I trust Emerald on this. She's been solid for a while now. All my twitter bookmarks have been deleted but two. her's is one of them.
To answer the questions, I think we need to look at a reality that nothing is going to get done with the civilian sector of the government as it is currently.
Anything Trump's people would have tried to do would have been stonewalled or, if investigated, turned into a loss for the Trump administration and the MSM would have been spiking the football on every show for days.
How many times did it have to happen before Trump realized nothing was possible in DC, because the president, regardless who it was, had no real influence.
Looking like the best move would have been to make popular/effective policy that resulted in an enormous number of motivated voters and force the dems (DS) to steal it, and in an obscene way, because that was the only possible way to win.
If, big if, but nonetheless, not out of the realm of possibility, IMO, the dems are caught creating a pandemic to raise funds and steal an election, using the embedded, lifetime drones of the federal government apparatus to carry their water, it's over for the federal government as it exists in current form.
To broke to work within it regarding changing system wide ideological dogma to the benefit of the US public and to broke to fix so that it could.