Fox News senior political analyst Brit Hume is criticizing President Donald Trump after he boasted about the ratings of his daily coronavirus press briefings. In a “ridiculous tweet” shared Thursday afternoon, the president slammed the Wall Street Journal for a recently-published editorial that failed to mention the ratings of the televised briefings with his White House Coronavirus Task Force.
“This is a ridiculous tweet,” Hume wrote in response. “He could get his views across without bragging, endlessly repeating himself, and getting into petty squabbles with the junior varsity players in the WH press corps. And he could stop talking much sooner to give Pence, Fauci, Birx and Giroir more time.” Mentioning Vice President Pence, coronavirus task force coordinators Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, and Assistant Secretary for Health Brett Giroir, Hume’s tweet came just an hour after Trump’s.
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“The Wall Street Journal always ‘forgets’ to mention that the ratings for the White House Press Briefings are ‘through the roof’ (Monday Night Football, Bachelor Finale, according to [The New York Times] & is only way for me to escape the Fake News & get my views across,” he wrote. “WSJ is Fake News!”
In the editorial piece, titled “Trump’s Wasted Briefings,” the Wall Street Journal wrote that the daily briefings had become “a boring show of the president vs. the press” that had become “more about the many feuds of Donald J. Trump” than the coronavirus pandemic itself. “Sometime in the last three weeks Mr. Trump seems to have concluded that the briefings could be a showcase for him. Perhaps they substitute in his mind for the campaign rallies he can no longer hold because of the risks,” the editorial reads, according to The Hill. “Perhaps he resented the media adulation that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has been receiving for his daily show. Whatever the reason, the briefings are now all about the President.”
“They last for 90 minutes or more, and Mr. Trump dominates the stage,” it adds. “His first-rate health experts have become supporting actors, and sometimes barely that, ushered on stage to answer a technical question or two.”
Beginning with his opening statements and including questions from the press and remarks from the White House Coronavirus Task Force, the daily briefings reportedly draw an average of 8.5 million viewers. In recent weeks, the president has boasted about the ratings, earning plenty of criticism. Still, not everyone is eager to contribute to those numbers, with both CNN and MSNBC recently cutting off this week’s Tuesday briefing early.
