In case that didn’t make it clear where Barr is going with this, check this out. “We will have a weaker health-care system if we go into a deep depression,” he also said. “So just measured in lives, the cure cannot be worse than the disease.” Hoo boy. 1) We will have a weaker healthcare system if it’s overwhelmed by dying people and 2) a return to “the cure cannot be worse than the disease,” Trump’s favorite line of his “reopen the economy by Easter” period? That’s a screaming red flag right there about what Trump’s saying privately.

In addition to laying the groundwork for reopening businesses while we’re still under major threat from the virus, Barr did some champion sucking-up, showing why he’s such a favorite of Trump’s.

“The president went out at the beginning of this thing and really was statesmanlike, trying to bring people together, working with all the governors, keeping his patience as he got these snarky, gotcha questions from the White House media pool, and the stridency of the partisan attacks on him has gotten higher and higher, and it’s really disappointing to see,” Barr told Ingraham, using an interesting definition of “the beginning of this thing,” since Trump spent the first weeks of the spread of the virus denying that it posed a danger, and using an equally interesting definition of “working with” and “all” as related to governors, since Trump has repeatedly attacked governors who didn’t suck up to him enough and has even withheld aid from their states.

“The politicization of decisions like hydroxychloroquine has been amazing to me,” Barr continued. “Before the president said anything about it, there was fair and balanced coverage of this very promising drug, and the fact that it had such a long track record that the risks were pretty well known, and as soon as he said something positive about it, the media’s been on a jihad to discredit the drug, it’s quite strange.”

Before Trump said anything about it, hydroxychloroquine was being treated as a potentially promising treatment that needed further study. Once he talked about it, it was on the fast track to widespread use without adequate study. Trump talking about it changed the story—and he’s been actively silencing actual medical experts on the subject.

It’s likely that Barr partly just wanted to feel relevant when so many other top administration officials are getting so much more attention than him, and wanted to shore up his position with Trump through some public sucking-up. But that’s definitely not the only thing going on here, and it foreshadows another round of threats to move against public health.