Trump, coaxed back to the White House briefing room by his tumbling poll numbers and plummeting public confidence in his handling of the pandemic, mostly stuck to an unusually disciplined, scripted message on Tuesday.
He finally endorsed, without reservation, the wearing of masks, weeks after many state, city and local leaders had pleaded with their constituents to adopt the practice to slow the out-of-control spread of the novel coronavirus. And hours before the daily US Covid-19 death toll topped 1,000 for the first time in two weeks, the President warned in an unusually somber and honest assessment that the crisis was likely to get worse before it got better.
But deep into a crisis that has seen nearly 4 million US infections and tens of thousands dead, Trump offered no clear plan to reverse his administration's mistakes or any comprehensive new approach to lead the country out of its worsening viral nightmare -- or even much comprehension of why things got so bad.
There was no new announcement on setting up a nationwide testing and tracing scheme, which experts say is vital to beating the pathogen. Trump laid out no ideas on how to carry out his demands for school openings while stopping virus spikes, beyond vague predictions of vaccines and therapies that he said were coming more quickly than anyone thought.
And Trump, in a striking lack of empathy, made only passing reference to the 141,000 Americans who have died in a pandemic made worse by his denial and neglect as he fashioned the White House response as a triumph.
The notion that Tuesday's exercise was a serious attempt to provide the country with a vital health update and not a panicked effort to stabilize a plunging presidency was undercut by the absence of any top government health officials alongside Trump -- a President who likes to be the star of his own show.
And the idea that he can rebuild his credibility by suddenly reappearing -- after spending weeks ignoring a crisis that he worsened with his demand for premature state openings -- is scarcely credible.
'Whether you like the mask or not, they work'
Health experts could, however, at least take away the fact that Trump made his most full-throated call on Americans to start wearing masks -- after spending weeks undermining such advice and mocking those who did cover up.
"We are asking everybody, when you are not able to socially distance, wear a mask," Trump said. "Whether you like the mask or not, they have an impact."
In the weeks in which Trump has sided with conservatives who portrayed mask wearing as an infringement of American freedoms, hundreds of thousands of Americans have been infected and thousands have died. Had he led the way on masks once health officials decided to recommend their use, he could have saved many of those lives.
The President, departing from his normal sunny predictions of an imminent end to the crisis, did warn that the pandemic will "probably, unfortunately, get worse before it gets better." But
