Diversionary Tactics

Shiny Objects:  Yesterday, Trump held a meeting with restaurant industry representatives.  They expressed serious concerns over the dire impact of coronavirus on their businesses, pressing for more time to spend their paycheck protection loans.  Trump’s response: haven’t you heard, there’s nothing to worry about anymore, the pandemic is just about over, a vaccination is around the corner, business will be back to normal shortly. Then with little positive to say about the meeting and wanting to distract from the investigations into Secretary Pompeo that prompted the firing of the State Department Inspector General, he threw out one of his shiny objects during the press conference that followed the restaurant meeting announcing that though he’s sure that he hasn’t been exposed to COVID 19 he’s been prophylactically popping hydroxychloroquine pills for around a week and a half because he’s heard from a number of “doctors” that the drug really works.  That week and half timetable corresponds neatly with when he learned that his valet and COVID Katie, close aide Stephen Miller’s wife, had tested positive for the virus. It’s not clear that he’s really taking hydroxychloroquine, to state the obvious with him it’s hard to tell truth from deceptive distraction, but either way his statement is grossly irresponsible.  First, if he’s taking the drug he’s putting his life in jeopardy as he’s hardly the picture of robust health.  As Speaker Pelosi, not one to mince words, commented last night, he’s “morbidly obese.” Even his fawning doctors admit that he suffers from heart disease, not a good thing when taking a drug that can cause arrythmias. Fox News’ Neil Cavuto was so shocked by Trump’s statement that he warned viewers that "If you are in a risky population here, and you are taking this as a preventative treatment to ward off the virus or in a worst-case scenario you are dealing with the virus, and you are in this vulnerable population, it will kill you. I cannot stress enough: This will kill you."  Trump responded to Cavuto by attacking Fox, saying they’re not the same and that he’s looking for another outlet to watch. On a more serious note, no doubt countless Trump fanatics and even a few normal folks are now flooding the phonelines, demanding that their doctors write them Hydroxy-C prescriptions and lupus and rheumatoid arthritis patients who rely on the pills will now find their prescriptions difficult to fill.  Nothing like leading from the top.  Late yesterday, Trump’s WH physician issued a statement saying that he and Trump had discussed the pros and cons of taking Hydroxy-C, but like everything else out of the Trump White House, the statement was unclear and did not come out and say whether or not Trump was really taking the pills.  We’ll only know,  if he ends up taking another one of those mysterious, emergency trips to Walter Reed.

Cabinet Swipes:  As to Secretary of State Pompeo, he claims that he didn’t know that he was being investigated by Inspector General Linick, he just wanted him fired because he was “undermining” the department and “wasn’t performing” up to snuff.  It turns out that IG Linick wasn’t just investigating whether or not Pompeo was improperly using government staff to walk his dog and pick up his laundry, he was also investigating whether  Pompeo improperly pushed through an $8 billion plus arms sale to Saudi Arabia, one opposed by Congress following the Istanbul murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Trump’s view on all this is that he has the right to fire all of the inspectors general at any time, especially if they are Obama holdovers and that he may just fire the rest of the lot, so there!  None of this is sitting well with Senator Chuck Grassley, the patron saint of IGs, who wrote one of his lukewarm letters demanding an explanation but since that’s probably as far as he’ll go, Trump will get his way.  On the Obama front, despite Trump’s continued assertion that former President Obama and current opponent/former VP Biden should be investigated for their “illegal” activities, that Obamagate nonsense, last week and probably next week’s shiny object, Attorney General Barr said that he doesn’t expect the investigation being undertaken by US Attorney General John Durham, that’s still another investigation into the origins of the Russia investigation, to lead to a criminal investigation of either Obama or Biden;   a kind of snide way of saying that there’s nothing there and that spinning something out of nothing is harder than he thought it would be.  In any case, don’t be too impressed with Barr or his assertion that he doesn’t want to see the Justice department “politicized” because we all know that he has been politicizing the department and it remains highly likely that he will drop a bomb of some sort later in the election cycle because even if Durham fails to come up with anything substantive he’ll spin those conclusions into something.

Et Cetera:  War appears to have broken out in the administration.  On Sunday, Trump’s trade advisor Peter Navarro attacked the CDC, noting that the agency’s virus test development screw-up had delayed the administration’s efforts to get a comprehensive testing system up and running, that’s the testing system that Trump brags about while insisting that tests are so unnecessary.  Yesterday, the CDC pushed back pointing out that an attack on CDC head Redfield is an attack on Trump since he’s a Trump appointee. While the CDC has been underperforming and Redfield is not all that competent, that’s kind of the story of the whole Trump administration so it’s fair to assume that the infighting is Trump sanctioned, just another shiny object.  Similarly, Trump is continuing his war on the World Health Organization.  He rejected an invitation to speak at their virtual conference.  Notably Chinese President Xi accepted his invitation and did speak.  Trump is now threatening to permanently cut funding if WHO doesn’t clean up its “pro Chinese” stance immediately, another destructive act that will limit our ability to influence anything coming out of WHO while also diminishing our world standing.  That’s not to say that WHO didn’t screw up, they did, but Trump had enough information to know that the pandemic was coming he is just engaging in more blaming, shaming and distracting.  Now getting to the vaccination front, yesterday the stock market shot up on the good news that pharma company Moderna’s mRNA vaccination is generating anti-bodies in human participants in a relatively small Phase 1 trial.  That’s really good news, however the trial was small and Moderna’s mRNA technology is new, to date there have been no RNA vaccines approved for human use, so the enthusiasm may be premature.  In any case, assuming things continue on this trajectory and let’s hope they do, there still won’t be a vaccination until next year. So take a deep breath we are far from out of the woods.