Earlier this month, Michael Caputo, the Department of Health and Human Services’ top spokesman, was diagnosed [1] with metastatic head and neck cancer, and as such he’s currently on leave. But not before unleashing some wackadoodle conspiracy theories [2] and trying to nab some 30 A-list celebrities for a Trump ad campaign, The Week [3] reports. And of course, Caputo is also under scrutiny right now for demanding [4] access to and then changing the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports and allegedly [5] browbeating the agency’s top scientists for “trying to hurt the president.”
Obviously, September’s been a busy month for Caputo, who in a Facebook live stream earlier this month claimed left-wing “hit squads” are preparing to rise up against Trump and kill him. He claimed with no evidence whatsoever that a “resistance unit” of scientists “deep in the bowels” of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are meeting “at coffee shops” to plan “how to attack Donald Trump next.”
He also attacked the news media and asserted that Trump will win, but Joe Biden won’t concede “and when Donald Trump refuses to stand down at the inauguration, the shooting will begin.”
“The drills that you’ve seen are nothing,” Caputo said during the live stream. “If you carry guns, buy ammunition, ladies, and gentlemen.”
Caputo then said his family is being verbally threatened and that his “mental health has definitely failed” and added he doesn’t “like being alone in Washington” and that the “shadows on the ceiling in my apartment, there alone, shadows are so long.”
He has since deactivated his Facebook account and had hoped to get the celebrities on board to “inspire hope” as the pandemic continues to ravage the country and secured $300 million from the CDC to do this, per Politico’s [6] Dan Diamond. [7]
EXCLUSIVE: They wanted names like Timberlake and Lady Gaga. They got Quaid — who’s already quit.
Inside the sputtering ad blitz to “defeat despair” about coronavirus, with celebrities ditching the Trump-backed campaign as scrutiny grows. https://t.co/pFUvYfVTs7 [8]
— Dan Diamond (@ddiamond) September 30, 2020 [9]
HHS had set its sights on such luminaries as Billy Joel, Britney Spears, and Taylor Swift (really? After her criticism [10] of Trump?) but instead wound up “with Dennis Quaid, CeCe Winans, and Hasidic singer Shulem Lemmer. And Quaid has already jumped ship.
This is the bureaucratic version of “my mom and dad went to Paris and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.” And you know the situation is in bad shape when even Dr. Mehmet Oz, who formerly advocated for the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat the virus, apparently won’t be going to bat for your team.
Maybe that’s part of some conspiracy theory and those durned celebrities are just itching to trip Trump up.