To the surprise of no one, under the Trump Administration the CDC issued guidance for the pandemic that was "not primarily authored" by the CDC staff. The fact that political appointees were altering CDC recommendations was reported last year. But it seems to me that the "not primarily authored" admission goes a bit beyond that. Instead, it looks like Trump people were actually writing guidance about when COVID testing should be done and when guidance for reopening schools to support Trump's mad claims that the U.S. should test fewer people (to lower the then sky-high number of COVID cases) and should immediately open schools even if virus mitigation efforts that had previously been recommended were not possible.
That is the functional equivalent of Trump putting on a doctor's coat and one of those head bands with a mirrored disk (do doctors still wear those things?) so he can say "as a trained physician, we should stop testing for COVID."
Even though those actions probably got Americans killed, this will not go down in history as a major Trump scandal. Instead it will be a small not buried under a mound of other scandals that were not taken seriously enough. The bottom line is most of us expect that Trump acted as an irresponsible lying fuck up while in office. Whenever we get back to cocktail partiers we can all shake our heads and say, "Oh Donald, what a crazy presidency that was!"
