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President Donald Trump in the White House press briefing room on Friday.

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There is nothing Donald Trump loves more than a rally. Its where he gets to hear hordes of people screaming his name in ecstasy, where he gets to call for the downfall of his enemies, and where he gets to talk, uninterrupted, for hours at a time about any passing thought he chooses. He loves his rallies so much hes done 96 of them since being elected president. The rally is perhaps the only place Donald Trump is truly happy. Or at least, it was.

In mid-March, however, with the coronavirus spreading ever more rapidly, Trump reluctantly announced that hed be canceling his campaign rallies for the foreseeable future, depriving himself of the closest thing our president has to a sanctuary. To make matters worse, Trumps sole source of self-soothing was being ripped from him by the thing he hates more than anything: his job. The country was being ravaged by a pandemic that he was in charge of containing, and a failure to do so could be catastrophic to his reelection chances.

Trumps second instincthis first instinct having been to pretend the outbreak wasnt happening and to tell people the virus would go awaywas to find someone else to take responsibility. And so, just as things were beginning to get too bad to ignore, Trump appointed Mike Pence to lead the White House Coronavirus Task Force.

Not only would his vice president happily obey orders, but any blame for the administrations response efforts could easily be offloaded on Pence and away from Trump. As NBC reported, Trump thought being the public face of the daily White House briefings on the pandemic would come with an onslaught of criticism, people familiar with the matter said.

Then Trump saw how much attention the vice president was receiving, and he decided to start regularly leading the televised daily updates himself. Since March 9, Trump has held 27 coronavirus task force briefings.

And, at least according to any metric Trump cares about, its paying off. Every day he gets to fill airtime across multiple networks, find new reasons to stoke outrage at the national media among his base, and receive some of the best coverage of his presidency. There is nothing a talking head loves more than a president looking stern-faced in a crisis, and Trump has been more than happy to oblige.

Trump at the coronavirus briefing on Monday.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

In a recent article titled Trump Literally Laughed at How He Can Game the Press With His New Tone, the Daily Beast reported that Trumps somber pivot was very much by design:

And over the past three years, the president has periodically remarkedsometimes with a self-aware chuckle or smirkabout how easy it is for him to trigger praise from a typically adversarial press simply by acting nice during a particularly weighty moment.

Its so easy, can you believe it? the president said during a dinner at the White House in early 2017, according to a source who was in the room at the time. All I had to do was be a little nice and do something beautiful [and now theyre] saying all these terrific things about Trump.

Its certainly been paying off. In one CNN segment from mid-March, Dana Bash had nothing but praise for the president.

From the clip:

If you look at the big picture, this was remarkable from the president of the United States. This is a nonpartisanthis is an important thing to note and to applaud from an American standpoint and from a human standpoint. He is being the kind of leader that people need at least in tone today and yesterday, in tone that people need and want and yearned for in times of crisis and uncertainty.

Just a week before, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had stopped holding its own coronavirus briefings because the White Houses task force kept elbowing in to hold their own last-minute pressers. These, led by a failed meat salesman and a man who allowed Indianas HIV crisis to flourish, were naturally given precedence.

While Trump allows medical professionals and other featured players to participate on a rotating basis, everyone knows that Trump is the star. He leads the briefings, he fields the questions (even going so far as to prevent Anthony Fauci from providing answers that might embarrass him), and he gets the praise he craves. While he may be delighted to receive positive, or even respectfully mixed, reviews from the same reporters he publicly excoriates, hes also managed to turn the events themselves into a daily worship session.

By now, everyone knows that the best way and perhaps only way to get Trumps cooperation is to slather him in praise. The sincerity of the compliment makes no difference; all that matters is that its effusive. Three years in, the few government officials who remain are happy to obligeand with millions of lives hanging in the balance, even would-be independent public health experts will do whatever it takes to keep the president from derailing their efforts in a burst of pique.

The result is a daily ritual where, quite literally, the first priority of all the pandemic responders is the boosting of the presidents ego. In poring over Trumps briefings from the past month for the fits of sycophancy anyone who wishes to speak seems required to perform, I found myself with nearly an hour of pure bootlicking. To spare you at least some of the secondhand embarrassment, I trimmed it down to just over three minutes:

Occasionally, truly critical information will be sandwiched between calls to recognize Trump as the one true king. Often, though, each days dose of meaningful new information or policy could have been tossed out in a press release. None of that affects the length or pacing of the show, though, because more than anything these briefings exist simply to fill that cavernous void in Trumps soul where his rallies used to go.

He often speaks for over an hour, rambling his way through a stream of consciousness in the sort of stand-up comedy cadence his rallygoers know and love. Hell take questions from Jim Acosta, giving him an opportunity for some performative media-bashing in the moment and some Twitter material for later. Hell listen to officials prostrate themselves, visibly basking in the warm glow of their stilted praise.

Its not all fun, of course. As much as his media bashing is a performance, he also genuinely despises being questionedespecially when the questions are about unpleasant concrete facts such as the countrys inability to test for the disease as he promised it would, or the chronic failure to deliver masks, ventilators, and other critical gear. Hell often have a tantrum or two, occasionally storming out if things get really bad. For the most part, though, this is the best part of Trumps day.

Meanwhile, Pence, the actual head of the task force, is little more than an afterthought. In a randomly chosen period of seven episodes, Donald Trump overwhelmed his chosen coronavirus leader in speaking time:

Slate

I chose not to include the time Trump spent leaning in to interrupt someone elses podium time, because it felt cruel.

Mike Pence, for his part, knows perfectly well what this is. Over the course of Trumps presidency, Mike Pence has been more than happy to do his bosss bidding, often humiliating himself in the process. And he knows that if he wants to keep his spot in the presidents good graces, he has to perform subservience to an astonishing degree.

If you watch the briefings back to back, one of the things that most stands out is Pences constant crediting of Trump. He refuses to even so much as begin to intimate that he himself might have had some say in anything thats happening related to the task force he leads. Over the course of the week I surveyed, Pence said some variation of as the president said or as the president likes to say or at the presidents direction no less than 38 times in his less than an hour of speaking time.

In fact, Mike Pences brief moments in the spotlight seem to be almost exclusively for the purpose of reminding everyone that hes little more than a go-between. He discusses the task force now and then, but everything eventually always comes back to Trump.

During that same period of seven days, Pences references to Trump beat references to the coronavirus currently ravaging the country at a ratio of roughly 5 to 3.

Slate

Still, despite these displays being largely for and about Trump, people are desperate for information and will continue to tune in. Its the largest, most captive audience Trump has ever had. He may lack the immediate feedback loop of a rally, but hes found a more than adequate replacement in the daily parade of government officials describing the various ways in which theyd die for him. The daily presser has largely stopped being even remotely useful, but like his rallies, now that he has it, its hard to see why hed ever give it up.

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Trump Is the Star of the Coronavirus Show, and Hes Loving Every Minute of It - Slate