The "space wars" thing is a bit tin hat at the best of times, but there's a lot of speculation that Tinajin was a message to the Chinese, and that message was "we can attack you from space". If you believe that, then you could be forgiven for thinking covid is their retaliation. It would be natural for Trump to then flex his muscles when it comes to the advancement of the space programme. Sure it's goofy, but NASA probably looked goofy when that first happened.