On Tuesday night, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro—whom Donald Trump affectionately calls “my Peter”—decided to dump gasoline on a smoldering fire when he sent USA Today a statement that it published as an op-ed in which he slammed Dr. Anthony Fauci for standing in the way of “the president’s courageous decision” making on the COVID-19 pandemic.
Wait. He calls him “my Peter”? Lol…
Having just downplayed the significance of anti-Fauci talking points that they themselves had sent to media outlets, members of the White House press office were left, once again, to repair the residual damage, insisting that the USA Today opinion piece didn’t go through the “normal White House clearance processes.”
But the fact that Navarro didn’t get official clearance for his statement was largely an irrelevant point. After all, he didn’t need it. According to three individuals familiar with the matter, in the past few months Trump has privately encouraged multiple senior officials and allies, including Navarro, to remind journalists and the American public of how Fauci has been “so wrong”—in the president’s phrasing—in some of his predictions about the coronavirus pandemic.
Navarro hadn’t “gone rogue,” as one White House official put it. He’d performed the precise task that many in Trump’s orbit have been given in recent days. He pleased the boss.
As Trump’s re-election campaign has struggled to tear down former Vice President Joe Biden with less than four months until Election Day, the president’s staff has devoted considerable resources to finding novel ways to make him feel better about the crumbling world around him.
They tell him tales of his sagging poll numbers being fake. They’ve concocted ways of convincing him that the adoring crowds he loves on the campaign trail are still there and ready. They’ve pledged that the social, racial, and economic crises ravaging the nation are ephemeral. And they’ve carried his water as he seeks to reassert his authority over situations falling beyond his control.
Among Trump’s modern-day court jesters are administration brass and prominent White House allies. Navarro may be the most pugnacious of the bunch. But he’s hardly the only one going out of his way to trash Fauci, a coronavirus task force member and leading infectious-disease expert.
Stephen Moore, a conservative economist who informally advises Trump, told The Daily Beast earlier this week that he’s already in the midst of co-authoring a new memo for the president, titled “Dr. Wrong,” that will demonstrate “how many times Dr. Fauci’s been wrong during not just corona, but during his entire career.”
Stephen Moore, the guy Trump tried to appoint to the Fed and was ignominiously forced to withdraw when people were reminded that he’s an ignorant hack and a racist and sexist to boot. I’m sure Trump would call him “my Stephen” if that moniker wasn’t already taken by Stephen Miller.
This is just sad:
Beyond trying to publicly humiliate Fauci, the president’s lieutenants have sought to lift his spirits in numerous other ways during this dark and deadly chapter for the country. One of them is to simply highlight for the president—as much as they possibly can—the images and footage of Trump-loving citizens the president has affectionately dubbed his “beautiful ‘boaters’” during the pandemic.
According to two people who’ve been in the room when Trump has fixated on the issue, the president has repeatedly stressed that “boaters”—MAGA fans who join in on pro-Trump flotillas, with ships adorned with Trump and Mike Pence banners and gear—are a shining exemplar of the enthusiasm gap he enjoys over Biden. He has delighted in advisers showing him boater photos and videos that have bubbled up on social media. And during strategy sessions in the past two months, he’s told officials to keep bringing him more and to push out the content on their own accounts, as well.
[…]
John McLaughlin, a top Trump pollster whom the president values in part for providing internal data that give Trump significantly better odds than most of the public polling does, told The Daily Beast that though “there’s not enough boaters” to buoy the president to a November victory, “we also do well with bikers, NASCAR fans, NFL, college and high school tailgaters, golfers, aviators, RV people, campers, [and] homeowners,” for instance.
McLaughlin is also a hack, by the way.
And then there’s this, which is the most pathetic of all:
[T]his past weekend, when the president made headlines for wearing a mask in front of news cameras following his lengthy stretch of petty refusal, several of his senior aides and allies took to Twitter to lavish praise on Trump for how good he looked and to claim that this was somehow a small victory over Barack Obama’s VP.
They would like to get him in front of rally crowds, which makes him very happy, but since he’s botched the response to the virus so badly they can’t do it. So this is what they’re reduced to:
Unable to get him out of D.C., Trump’s staffers have, instead, tried to assuage his stir-craziness and gloom by other means, including telling the president how many people are viewing him while he’s in the nation’s capital.
But no matter how much they try to buck him up this is still reality. And it bites
