I'm gonna go out on a limb and predict POTUS does in fact intervene in Hong Kong this summer. It would not be surprising if a large percentage of high-level CCP members believe the numbers coming out of CDC, giving them the false impression that the USA is too weak to act to help HK
sauce:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/us-bluffing-china-claims-trump-too-weakened-pandemic-intervene-hong-kong
"The US Is Bluffing": China Claims Trump Too "Weakened" By Pandemic To Intervene In Hong Kong
In his overnight market commentary, Rabobank's Michael Every laid out an interesting hypothesis why markets continue to fade the risk of a serious escalation in tensions between the US and China: "within serious HK money circles there is absolute certainty that the US is now an EU-style paper tiger and has no stomach for a real fight, and that Trump is so beholden to Wall Street that he won’t dare act."
And while Every himself disagrees with this sanguine assessment, saying this stance "captures the self-confidence in Beijing but utterly fails to capture the bipartisan anger in DC, or the fact that both sides are using Beijing as a stick to beat each other with in the 2020 presidential election, or that the US has financial weapons as fearsome as its military, or that the Fed is there to prop up the stock market anyway", he appears to have a point regarding China's "self-confidence."
In an editorial published in China's Global Times, the authors claim that Trump is indeed nothing but a paper tiger and that "US talk of Hong Kong a nothingburger" in response to Beijing's formulation of a national security law. To be sure, the article is filled with the usual jingoist allegations, first claiming that "the US is again leading the Western camp in besieging China" a stance that is driven by the "compression of Western values", resulting from "the rise of emerging markets and developing countries becoming increasingly independent." (snip)