic nominee’s 10 percentage-point lead falling to 6.4 points in recent weeks.
Trump is now polling at 42.7 percent to Biden’s 49.1 percent, an improvement from late June, when that figure was 40.9 to 51.1 percent.