The new era of briefings began with a series of concessions that would have been unthinkable earlier in the month. It’s almost as if someone handed the president his own folder labeled Things Trump Will Never Say and forced him to recite them anyway. The pandemic, he said, “will probably, unfortunately, get worse before it gets better.” This was “something I don’t like saying about things,” he added, which isn’t true at all: The president takes undeniable relish in limning the disasters that await the country should it be swinish enough not to reelect him. No one thinks of Donald “American Carnage” Trump as President Pollyanna. What he means is he dislikes speaking negatively on matters that he is personally involved in, and predicting bad news about the virus implicates him in the bad news. This was a first.

At one briefing last week he showed a chart of “different statistics and different rates of success and, I guess you could say also, things that we can do better on.” Until that moment in the Trump presidency, the category of “things we can do better on” did not exist; ontologically, such things were akin to heffalumps and jackalopes. He acknowledged that the $600 in supplemental unemployment insurance enacted earlier this year “worked out well” even though “I was against that original decision”—an admission that veered close to saying he’d once committed an error in judgment. After threatening earlier in the month to cut off federal aid to schools that failed to provide in-class teaching this fall, he conceded that school districts “may need to delay reopening,” depending on the local advance of the virus. He even seemed to second-guess his dearest indulgence. Asked by one interviewer whether he ever regretted his tweeting, he replied, “Often. Too often.”