The likes of conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh and Jim Hoft, publisher of the Gateway Pundit, a conspiratorial, pro-Trump site, have seized on the sibling connection, as have a large number of anonymous Twitter accounts. “Rod Rosenstein as we all know definitely worked to undermine the Trump administration, which is oddly exactly what his sister is doing by undermining the more logical and calm message the president’s team has issued on the virus,” charged conservative pundit Wayne Dupree in a Wednesday blog post.

Of course, there’s no evidence whatsoever that health officials like Messonnier have been overstating the threat of the virus, yet a considerable amount suggesting that Trump has downplayed the situation so as to avoid upsetting financial markets. “I’ve heard people jumping on Nancy Messonnier because she told us the truth: that it’s not a matter of if but when,” Representative Tom Cole told reporters on Wednesday, according to Politico. “Isn’t that what you want to hear instead of some pie in the sky?” Apparently, not so much!

In addition to putting two and two together re: Messonnier—who, unlike the president and newly minted coronavirus czar Mike Pence, is an actual doctor who has never helped cause an HIV outbreak that we know of—supporters like Limbaugh have also fingered the media for the inside job. On Monday, the Medal of Freedom recipient told his listeners: “It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump,” adding, “Now, I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus…The coronavirus is the common cold, folks. The Drive-By Media hype of this thing as a pandemic, as the Andromeda strain, as, ‘Oh, my God, if you get it, you’re dead’...I think the survival rate is 98%. Ninety-eight percent of people get the coronavirus survive…I believe the way it’s being weaponized is by virtue of the media, and I think that it is an effort to bring down Trump, and one of the ways it’s being used to do this is to scare the investors, to scare people in business. It’s to scare people into not buying Treasury bills at auctions. It’s to scare people into leaving, cashing out of the stock market—and sure enough, as the show began today, the stock market—the Dow Jones Industrial Average—was down about 900 points, supposedly because of the latest news about the spread of the coronavirus.”

Perhaps now that it’s all been laid out as plain as day, you‘ll begin to understand.

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