Press conference

Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg officially indicted Donald Trump on April 4 on thirty-four counts of “falsifying business records in the first degree... with the intent to defraud and intent to commit another crime and aid and conceal the commission thereof.” This makes Trump the first president in US history to be indicted on a criminal charge. Not willing to let any opportunity — however ignominious — go to waste, Trump is already selling t-shirts on his website featuring a digitally-created mugshot with the words “Not Guilty” emblazoned below and the prisoner code "45-47" (get it?). The former president was not required to take an actual mugshot by Bragg's office.

Boris Johnson's favourite phrase since he released his roadmap out of lockdown has been ‘cautious but irreversible’. These are the three words that supposedly describe the UK’s six-month timeline to freedom since it went into lockdown at the start of the year.  But the phrase was notably absent from tonight’s press conference. Instead, the Prime Minister warned that the rise of the Indian variant B1617.2 could pose a ‘serious disruption to our progress, and could make it more difficult to move to step 4 in June.’ The government’s worries, as Johnson laid out tonight, are what he described as ‘important unknowns’. The key question is to what extent the virus is more transmissible than the other variants.

What do you do when you are in an argument with an impossible child who sees you as the enemy? Do you shout at them until you sound as unreasonable? Do you keep going back to them to hash out the key points? No, you do not engage. You walk away and leave them to stew in their own rage. All parents know this. Donald Trump is often called childish; petulant; irascible — in his press conferences, he often is. His pride takes him over and he ends up ranting. He takes the bait and the media revels in it. But what the media can’t accept or understand is that, in the president vs media conference dynamic, it is the journalists who play the role of teenage brat. They goad Trump until he flips, then gloat about how mad he went.