Sometimes it can seem as if Trump almost gets it…is sort of kind of paying attention…is managing to look as if he’s doing his job for a few minutes – but then he always talks to someone else and it all falls apart again.

Midday [on Monday], Fauci and others gathered in the Oval Office to update Trump on the 30,000-person Phase 3 trial launched by Moderna. Trump later told reporters it was a “great meeting” and participants walked away believing the President was sincere in his efforts to convey more leadership on the outbreak.

“We had a lot of our wonderful doctors and researchers with me,” Trump said. “I think the meeting went really well.”

While the meeting focused almost exclusively on the vaccine trial, and not on Trump’s response to the virus more broadly, it seemed to participants like the President was engaged — unlike some previous meetings that became derailed with unrelated topics and complaints.

Hold your breath…tiptoe…nobody say anything – oops no it didn’t work.

But as the day progressed, Trump heard from several others who reinforced a different message than the one being offered by the administration’s health experts. His hawkish trade adviser Peter Navarro — who recently published an op-ed in USA Today trashing Fauci without running it past the White House but was never formally reprimanded — traveled alongside Trump to North Carolina, where the President broke with health experts by calling on governors to reopen.

“I really do believe a lot of the governors should be opening up states that they’re not opening,” Trump said, countering the advice being offered by Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx for states to rethink how they are lifting restrictions.

So the midday meeting might as well not have happened.

The same day, Trump spoke with Robert Herring, the chief executive of far-right OANN, about an unproven anti-malarial that Trump has long touted and even took himself, despite a lack of clear evidence on its efficacy in preventing or treating Covid.

“Yesterday, I had a chance to talk to President Trump about hydroxychloroquine,” Herring later wrote on Twitter. “I gave him a list of doctors we have interviewed. I know he wants to help & put people back to work. Hope he talks to real doctors & not Dr. ‘Farci.’ ”

Yes, it’s Fauci who’s not a real doctor and people who promote random medications for no clear reason who really know their medical stuff.