With the election less than 5 months away and the increased virus infections having the media and state and local officials turn to the Centers for Disease Control instead of Donald Trump?
The Trump White House was up to now embarking on ways to tarnish the agency and embed political people to blunt the influence of the ‘experts’….
This might remind some intelligence and military people of the Russian system of making sure a political person had influence over those who ran things in the military and other places….
It IS Donald Trump’s broad plan to change the American reality to fit HIS ….
And it could be seen as a quiet march to take over the American Political process like his buddy in Russia Putin…
White House officials are putting a target on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, positioning the agency as a coronavirus scapegoat as cases surge in many states and the U.S. falls behind other nations that are taming the pandemic.
Trump administration aides in recent weeks have seriously discussed launching an in-depth evaluation of the agency to chart what they view as its missteps in responding to the pandemic including an early failure to deploy working test kits, according to four senior administration officials. Part of that audit would include examining more closely the state-by-state death toll to tally only the Americans who died from Covid-19 directly rather than other factors. About 120,000 people in the U.S. have died of the coronavirus so far, according to the CDC’s official count.
Politically, Trump aides have also been looking for a person or entity outside China to blame for the coronavirus response and have grown furious with the CDC, including its public health guidance and actions on testing, making it a prime target. But some wonder whether the wonky-sounding CDC, which the administration directly oversees, could be an effective fall guy on top of Trump’s efforts to blame the World Health Organization.
“WHO is an easy one,” said one former administration official. “It is foreign body in Switzerland. CDC will be tough to create a boogeyman around for the average voter.”
The moves are among the White House’s efforts to deflect attacks on President Donald Trump and place blame elsewhere in the federal bureaucracy. Protecting the president is seen as increasingly important by political aides as the general election approaches in just over four months and criticism mounts from former Vice President Joe Biden, other Democrats and even former national security adviser John Bolton, who say the blame rests squarely on Trump…..