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Then I don’t think “germ phobia” is a sufficient handle to have manipulated Trump on COVID.

I think he “trusted the experts” and trusted his personal ability to manage people and projects. Unfortunately, this “project” was way outside his experience base & expertise. I think he was a like a lot of older people, it was just scary! Think about this, starting a year or two prior to COVID prior there were a lot of ScFi TV and films (the stupid zombie shows & films!). Whether deliberate or not they helped prepare the fear groundwork. I think it affected a lot of people’s subconscious. I think he and others were stampeded into thinking it was the second coming of the Black Plague. It wasn’t! To me it never looked like it was that! Not even close! Biological-based development is not the same as a construction project. Throwing more money at it and compressing the time-line drives the risk up and produces a potentially dangerous product. Since this was not in his normal wheelhouse, he should have been more skeptical. Why oh why did he let the serial exaggerator Fauci (In the 1980s we’re all going to catch AIDS!) have center stage? A 15-minute Internet search should have told them all they needed to know about him. He should have been fired back in the 1980s. I know given the hysteria it was “damned-if-he-did-and-damned-if-didn’t”, election run up made it worse.
Like it or not it’s going to be hung around his neck.
He needs to start walking some of his “enthusiasm” for Warp Speed back.