[Chicks]

From Heather Cox Richardson last night:

Two days ago, I missed altogether something else that bears watching, and the fact that I missed it suggests it was barely covered—I’m generally all over the news. On March 9, 2020, the Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Anatoly Antonov met Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin and, according to the press release from the Russians, discussed “implementation of the arrangements reached by Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump during the summits in Helsinki in 2018 and Osaka in 2019.” There was virtually no coverage of this meeting in the United States; the only record I found was a readout from the Treasury Department, saying just that the meeting had happened. The Helsinki meeting is the one where Trump and Putin met for two hours alone with only their interpreters in the room. The Osaka meeting came just after Putin declared western liberalism obsolete.

Perhaps this meeting was nothing. But, coming as it does in the midst of Russia’s oil war with Saudi Arabia, and alluding to the two-hour conference that so irregularly cut all the usual advisors and staff out of the room, it would sure be nice to know a bit more about it.

All this to say that I am skeptical that all the intrigue over money and power that has plagued this administration since its beginning have suddenly ended as the president and his people turn their attention to the coronavirus. It has seemed to me he saw the pandemic as a media crisis rather than a public health crisis, and if so, there is no reason to think his priorities have changed.

As I say, perhaps I’m just too skeptical. But I suspect it’s more likely I’m a realist.