The president is slowly but surely headed for obscurity
Joe Biden won the battle for airwaves this week when the pair held competing press briefings, says Dave Maclean
There was a moment on Tuesday when Joe Biden and Donald Trump held dueling press conferences about coronavirus and the vaccine: the president trumpeting Operation Warp Speed’s success, and the president-elect laying out the plan for his first 100 days.
It left TV channels and networks with a decision: who to air. In the end, Biden was featured on six screens — including major outlets like ABC News, CBS, and CNN. Trump, meanwhile, made it onto five – if you included OANN and Newsmax. It felt like a telling moment: Donald Trump is slowly, but surely, fading from the public conversation.
Towards the end of the election campaign, there was a Biden campaign commercial which struck a chord. In it, a black circle outline moved like a mouth, over which Donald Trump’s mangled claims about climate change were played. It ended with a pen coming into shot and filling in the circle – the space was on a ballot paper. The message at the end was simple: “Silence him.”
That process is now well underway.
During Tuesday’s press conferences, we had one reporter assigned to each news conference. Joe Biden’s blueprint for the first few months of 2021 was published as a breaking news story, because what he says will affect our lives imminently. Biden’s remarks were featured higher on our US homepage. Mr Trump’s utterances – for the first time in years – are no longer guaranteed top billing.
His comments, as president, will still be consistently covered through to 20 January. He is, after all, still the leader of the most powerful country on Earth. But his stock immediately plummets from midday onwards on that date, when he returns to being a private citizen.He’ll flail and rail against imagined forces who cheated him out of the election, amping up the shock value a la Katie Hopkins in increasingly desperate gasps for attention.
The novelty, even in a media landscape buoyed by Trump clicks for four years, will likely soon wear off. He’ll flail and rail against imagined forces who cheated him out of the election, amping up the shock value a la Katie Hopkins in increasingly desperate gasps for attention.The novelty, even in a media landscape buoyed by Trump clicks for four years, will likely soon wear off.
Yours,
Dave Maclean
US features editor