Donald Trump salutes as he is driven in a caravan alongside his supporters in Bethesda, Maryland.
President Donald Trump unexpectedly left the hospital where he is being treated for Covid-19 to greet supporters Sunday, greeting them from his caravan in an attempt to show strength as he yearns to return to the campaign.
Video footage showed Trump in a mask waving from behind the closed window of a black sport utility vehicle as supporters cheered. He then returned to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland, where he has been since Friday, said White House spokesman Judd Deere.
In a video posted to Twitter around the same time, Trump said he “learned a lot” about the coronavirus while undergoing treatment. “This is the real school,” he said. “And I understand. And I understand.” His departure, he said, was intended to “give a little surprise” to his followers.
Trump’s doctors gave an optimistic assessment of his health as he recovers from the virus infection, with one of them saying he could be released from the hospital on Monday. However, new revelations about his treatment raise concerns that his condition is more serious than what the American public has been told.
“The president has continued to improve,” White House physician Sean Conley told reporters at a medical team briefing Sunday morning. “As with any disease, there are frequent ups and downs throughout the course.”
Brian Garibaldi, a member of the president’s medical team and a lung expert at Johns Hopkins University, said “our hope is that we can plan for a discharge as soon as tomorrow at the White House.”
Conley revealed that Trump, who revealed on Friday that he had tested positive for Covid-19, was administered a drug to control inflammation, and he acknowledged for the first time that the president received supplemental oxygen on Friday at the White House.
Additionally, Trump did not disclose a positive rapid test result for Covid-19 on Thursday ahead of a phone interview on Fox News as he awaited the findings of a more thorough assessment of the coronavirus, the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday, citing people familiar with it. with the matter that he did not identify.
On Sunday night, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany told reporters that Trump tested positive for the first time after returning from a fundraiser at his New Jersey golf course on Thursday. “I’m not giving a detailed reading of his tests. But it’s safe to say that his first positive test was when he came back or at least after Bedminster,” he said.
Although advisers suggested that Trump would soon be ready to return to the election campaign with the election only a month away, questions remain about how ill he has been as he heads into a phase where conditions for some patients suddenly worsen. and dramatically.
“We know that in many patients who become seriously ill, it occurs between the 8th and 10th,” said Helen Boucher, chief of the geographic medicine and infectious diseases division at Tufts Medical Center in Boston.
McEnany also expressed some caution.
“He will come out on the other side of this,” he said on Fox News. “But of course we are aware that the next day or two is important.”
And Dr. James Phillips, a professor of emergency medicine at George Washington University, said Trump put others at risk by taking the walk Sunday. “That presidential SUV is not only bulletproof, it is hermetically sealed against chemical attack. The risk of COVID19 transmission inside is as high as outside of medical procedures. The irresponsibility is staggering,” Phillips tweeted.
Deere later said that “adequate precautions were taken in the execution of this movement to protect the president and all those who support him, including the PPE. The movement was authorized by the medical team as safe.”
A spokesman for the United States Secret Service said protocols for the security of service personnel protecting the president had been followed.
In Sunday’s briefing, Conley said Trump’s blood oxygen saturation level has dropped twice since his diagnosis, and that the president’s medical team decided, after debate, to administer dexamethasone, a steroid that is used to treat inflammation in patients with Covid. When asked about the president’s lung X-rays and CT scans, Conley said there were “some expected findings” but nothing “of clinical significance.”
Trump has already been administered an experimental “antibody cocktail” as well as remdesivir, an antiviral drug.
During a briefing on Saturday, Conley said flatly that Trump had not been administered oxygen on Friday, then said he had not received it at Walter Reed.
Trump was “adamant that he didn’t need it,” Conley said Sunday, and his blood oxygen saturation was restored to about 95% after about a minute of supplemental oxygen in the White House. The president was on oxygen for less than an hour, Conley said, and has not needed treatment or seen a return of fever since Friday.
When asked why he did not disclose the information earlier, Conley said: “I was trying to reflect the optimistic attitude that the team, the president, had had in his course of illness. I did not want to give any information that could drive the course of the disease in another direction, and in doing so, it turned out that we were trying to hide something that was not necessarily true. “
He concluded Sunday’s briefing after only about 10 minutes, refusing to answer repeated questions about whether scans of Trump’s lungs had shown any signs of pneumonia.
Back to Campaign Trail?
“We need to have confidence that what they tell us about the condition of the president is real,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” Suggesting that Trump is endorsing the medical team’s public statements, the Democratic leader said, “That’s not very scientific.”
Earlier Sunday, a senior campaign aide said Trump will soon be “ready to go back to the election campaign.”
Jason Miller said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that in a telephone conversation Saturday afternoon, Trump, who for months has defied public health advice to wear a mask and maintain social distance, wants to “remind people wash your hands, use hand sanitizer, make sure you wear a mask if you can’t socially distance yourself. “
When asked about a new NBC-Wall Street Journal poll showing Biden leading Trump by 14 percentage points, Miller said on ABC’s “This Week” that the campaign is optimistic about Trump’s prospects in the states. key on the battlefield needed to obtain 270 electoral votes. In the poll conducted after Tuesday’s presidential debate, but before Trump was diagnosed with Covid-19, Biden led Trump between 53% and 39%, the biggest advantage of the presidential campaign.
Trump took to Twitter Sunday afternoon to thank “all the fans and supporters” who have been gathering outside Walter Reed’s doorstep.
I really appreciate all the fans and supporters outside of the hospital. The fact is, they really love our country and are watching WE MAKE IT BIGGER THAN EVER BEFORE!
– Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 4, 2020
The president’s aides took to Sunday news shows to dispel doubts about his re-election campaign and defend his campaign rallies and White House events where Trump and his supporters rarely wore masks.
“We give them a mask, we check their temperature,” Miller said, mocking that Democratic candidate Joe Biden often “wore the mask as an accessory.” Trump has also ridiculed Biden for wearing a mask in his public appearances.
Miller said Trump “is going to defeat” the virus. “And I think that when President Trump gets to the White House and comes out on the campaign, it will be a sling in the future,” he said.
But national security adviser Robert O’Brien, who contracted the virus before and has recovered, was more cautious, stressing that it is too early to know how Trump will fare.
When asked about a possible transfer of power should Trump’s situation deteriorate, O’Brien said: “We have a great team and the president is in firm control.”
Miller, the campaign adviser, promoted what is billed as “Operation MAGA,” with a virtual event Monday night followed by Vice President Mike Pence, members of the Trump family, and surrogates who were deployed after the vice-presidential debate scheduled for Wednesday night in an effort to build momentum in Trump’s absence.
Helpers, affected allies
Trump’s aides, including Hope Hicks, campaign manager Bill Stepien, and supporters including former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Republican Senators Thom Tillis, Mike Lee, and Ron Johnson, have spoken out on Covid-19, which Which raises questions about whether the Trump White House and campaign events have become super-spreading locations for the virus.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is posted from a syndicated feed.)
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