The Washington Post brings us an exceedingly polite look at Donald Trump's "aides and allies" attempting to "refocus the president away from" his batshit insane daily COVID-19 pressers and into some other behavior that would, at the very least, make him look slightly less like the incompetent jackass whose flights of fancy and staggering disinterest continues to derail federal pandemic response efforts.
It's likely to enrage Trump when he sees it, because it is another in a long line of stories describing how Trump's aides try to steer Trump toward the behaviors they want by treating him like the idiot man-child he is. Everybody can agree, privately, that the man suggesting doctors look into maybe injecting people with disinfectants is absolutely an idiot. The latest key-jingling attempt to distract him will be a suggestion that as a Genius Businessman, he should instead be focusing on Genius Businessman stuff. Things he's good at. You know, like picking out decor for our new tent hospitals.
The rift between what every last Republican quoted by name says about Donald Trump and what the ones speaking anonymously tell reporters continues to be comical, insofar as the structures of fascist rule can be comical. In Republican attempts to steer Trump away from publicly pantsing himself on a daily basis, Senate Majority Whip John Thune will only offer that “one of the keys of being a good leader is surrounding yourself with people who have the knowledge and expertise and can kind of talk people through what we’re going through,” which is perhaps the gentlest possible way yet invented to tell a powerful person to shut his piehole every now and then.
On background, though, it is clear that both Trump's White House and Republican leaders elsewhere are engaged in a full-press effort to coax Trump into giving up his daily free-association sessions about the medical side of the pandemic and instead limit himself to economic cheerleading, and that they are doing so because President Tide Pods has been doing such damage to both himself and the Republican brand during an actual, full-fledged worldwide crisis that intervention is needed. Trump believes himself to be a master businessman, so the plan is to move him into speaking primarily about the economy, and the promised economic rebound, and other generic fact-free probably-lying nonsense of the sort that both Trump and his myriad economic "advisers" (looking at you, Kudlow) have turned into their own art form.
It is very easy to run into public trouble when spouting off the cuff about how doctors should maybe look into how to inject ultraviolet light into a person's insides to sterilize their insufficiently sizzling guts. Say the "economy" is about to rebound because you're lubricating the nation's job dispensers with new interest-bearing doodlewonks, though, and nobody will bat an eye. It's about time somebody lubricated our economic doodlewonks, the pundits will nod. Finally, a leader who is proactive.
An anonymous senior official tells the Post that "so far, Trump has been receptive to the new economic emphasis," while others make it clear that everybody knows this could all go to hell again if Trump begins to realize he's being stage-managed. Trump does consider "business" to be his bailiwick, however, so his aides have a decent chance of at least temporarily sidetracking him.
Note, however, that these moves appear to be being taken solely for White House self-preservation. Whether or not Trump's medical advice has been killing people, or his orders to focus on unproven treatments have been wreaking havoc on federal efforts to respond to the pandemic in a more appropriate fashion, doesn't enter into it; the question is whether Trump is politically damaging himself, his campaign, and other Republicans.
It shouldn't be assumed that moving Trump from "medical" briefings to "economic" briefings will get fewer people killed. It likely won't. Trump's push to reopen economies so that he does not face voter wrath for economic damage will absolutely increase U.S. pandemic deaths, if successful, and may threaten hospitals with the untenable patient surges that shelter-in-place orders have in many places succeeded in holding off. The man can do serious damage.
The point is, however, that those deaths will be 1) later, as in not now, and 2) Trump and Republicans cannot, they believe, be as easily blamed for those deaths as they can be for briefings in which Trump suggests patients maybe try lupus medication or experimenting with bleach and see what that does. Republicans nationwide seem to be quite convinced that they will not be blamed for deaths caused by prodding states and counties to lift stay-at-home orders too early; the basis of that confidence remains vague, at best.
