Hey Donald Trump, what happened?

| 4:45 pm EDT April 21, 2020
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For a couple weeks, Donald Trump used his daily press briefings to repeatedly, obnoxiously, and cartoonishly promote a drug called hydroxychloroquine as a supposed coronavirus miracle cure. Trump was so hung up on promoting the drug, you’d think he owned stock in it. In fact the New York Times exposed that three Trump family trusts do own stock in the leading manufacturer of the drug.

But that’s suddenly stopped now. Donald Trump no longer mentions hydroxychloroquine at all. Over the past few days, a number of clinical trials around the world have suggested that hydroxychloroquine is ineffective for coronavirus, or in some cases too dangerous to even continue tests. But we know Trump didn’t see these ugly trial results, and stopped promoting the drug because he’s grown a conscience. His mind does’t work that way. So what’s really going on?

It’s clear that one of Donald Trump’s financial puppet masters has told/i> him to stop talking about hydroxychloroquine. The question is why. There are two possibilities. One is that whoever has been pulling Trump’s strings with this drug has taken a look at these clinical trials and decided it’s no longer worth trying to market hydroxychloroquine as a coronavirus treatment.

The second possibility is that whoever is behind this has simply decided that Donald Trump isn’t helping things by talking about it. We’ve seen scattered media reports that Republican governors have been funneling hydroxychloroquine to everyone from prisoners to nursing home residents. It’s not clear if these schemes are still underway. We said all along that by running his mouth so blatantly, Trump was making it harder for the hydroxychloroquine scheme to succeed. Maybe it’s still operating in silence now.

Hydroxychloroquine has long been a crucial (if dangerous) drug for medical conditions like malaria and lupus. But it’s not a proven coronavirus treatment. We still need to know why Donald Trump was pushing it as a miracle cure, why he’s stopped pushing it, and whether his allies are still trying to implement it as if it were one.