Coronavirus has revealed just who Trump really is. So why is Biden still in trouble?

Polls show that the former VP and the current president are polling just one percentage point apart in six key battleground states

Donald Trump did something this week that seemed unthinkable: he got rather boring. Well, almost.

As his now nightly coronavirus briefings plodded on, the only excitement came from the reporters in the room. If you studied them closely, you could see the stresses of covering a global pandemic and a reality television president in plain sight.

They asked more pointed questions. They were more willing to interrupt the commander-in-chief, discarding the deference for the office – not its incumbent – that typically hovers over a White House news conference. A few even allowed their exasperation at a Trump claim or blatantly false statement to show as he uttered them, mouths agape and heads shaking in disbelief.

But then, for a few days, Trump came to the briefing room with little to announce. Mostly, he came to fight. More than once in the last two weeks, this correspondent has informed his usually disinterested cat – a mischievous lad who has made a surprisingly solid quarantine mate – “Trump’s got nothin’ tonight”.

The feline would respond with a wide yawn. By minute 45 or so of this week’s White House briefings, I unleashed a few of my own.

That changed on Wednesday evening. The Donald was back. In a big way.

Former First Lady Michelle Obama once said this of the US presidency, after watching her husband, Barack Obama, do the job: “Being president doesn’t change who you are, it reveals who you are.”

Here was Trump in peak Trump mode on Wednesday night.

“It is estimated it might not come back at all, Jeff. It may not come back at all,” he told Reuters White House correspondent Jeff Mason of the coronavirus.

When Mason asked how the president could be so sure “it won’t come back on a big scale”, Trump responded with another stunning denial of something he had just said.

“I didn’t say it’s not,” he said. “I said if it does, it’s not going to come back on anything near what we went through.”

Later, he told a female reporter she could ask a question but under these terms: “Nice, just nice and easy. Just, good.”

He soon informed journalists, many yelling questions in exasperated tones, that the United States is the “king of testing already” because “there’s no country in the world that’s done more. Not even – not even close.”

Never mind that public health experts say what matters is per capita testing rates. The United States trails Italy almost two-to-one in that category, with around 11,000 tests per million people.

Then there was this Trumpian classic, as the president returned to his fired-up persona after seeming flat for much of the week.

“The headline in the Washington Post was totally inaccurate. The statement wasn’t bad in the Post, but the headline was ridiculous, which is, as I say, that’s fake news,” he roared with reddening cheeks, before slipping a rhetorical jab a few seats over in the socially distanced James S Brady Briefing Room: “And CNN is fake news like crazy – and they had just totally the wrong story, which they knew.”

Did they? Who knows.

The coronavirus pandemic is revealing just who Donald John Trump is.

The nightly press conferences have turned loose his every instinct to fight, stretch the truth, utter false statement after false statement, try to rewrite history. They also have dragged into public view his politically selfish tendencies, like insisting on having things both ways; of being for controversial issues – but also against them.

After all, that allows supporters and so-called “establishment Republicans” to pick their rationale for – despite it all, despite nearly 50,000 dead Americans from Covid-19 and economic damage likely for decades – voting for him again.

Many Americans don’t seem to mind any of this. It’s just Trump being Trump. On paper, the president should be trailing former vice president Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, by double digits.

A pandemic outbreak that might have been avoided had Trump not brushed aside warnings. Tens of millions of Americans now out of work. A locked down country. A stumbling economy. A federal government shovelling dump truck-sized dollar amounts onto the national debt via three massive coronavirus relief bills – with more expected. And a president willing to criticise the Chinese government over its handling of the disease going public there, but seemingly afraid to utter the word “China” when doing so.

Some polling data even suggests the president should be trailing Biden big. Let’s go live to six key battleground states: Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. When it comes to the virus outbreak, things look bleak for Trump.

The president is underwater among voters in those half-dozen states for his response to the pandemic, with 52 per cent expressing displeasure compared to 48 per cent who approve, according to a poll conducted by Change Research.

Yet, Americans seem willing to look past it all. Trump might really be, as the vice president, Mike Pence, said near a hot mic earlier this year, “unstoppable”.

In those six battleground states, which political experts say will decide November’s election, Trump actually leads the former VP, though his lead is just a single point. Voters in the six key states prefer Trump over Biden 48 per cent to 47 per cent.

That suggests a dead heat in the states that will matter most, spelling trouble for Biden. The president is benefiting from many Americans’ appreciation that he is, as one southern conservative wrote in a Facebook comment this week, “telling it like it is”, and from the incredible power of incumbency.

More trouble for Biden: though the briefings drive Democrats and the media mad, Trump is getting from them what he needs – two hours to deliver subtle and not-at-all-subtle messages to voters in light blue and red counties from Pennsylvania to Michigan to Wisconsin and across the other swing states.

“We were attacked. This was an attack,” Trump said sternly Wednesday evening. “We have the greatest economy, and we built it in the last three years, three-and-a-half years, we built it … The greatest ever in history and we had to close it. Now we’re going to open it again, and we’re going to be just as strong or stronger.”

Meantime, Biden is left to try punching back from his home in Delaware, where he is riding out the Covid-19 outbreak. It’s quite clear to see how Trump can use the bully pulpit of the White House to secure a second term.

But there’s just no precedent for even a popular former vice president taking down an incumbent president from his living room – no matter how nice the lamps and carefully arranged bookshelves look on television.