Did you hear? The president said some things today. Mean things! About someone I know … I can’t quite remember the details, or whether it was today or yesterday, or what day of the week it is, anyway.

President Trump has figured out the answer to one of the less important questions of 2020: How do you run a presidential campaign amid a pandemic? He can’t hold rallies, he can’t kiss babies, he can’t shake hands, not that he likes doing that anyway. And he can’t talk about anything else.

What Mr. Trump can do, it turns out, is host rolling, raucous, two-plus-hour daily television variety shows to keep his connection with the faithful and, incidentally, to variously entertain and appall the rest of the homebound American public. He can rally gun owners in Virginia as well as angry suburbanites in Michigan. He can attack the news media to make sure it’s paying attention.

This is it — the corona campaign. The most effective form of direct presidential communication since Franklin Roosevelt’s fireside chats. Mr. Trump wanted to start a radio show, my colleague Elaina Plott reported, but really, television was the medium that made him and the one he knows and loves. Get used to it, because given its power, he’s not going to stop in November, win or lose. He’ll most likely broadcast on his favorite medium until the day he dies.

So how do we, citizens and — to stick to my particular beat here at The Times —  journalists, handle this?

We keep it in perspective. The briefings are important; Mr. Trump is important. But the big story — of this year, of this decade — is the coronavirus. That isn’t a story about Mr. Trump, and there’s no reason to cover it that way.

It’s not a story about Mr. Trump for a number of reasons.

First, because this is, above all, a public health story. The most important voices are the experts who have some grasp on our situation — like the 20 professionals working in public health, medicine, epidemiology and history whom Donald G. McNeil Jr. spoke to last week. You can follow those voices on Twitter — here’s a good list — or, increasingly, watch them on cable news channels that have had to bench their talking heads for physicians. Dr. Anthony Fauci remains one of the most trusted figures in America for a reason.

Second, because it’s a global story. Mr. Trump is one of dozens of national leaders who are trying to find their way through this crisis. The best practices have not, so far, been developed in the United States. The breakthroughs, so far, have not been American. State and federal leaders are scrambling to imitate South Korean and German practices. Everyone, everywhere, is hoping that someone, somewhere, develops a vaccine. And whenever that happens, the highest costs will not be paid here, but in slums in poorer countries.

And finally, because most of the issues we face — of science and medicine; of economics; of federal, state and local planning; and of individual and business decisions — don’t revolve around Mr. Trump. In the absence of a strong federal and functional central government, the U.S. response adds up to thousands of different players and to millions of citizens listening to hundreds of voices, of which Mr. Trump is one. The president has shown no patience for complexity, and so we have the briefings — a corona campaign that largely spins and pantomimes a response rather than carrying one out.

You can cover both stories — the central health story and the important political story —  without conflating them.

Journalists can, and increasingly do, act on the realization that the public health story isn’t about Mr. Trump. Peter Hamby’s recent Vanity Fair/Snapchat interview with Dr. Fauci asked the good doctor about Tinder and baseball, refreshingly, instead of Mr. Trump. Dr. Ashish Jha of Harvard, a straight-shooter who complained to me a few weeks ago that interviewers on Fox and CNN were constantly trying to drag him into scoring points, said he had felt the partisan pressure eased in more recent cable news appearances.

“I don’t know that I’ve felt that same pull in the last couple of weeks,” he told me on Saturday. “Maybe producers have figured out that it’s not the most useful angle right now.”

The political story matters, too — and it’s possible to separate it, to a degree, from coverage of what is happening. In a political sense, the buck stops with Mr. Trump — the theme of an important Times story that seemed to be part of what had set him off against this publication on Saturday, as well as damning investigations in The Washington Post and elsewhere. Mr. Trump will be judged in November on how he led America through the crisis, and how many lives the slow American response will cost. Political journalists are, and should be, looking hard at Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign — the strategy of his apparatus, and his preference for improvisational live performance. They’re looking, too, at Joe Biden trying to counter the president.

They should cover the campaign from the briefing room as well as the tweets — but they should cover them as what they are, a political campaign, not as a central part of the public health response except to the degree that it occasionally derails that response.

I don’t intend to reopen the tiresome debate over whether news organizations should broadcast Mr. Trump’s remarks. The only people really debating this are the outlets for whom it doesn’t really matter, unless you’re big on symbolism. How many listeners to Seattle’s NPR affiliate are proud red hat wearers? And who thinks that the outlets for whom it would matter — Fox News, most of all — are even considering it? The whole debate seemed rooted in the idea that if only your favored news outlet didn’t live stream the president, he would just go away.

But if the cable networks want an alternative to the briefings, they can get out of the studio and back to what first made TV news so powerful — not fact-checking, but emotionally powerful imagery of human suffering.

During Katrina, for instance, “the power of CNN was having an army of cameras and correspondents all over the Gulf, showing the brutal human and economic toll split-screened against the anemic assurances of the Bush administration,” Mr. Hamby, a former CNN staff member, recalled. “It was crippling.”

Of course, the briefings are also, as Ryan Lizza wrote in Politico on Thursday, revealing, and if you still want to know what Mr. Trump is like, watch them. Mr. Lizza also noticed that the way to get Mr. Trump to call on you was to ignore Drs. Birx and Fauci when they were speaking, and to stare at the president instead. But that’s Mr. Lizza’s job; it doesn’t have to be yours.

And when the history of this era’s politics is compiled in some delightful future V.R. medium, they will obviously be the centerpiece, along with a speeding Twitter timeline that makes it seem even more anxiety provoking. He is, like it or not, the president; his citizens can see and judge him.

So why was Mr. Trump mad at The Times’s Maggie Haberman today? It’s actually a great story, a political story that is not centrally about Mr. Trump. It’s about his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, who is finding the challenges of this moment so severe that he’s been crying in the West Wing. Who can’t identify with that? Give it a read.