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It was the week the men in white coats finally came for Donald Trump.
Seven masked doctors emerged from Walter Reed Military Hospital outside Washington to try to assure a skeptical world that their most famous patient was beating the coronavirus.
They had lobbied the President of the United States to take experimental antiviral drugs and prescribed an aggressive course of steroids that was not available to the average patient.
But they failed to cure what many critics consider Trump’s primary pathology: chronic narcissism. He took a triumphant helicopter flight back to a Covid-19-ravaged White House, staged a badass “The Mussolini Moment” on his balcony, and unleashed a blitzkrieg of tweets so erratic they surprised even Trump’s seasoned watchers. battle.
Doctors said his physical vital signs were improving; Pollsters said his political vitals were stagnating, with his rival, Joe Biden, leading by 16 percentage points in a CNN poll less than a month before the presidential election. Some said that if Trump deliberately tried to sabotage his own campaign, he could hardly do a better job than last week.
“This @POTUS has turned his own political suicide into a surreal reality show”, tweeted David Axelrod, former chief strategist for Barack Obama.
The clinically obese 74-year-old Trump woke up last Saturday in the presidential suite of the Walter Reed Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, to his staunch supporters waving flags outside. He had flown there the night before after testing positive for Covid-19, a virus he spent months downplaying in both word and deed, even as it killed more than 210,000 Americans.
With global speculation at a fever pitch, his team of doctors appeared on the hospital stairs to insist that their star patient was on the mend. But as spin doctors, they had less practice. Sean Conley, the White House physician, repeatedly refused to say when the president received his last negative test (the White House still refuses to reveal this).
He also made excruciating efforts to avoid directly answering whether Trump had received supplemental oxygen. Twenty-four hours later, standing in the same spot, he admitted that Trump had done it. “I didn’t want to give out any information that could divert the course of the disease in another direction,” Conley explained hesitantly. “And in doing so, you know, it turned out that we were trying to hide something, which wasn’t necessarily true.”
The president’s other treatments consisted of an experimental antibody cocktail, the antiviral drug remdesivir and, after his blood oxygen level suddenly dropped twice, dexamethasone, a steroid generally only recommended for the very sick.
On Sunday night, Trump, a former reality TV star, gave another surprise, riding in an armored limousine outside the hospital and waving to his fans. Experts warned that he was endangering his Secret Service detachment in the hermetic vehicle. A treating physician at Walter Reed called the stunt “insane.”
To further dismay, Trump announced via Twitter on Monday that he would return to the White House and the medical team said they supported the decision. Just in time for the evening news, the president flew across Washington to the White House, climbed a ladder to the balcony, gave a double thumbs up, and quickly removed his mask.
He continued to tweet videos of his return at sunset accompanied by heroic music and comments in which, breathing more deeply than usual, he claimed: “Nobody who is a leader would not do what I did. And I know there is a risk, there is a danger, but it’s okay. And now I’m better. Maybe I’m immune! I do not know. But don’t let it rule your lives. Get out there. Be careful. We have the best medicines in the world ”.
It was the opposite of what any scientific or public health official would advise, as the US continues to report more than 44,000 new Covid-19 infections each day.
In fact, Trump entered a very different building than when he left it. The White House complex was described as a “ghost town” with more than a dozen employees, including senior adviser Stephen Miller and press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, who tested positive.
Rich Galen, a Republican strategist, said: “The idea of the White House being the hot spot at the epicenter of the world is incredible. As far as Trump is concerned, we know this about him: You can tell, how many people have died from coronavirus? Well, if none of their names is Donald J. Trump, then the answer is none. “
Morale in the narrow West Wing, where health guidelines were disregarded and those wearing masks ridiculed for months, was said to be desperate, with particular frustration on Chief of Staff Mark Meadows for his inability to control Trump or communicate with him. personal information about your personal safety.
Chris Whipple, author of The Gatekeepers: How White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency and The Spymasters: How CIA Directors Shape History and the Future, said: “This is the culmination of a chief of staff. White House staff who have been there since day one. It has been a dysfunctional and broken White House from the beginning and now we can see that there is no bottom.
“It’s far worse than we think, and frankly, it’s almost unbelievable to see a White House chief of staff conspiring with the president in a total denial of basic science. Meadows has abdicated responsibility from day one of telling the president the harsh truth. “
Whipple added: “He couldn’t have any protocol in the White House with the result that the staff is dropping like flies. No competent White House chief of staff would ever have allowed that Mussolini tin horn event on Truman’s balcony or the promenade that preceded it and possibly endangered the lives of his Secret Service agents. So I think it’s been an absolute disaster under Meadows. “
On Tuesday, Trump again dashed hopes of having learned his lesson, comparing Covid-19 to seasonal flu, just as he did at the start of the pandemic. He also surprised members of his own Republican party by abruptly cutting off negotiations with Congress for a new round of stimulus for the ailing economy until after the election. In a matter of hours, he partially reversed the decision, sowing even more confusion.
On Wednesday, Conley said Trump had been fever-free for more than four days and had been symptom-free for more than 24 hours. But medical experts wondered aloud whether her steroid treatment might be causing mood swings.
The president returned to work in the Oval Office, breaking his own administration’s isolation rules, and was unleashed with another barrage of tweets and retweets: quirky, self-contradictory, unhinged. In another video, he claimed that his coronavirus infection was “a blessing from God.”
The next morning, Trump gave his first interview since hospitalization during a hectic hour on Fox Business. “I feel good,” he said nonchalantly. “Really good. I think perfect. I think I’m better to the point where I would love to do a rally tonight.” He added that he is a “perfect physical specimen” and “extremely young” and no longer “contagious at all”.
He also made it clear that he would refuse to participate in a virtual debate with Biden on October 15, although attendees are reportedly trying to change their minds, warning that he is running out of time as polls show that the Former vice president could win a landslide on November 3. Congressional Republicans running for reelection also fear a collapse.
Meanwhile, Democrats announced plans to establish a panel to review Trump’s health and fitness for office, raising the specter of his possible impeachment before inauguration day. It was another indication that while Trump has always been a disruptor who delights in provoking a constant stream of shock and outrage, this time around he feels different.
Elaine Kamarck, a senior policy adviser at the White House in the 1990s, said: “It’s more of the same, but it’s getting worse. I don’t know if it’s the disease, the medication, or the reality that day by day he’s lagging further behind in this race, but it’s erratic.
Look at what he did, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, saying we are not going to negotiate a stimulus package. Then at night, obviously people had told him, hey, this is crazy, so okay, well, we’ll do individual bills, which is not on the cards. “
Kamarck, senior fellow in the governance study program at the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington, added: “It’s deteriorating. Its irrationality is more extreme. His arrogance: he just said he’s a perfect physical specimen. Which 74-year-old fat man is a perfect physical specimen? Give me a break.
“It’s a disaster. He’s in a mess. I don’t see how you get out of that. “
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