NYT columnist complains Biden should get briefing airtime like Trump. She forgot he already tried that — and failed miserably.

An opinion writer for the New York Times complained Thursday that President Donald Trump's daily briefings are equivalent to campaign events and therefore suggested that presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden should be entitled to the same campaign airtime.

In her op-ed, titled, "If We're Giving Trump a Show, We Should Give Biden One, Too," Times columnist Jennifer Senior argued that the president is hitting the virtual campaign trail every night through his coronavirus task force briefings — and lamented that he is receiving free media exposure while doing it.

Let's drop all pretenses, shall we? The president has decided he's had enough of running the country and is running full time for re-election instead.

Trump's nightly news conferences, propaganda from the very beginning, are now aimed almost entirely at his base. They are campaign events. And if they are campaign events, the cable news outlets, which still carry the bulk of them live, ought to balance their programming. They ought to check in with the Joe Biden camp before, during and after each one.

There ought to be an army of Biden surrogates waiting to speak. Biden himself ought to be ready to speak: about reopening society in a rational, sane way that involves population-level testing and risk stratification, never forgetting to remind everyone we're here because Trump ignored reality. Biden ought to be hosting live, regular conversations with his brain trust, past and future.

She noted that Biden would be especially fit for such a task given his "cruel and unwelcome body of expertise in coping with grief" and ability to connect with people on an emotional level.

Did she forget Biden already tried this?

Never mind the fact that cable news outlets are not required to cover presidential candidates equally, Senior also appears to have forgotten that Biden has attempted exactly the sort of thing that she is suggesting — only to fail miserably at it.

The former vice president announced in late March that he would conduct regular "shadow briefings" of his own from his Delaware home to counteract Trump's coronavirus briefings. But the endeavor go off to a shaky start and has failed to recover.

From there, the campaign tried to change things up. They ran a virtual happy hour to cater to young voters, but that didn't take, either. The happy hour drew a measly simultaneous viewership of 2,800 and ended up disabling the comment feature midway through the event.

Over the last several weeks, Biden's briefings and TV appearances have been irregular and clunky, his message often overshadowed by frequent gaffes and incoherent speech.

It's unclear whether Senior is truly unaware of Biden's attempts at garnering the national spotlight through virtual briefings or if she has purposefully tried to forget the fact.

Either way, she is not alone. A recent NBC News poll found that almost half of people surveyed were not even aware that Biden had been weighing in on the coronavirus pandemic.