By Stephen Macaulay

On February 7, 2020, Donald Trump told Bob Woodward of COVID-19, “It goes through the air. That’s always tougher than the touch. You don’t have to touch things. Right? But the air, you just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed. And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus.”

On March 19 Trump told Woodward, “I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”

According to reporting by The New York Times, on Feb. 24, hours before Trump tweeted, that COVID-19 was “very much under control,” and that “Stock market starting to look very good to me!”, “senior members of the president’s economic team, privately addressing board members of the conservative Hoover Institution, were less confident.” It seems that Tomas J. Philipson, a senior White House economic advisor, told the group that he couldn’t estimate the economic effects of the COVID.

The Times reporters write, “To some in the group, the implication was that an outbreak could prove worse than Mr. Philipson and other Trump administration advisers were signaling in public at the time.” [Philipson in late June quit his new post as acting chief of the White House Council of Economic Advisors to return to the University of Chicago, two days after Kevin Hassett announced his departure as the council’s chief.]

Apparently this was a three-day affair of getting inside insights into COVID from White House officials.

A hedge fund consultant attended the event of the Hoover board and created a document about it. The Times reporters write, “’What struck me,’ the consultant wrote, was that nearly every official he heard from raised the virus ‘as a point of concern, totally unprovoked.’”

Here’s the thing: the information that the rest of us got from Trump and his minions was “Nothing to see here, move along.”

The information that was given to the Hoover people, which then went to a hedge fund, Appaloosa Management, was far less sanguine.

According to the Times, “legal experts say. . .it is not apparent that any of the communications about the Hoover briefings violated securities laws.”

So let’s see: Trump and his people tell you and me that there is no problem; people in the business of using information to buy and sell—and they sold in this case—were given insights that the rest of us would—what?—panic if we knew?

It would be the old case of the rich getting richer if it were also not the case that the sick were getting sicker and the dead, well, dead.

It is somewhat incomprehensible how people who are in the middle class and below think that Trump has any concern for their well-being.

Wall Street is doing great. Main Street has a whole lot of “For Rent” signs—and many more to come.

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