Today's "fruition" that I'm talking about is the president and his son retweeting a propagandic video disparaging the use of masks to fight covid-19, promoting hydroxychloroquine as a miracle drug, and encouraging widespread reopening of commerce. Trump also announced that Kodak would be entering the world of pharmaceuticals, and had thus been granted a $765 million loan to develop supplies and manufacturing methods for covid vaccination supplies. Which doesn't explain why KODK stock jumped by over 200% the night before.
This comes on the same day that the NYTimes put out a (woefully vague) report on Russian covid disinformation efforts, which doesn't exclusively link Russian influence campaigns to Trump's latest bullshit, but it continues to unnerve me how closely the common interests of Trump and Putin align.
Per the usual playbook, the Trump administration will use their own idiocy/mal-intent to advance other action items; In this case, decrying social media companies as hostile to "conservative" ideals, and "anti-free speech". Cool. Cool cool cool cool, not a big deal, except for the whole killing-Americans-with-an-increasingly-inexplicable-ignorance part.
And to Portland: I've watched for a couple nights during each of the last two weeks, and it's fucking HILARIOUS that it took this long for the feds to, um, "engineer" a barrier with concrete slab anchors on both sides. Someone is freestyling on a mic in the livestream right now, there are finally less-frequent "federal protective service" announcements, and the livestreamer has blocked off their camera while walking by the wall of moms, to preserve their identities. Someone is always shouting "Black Lives Matter", and it feels to me like we're still a society. For now. Things usually rapidly escalate around midnight, Portland local time (in about 5 minutes), so we'll see.
In related news: What incentive do you have to not perjure yourself in front of Congress if you're Trump's AG? "Yes, yes, Representative Nadler.. it's true that a bipartisan supermajority of senators have condemned me for perjury, but after a thorough investigation of myself, the DoJ (me) found that there was, in fact, no wrongdoing on my behalf." (It's a sad day when your Billy Barr impressions have had refinement)