Since Trump’s diagnosis last Thursday , he and his administration have worked diligently to cover up the president’s disease. They’ve downplayed his symptoms. They’ve suggested he needed to be hospitalized not due to his apparently high fever and low oxygen levels but out of an abundance of caution. They’ve posted videos and photos of the president doing normal things. Even the president’s own doctors have taken to politicized spin, arguing that they were trying to be “upbeat” as they refused to fully and truthfully answer questions about Trump’s health.
On Sunday, it culminated in a photo-op in which Trump was driven outside Walter Reed hospital as he waved at supporters — exposing at least a driver and passenger in Trump’s car to his infection. As James Phillips, attending physician at Walter Reed, tweeted , “That Presidential SUV is not only bulletproof, but hermetically sealed against chemical attack. The risk of COVID19 transmission inside is as high as it gets outside of medical procedures. The irresponsibility is astounding. My thoughts are with the Secret Service forced to play.”
This is all out of the same playbook Trump has used for Covid-19 from day one. It’s an attempt to make everything seem normal, as if the coronavirus isn’t wrecking lives, in a desperate attempt to go back to a better world that could help ensure Trump’s reelection. As Trump told journalist Bob Woodward , “I wanted to always play [the coronavirus] down.”
Trump has stuck to this even as it’s put people in danger again and again, now even after he’s gotten sick himself. He’s called for states to reopen — to “LIBERATE” them — even as experts warned that opening too soon would lead to new cases (and, sure enough, cases spiked over the summer as states opened prematurely). He’s pushed for less testing , arguing more tests pick up more cases and therefore make the US look bad, even as experts said more testing, along with contact tracing , is still needed to slow the outbreak. He’s mocked masks and frequently refused to wear one himself, even as experts and a growing body of research show masks are key to stopping Covid-19.
This obsession with creating a false sense of normalcy seemingly extended to the moment that Trump received a positive coronavirus test. As the Washington Post initially reported , and White House staff confirmed, Trump attended campaign events on Thursday even after he and his staff learned one of Trump’s closest aides, Hope Hicks, was showing symptoms. That continued, based on recent reports, as some staff noticed Trump seemed fatigued and likely sick himself. In doing this, Trump likely exposed his own staff and supporters to Covid-19.
A potential silver lining to Trump getting sick was that maybe this would show him how serious this virus is — that it’s real, that it can make people very ill and kill them. Trump alluded to that in a video on Sunday, claiming, “I learned a lot about Covid. I learned it by really going to school. This is the real school.” Despite that, Trump was back out Sunday for the drive-by photo-op that potentially exposed his staff, at least, to the coronavirus.
This is all ridiculous, of course, because we already know Trump is sick and hospitalized. This is obviously not normal.
And we know the consequences of this act. It’s how the US ended with nearly 210,000 Covid-19 deaths so far — more than any other country in the world. It’s how the US ended up, after accounting for population, at the top 20 percent among developed countries for Covid-19 deaths. (If the US had the same Covid-19 death rate as Canada, more than 125,000 more Americans would likely be alive today.) It’s why America can’t go back to normal, even as countries like Germany, New Zealand, and South Korea open up more, as it faces far too many coronavirus cases — almost 100,000 new cases just since Trump tested positive.
It’s why Trump himself got sick. As he lived his denial , going to ill-advised campaign rallies and events, frequently refusing to wear a mask, Trump exposed himself to the coronavirus again and again.
And it’s all set to continue — as Trump and his staff’s barrage of mistruths and political spin over the weekend proved.
In retrospect, it was an ominous scene — the vapor in Donald Trump’s breath visibly condensing as he spoke at the rally in Duluth, Minn., a wisp of exhalant hanging in the frigid air.
President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally at Duluth International Airport on Sept. 30, 2020, in Duluth, Minn. Photo/Alex Brandon
In a region where coronavirus cases are surging, a mask-less Trump stood before several thousand supporters on Wednesday, most of them mask-free themselves, pumping his fists and tossing hats to the tightly packed crowd.
Two days later, Trump would be hospitalized. And Duluth — the site of his last rally before checking into Walter Reed National Military Medical Center — would become mired in a recovery of its own.
The rally was a story of worst practices in a pandemic, with Duluth as the collateral damage. Before Trump’s hospitalization and wall-to-wall coverage of his evolving condition, it was in Duluth that the recklessness of his campaign fell plainly into view — from his scoffing at mask-wearing to his insistence on assembling large crowds.
By the weekend, local public health officials were warning rally attendees about their risk of exposure, and prominent Republicans in the state were in quarantine . Emily Larson, the city’s Democratic mayor, asked anyone who attended the rally to “ please get tested, self isolate.”
“Contact tracing President Trump in Minnesota: Who hung out with him for how long?” blared a headline in the St. Paul Pioneer Press. The Duluth News Tribune’s above-the-fold front page read simply, “[Rep. Pete] Stauber traveled with Trump.” No further context was necessary.
Photographs of the Duluth rally appeared on social media with red circles drawn around people standing closest to the lectern — and to Trump. Stauber and two other Republican congressmen who traveled with Trump on Air Force One were pilloried for returning to the state on a Delta Airlines flight on Friday night — apparently flouting airline rules .
The House members’ “stupidity and disregard for the well-being of their fellow passengers is staggering,” Ken Martin, chairman of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, said in a prepared statement.
Gary Anderson, the Democratic president of the Duluth City Council, said Sunday that Trump “took risks with the health of our community, clearly, and I think that’s how our community is worse off in the most direct way.”
Minnesota, a state Trump lost by fewer than 45,000 votes four years ago, wasn’t supposed to end like this for Trump. It was supposed to be where he stunned all the naysayers this year. Appearing at a rally in Duluth in 2018 to campaign for Stauber, Trump pinched his thumb and forefinger together and told the crowd he’d come “this close” to winning the state, something no Republican has done since Richard Nixon in 1972. One more visit, “one more speech,” he said, and he would have. In 2020, Trump said, “It’s going to be really easy I think.”
Duluth is critical to Trump’s ambitions. Though the city itself is a progressive enclave on the tip of Lake Superior, its media market gives Trump a port of entry to the state’s more conservative Iron Range, a blue-collar mining region that, while ancestrally Democratic, has been trending Republican in recent years.
Trump carried the congressional district surrounding Duluth by 15 percentage points in 2016, and he will need to juice turnout there this year to compensate for losses in the Democratic-heavy Twin Cities and their suburbs. In a year marked by little campaign travel, Trump has lavished attention on Northern Minnesota, dispatching family members to Duluth and appearing himself in Bemidji, Minn., in mid-September. Several mayors from the area publicly endorsed him.
One them, Larry Cuffe Jr., a former Democrat and the mayor of small town Virginia, recalled Sunday that Trump’s campaign provided hand sanitizer and distributed masks at the rally in Duluth last week. Cuffe and the people he was with were all wearing masks, he said, and he wasn’t worried about contracting the virus there.
What’s more, Trump looked good to him. Trump’s speech, Cuffe said, “was even more poignant and more to the point” than he had seen at previous events.
“I didn’t see anything that would make it look like he wasn’t at the top of his game,” Cuffe said.
In fact, Trump appeared to be in his element. One day after a chaotic and ineffectual debate, Trump boasted about his performance and derided Joe Biden. He mocked Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a former refugee and Somali-American from the Twin Cities area, and warned Biden would “turn Minnesota into a refugee camp.” (Biden has no such plans.)
He mused about serving “16 more years” as president.
But even as Trump spoke, there were signs that not all was well with his campaign. As in other states , Trump is underperforming his 2016 levels in Minnesota with his base demographic of white voters. The coronavirus, a persistent drag on his public approval rating — and the issue that will now dominate the campaign’s closing weeks — was on an upswing in Northeastern Minnesota when Trump arrived.
Trump spoke for only about 45 minutes, unusually brief for him. “It’s freezing out here,” he said.
The rest of Duluth was left to absorb the fallout.
Following the rally, the Minnesota Department of Health said “community transmission of COVID-19 was high in St. Louis County prior to this week’s rally, and people attending the rally may have been infectious without realizing it.”
Outside Trump’s rally, a Trump supporter in a plaid shirt and gray hair was filmed attacking a photojournalist. After Larson called Trump a “white supremacist,” Trump supporters took to their cars and trucks, parading down the street by her home. Residents unaccustomed to political mischief reported having lawn signs stolen for the first time in their lives.
“I think that we’re living in a political low point, where people feel empowered to behave in ways that we wouldn’t have just four years ago or six years ago or even 20 years ago,” said Jeff Anderson, a former Duluth councilman and aide to former Rep. Rick Nolan (D-Minn.).
Describing a political environment antithetical to Minnesota’s reputation for civility, he said, “I think there’s just been this permission that’s been given to make people feel more comfortable behaving in inappropriate [ways].”
Trump’s medical team said Sunday that Trump could be discharged from Walter Reed medical center as early as Monday. And it’s possible that his rally in Duluth won’t be his last.
But even a brief break will be damaging. Running behind Biden in both national and swing state polls, large rallies are a mainstay of Trump’s campaign, critical to generating media and identifying supporters who aren’t yet registered to vote. In a nod to their significance, Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said after the Duluth rally — and before announcing her own positive test for Covid-19 — that 60 percent of rally attendees in Duluth were not Republican and, more important, more than 17 percent did not vote in 2016.
Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for Trump’s re-election effort, said of the prospect of Trump returning to in-person events that “we’ll leave that to the president’s medical team.”
But he was not apologizing for holding the rally in Duluth. Noting temperature checks and other safety precautions taken there, he said that “if people can protest in the streets by the thousands, then they can gather peacefully under the First Amendment to hear from the president of the United States.”
Donald Trump drives past supporters after saying he has 'learnt a lot about Covid' – video
Donald Trump drew immediate rebuke from doctors on Sunday afternoon for an “insane” surprise drive-by visit to supporters outside the Walter Reed military medical center, where the president is being treated for an infection of Covid-19.
At least two other people, probably Secret Service agents, wearing respirators and eye protection, were seen on video in the vehicle accompanying Trump, who was also masked, during the short drive.
James Phillips, doctor of emergency medicine at George Washington University, who is an attending physician at Walter Reed, called the stunt “insanity”.
“Every single person in the vehicle during that completely unnecessary Presidential ‘drive-by’ just now has to be quarantined for 14 days. They might get sick. They may die,” he wrote in a tweet .
“For political theater. Commanded by Trump to put their lives at risk for theater. This is insanity.”
In a second tweet , Phillips added: “That Presidential SUV is not only bulletproof, but hermetically sealed against chemical attack. The risk of COVID19 transmission inside is as high as it gets outside of medical procedures. The irresponsibility is astounding. My thoughts are with the Secret Service forced to play.”
Jonathan Reiner, professor of medicine and surgery at George Washington University school of medicine and health services, said in a tweet : “By taking a joy ride outside Walter Reed the president is placing his Secret Service detail at grave risk.
“In the hospital when we go into close contact with a Covid patient we dress in full PPE: Gown, gloves, N95, eye protection, hat. This is the height of irresponsibility.”
NBC pointed out that a White House official told them Melania Trump would not leave her residence to visit her husband because: “That would expose the agents who would drive her there and the medical staff who would walk her up to him.”
Trump signalled his intention to visit his flag-waving supporters in a video tweet of his own , released only moments before a cavalcade of black SUVs drove through the gates of the Maryland medical center. Trump was seen waving animatedly through a fully-closed window, before the vehicles doubled back into the hospital grounds.
“This is the real school,” Trump said in the video, describing his experience with Covid-19, and his second full day at Walter Reed after being admitted on Friday. “I get it and understand it. [It is] a very interesting thing and I’m going to be letting you know about it.”
Questions also arose about who in the White House knew of or authorized the stunt. Reporters in the White House press pool had been told there would be no more presidential activity on Sunday.
A White House spokesman, Judd Deere, said the drive had been “cleared by the medical team as safe” and that “appropriate precautions were taken in the execution of this movement to protect the president and all those supporting it, including PPE.”
Shortly after the drive, the White House published Trump’s schedule for Monday. It states: “The president has no public events scheduled.”
James Clapper, former director of national intelligence, said on CNN that the moment was “pure Trump”.
“The president [is] always a showman and concerned about the optics,” he said. “Let’s hope this comports with his rate of improvement.”
Clapper added: “This will be of great interest to foreign countries, friends and adversaries alike. At least temporarily this is a good message.”
Fox Business Network journalist Lou Dobbs tweeted shortly after the drive that Trump was “A bad patient, but a great leader.”
As recently as Friday, Secret Service agents were expressing their anger at how Trump’s perceived recklessness was placing them at risk.
The newspaper said some agents had become convinced in recent months that the president was oblivious to them being in harm’s way, citing as evidence a policy that agents on duty at Trump rallies were no longer routinely being tested when they returned home.
I suppose that someone who's employed at the White House automatically feels important. So the shock, when they realize that they're just cannon fodder, has to be pretty tough.
This is what I have thought all along, when things start to fall apart, the family can use his illness to blame for losing and will continue to milk his illness in order to avoid or delay all prosecution for financial crimes. This is their dream come true. He and his family will gain sympathy from his supporters and then the family can move on into running their own television empire, their reall goal.
If Trump has learned anything from getting Covid-19, he’s not showing it
Trump’s drive-by motorcade photo-op is out of the same coronavirus playbook that got America into this mess.
On Sunday, it culminated in a photo-op in which Trump was driven outside Walter Reed hospital as he waved at supporters — exposing at least a driver and passenger in Trump’s car to his infection. As James Phillips, attending physician at Walter Reed, tweeted , “That Presidential SUV is not only bulletproof, but hermetically sealed against chemical attack. The risk of COVID19 transmission inside is as high as it gets outside of medical procedures. The irresponsibility is astounding. My thoughts are with the Secret Service forced to play.”
This is all out of the same playbook Trump has used for Covid-19 from day one. It’s an attempt to make everything seem normal, as if the coronavirus isn’t wrecking lives, in a desperate attempt to go back to a better world that could help ensure Trump’s reelection. As Trump told journalist Bob Woodward , “I wanted to always play [the coronavirus] down.”
Trump has stuck to this even as it’s put people in danger again and again, now even after he’s gotten sick himself. He’s called for states to reopen — to “LIBERATE” them — even as experts warned that opening too soon would lead to new cases (and, sure enough, cases spiked over the summer as states opened prematurely). He’s pushed for less testing , arguing more tests pick up more cases and therefore make the US look bad, even as experts said more testing, along with contact tracing , is still needed to slow the outbreak. He’s mocked masks and frequently refused to wear one himself, even as experts and a growing body of research show masks are key to stopping Covid-19.
This obsession with creating a false sense of normalcy seemingly extended to the moment that Trump received a positive coronavirus test. As the Washington Post initially reported , and White House staff confirmed, Trump attended campaign events on Thursday even after he and his staff learned one of Trump’s closest aides, Hope Hicks, was showing symptoms. That continued, based on recent reports, as some staff noticed Trump seemed fatigued and likely sick himself. In doing this, Trump likely exposed his own staff and supporters to Covid-19.
A potential silver lining to Trump getting sick was that maybe this would show him how serious this virus is — that it’s real, that it can make people very ill and kill them. Trump alluded to that in a video on Sunday, claiming, “I learned a lot about Covid. I learned it by really going to school. This is the real school.” Despite that, Trump was back out Sunday for the drive-by photo-op that potentially exposed his staff, at least, to the coronavirus.
This is all ridiculous, of course, because we already know Trump is sick and hospitalized. This is obviously not normal.
And we know the consequences of this act. It’s how the US ended with nearly 210,000 Covid-19 deaths so far — more than any other country in the world. It’s how the US ended up, after accounting for population, at the top 20 percent among developed countries for Covid-19 deaths. (If the US had the same Covid-19 death rate as Canada, more than 125,000 more Americans would likely be alive today.) It’s why America can’t go back to normal, even as countries like Germany, New Zealand, and South Korea open up more, as it faces far too many coronavirus cases — almost 100,000 new cases just since Trump tested positive.
It’s why Trump himself got sick. As he lived his denial , going to ill-advised campaign rallies and events, frequently refusing to wear a mask, Trump exposed himself to the coronavirus again and again.
And it’s all set to continue — as Trump and his staff’s barrage of mistruths and political spin over the weekend proved.
Trump’s last rally: A catalog of worst pandemic practices
In Duluth, Minn., the recklessness of the president’s campaign fell plainly into view.
President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally at Duluth International Airport on Sept. 30, 2020, in Duluth, Minn.
Photo/Alex Brandon
In a region where coronavirus cases are surging, a mask-less Trump stood before several thousand supporters on Wednesday, most of them mask-free themselves, pumping his fists and tossing hats to the tightly packed crowd.
Two days later, Trump would be hospitalized. And Duluth — the site of his last rally before checking into Walter Reed National Military Medical Center — would become mired in a recovery of its own.
The rally was a story of worst practices in a pandemic, with Duluth as the collateral damage. Before Trump’s hospitalization and wall-to-wall coverage of his evolving condition, it was in Duluth that the recklessness of his campaign fell plainly into view — from his scoffing at mask-wearing to his insistence on assembling large crowds.
By the weekend, local public health officials were warning rally attendees about their risk of exposure, and prominent Republicans in the state were in quarantine . Emily Larson, the city’s Democratic mayor, asked anyone who attended the rally to “ please get tested, self isolate.”
“Contact tracing President Trump in Minnesota: Who hung out with him for how long?” blared a headline in the St. Paul Pioneer Press. The Duluth News Tribune’s above-the-fold front page read simply, “[Rep. Pete] Stauber traveled with Trump.” No further context was necessary.
Photographs of the Duluth rally appeared on social media with red circles drawn around people standing closest to the lectern — and to Trump. Stauber and two other Republican congressmen who traveled with Trump on Air Force One were pilloried for returning to the state on a Delta Airlines flight on Friday night — apparently flouting airline rules .
The House members’ “stupidity and disregard for the well-being of their fellow passengers is staggering,” Ken Martin, chairman of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, said in a prepared statement.
Gary Anderson, the Democratic president of the Duluth City Council, said Sunday that Trump “took risks with the health of our community, clearly, and I think that’s how our community is worse off in the most direct way.”
Minnesota, a state Trump lost by fewer than 45,000 votes four years ago, wasn’t supposed to end like this for Trump. It was supposed to be where he stunned all the naysayers this year. Appearing at a rally in Duluth in 2018 to campaign for Stauber, Trump pinched his thumb and forefinger together and told the crowd he’d come “this close” to winning the state, something no Republican has done since Richard Nixon in 1972. One more visit, “one more speech,” he said, and he would have. In 2020, Trump said, “It’s going to be really easy I think.”
Duluth is critical to Trump’s ambitions. Though the city itself is a progressive enclave on the tip of Lake Superior, its media market gives Trump a port of entry to the state’s more conservative Iron Range, a blue-collar mining region that, while ancestrally Democratic, has been trending Republican in recent years.
Trump carried the congressional district surrounding Duluth by 15 percentage points in 2016, and he will need to juice turnout there this year to compensate for losses in the Democratic-heavy Twin Cities and their suburbs. In a year marked by little campaign travel, Trump has lavished attention on Northern Minnesota, dispatching family members to Duluth and appearing himself in Bemidji, Minn., in mid-September. Several mayors from the area publicly endorsed him.
One them, Larry Cuffe Jr., a former Democrat and the mayor of small town Virginia, recalled Sunday that Trump’s campaign provided hand sanitizer and distributed masks at the rally in Duluth last week. Cuffe and the people he was with were all wearing masks, he said, and he wasn’t worried about contracting the virus there.
What’s more, Trump looked good to him. Trump’s speech, Cuffe said, “was even more poignant and more to the point” than he had seen at previous events.
“I didn’t see anything that would make it look like he wasn’t at the top of his game,” Cuffe said.
In fact, Trump appeared to be in his element. One day after a chaotic and ineffectual debate, Trump boasted about his performance and derided Joe Biden. He mocked Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a former refugee and Somali-American from the Twin Cities area, and warned Biden would “turn Minnesota into a refugee camp.” (Biden has no such plans.)
He mused about serving “16 more years” as president.
But even as Trump spoke, there were signs that not all was well with his campaign. As in other states , Trump is underperforming his 2016 levels in Minnesota with his base demographic of white voters. The coronavirus, a persistent drag on his public approval rating — and the issue that will now dominate the campaign’s closing weeks — was on an upswing in Northeastern Minnesota when Trump arrived.
Trump spoke for only about 45 minutes, unusually brief for him. “It’s freezing out here,” he said.
The rest of Duluth was left to absorb the fallout.
Following the rally, the Minnesota Department of Health said “community transmission of COVID-19 was high in St. Louis County prior to this week’s rally, and people attending the rally may have been infectious without realizing it.”
Outside Trump’s rally, a Trump supporter in a plaid shirt and gray hair was filmed attacking a photojournalist. After Larson called Trump a “white supremacist,” Trump supporters took to their cars and trucks, parading down the street by her home. Residents unaccustomed to political mischief reported having lawn signs stolen for the first time in their lives.
“I think that we’re living in a political low point, where people feel empowered to behave in ways that we wouldn’t have just four years ago or six years ago or even 20 years ago,” said Jeff Anderson, a former Duluth councilman and aide to former Rep. Rick Nolan (D-Minn.).
Describing a political environment antithetical to Minnesota’s reputation for civility, he said, “I think there’s just been this permission that’s been given to make people feel more comfortable behaving in inappropriate [ways].”
Trump’s medical team said Sunday that Trump could be discharged from Walter Reed medical center as early as Monday. And it’s possible that his rally in Duluth won’t be his last.
But even a brief break will be damaging. Running behind Biden in both national and swing state polls, large rallies are a mainstay of Trump’s campaign, critical to generating media and identifying supporters who aren’t yet registered to vote. In a nod to their significance, Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said after the Duluth rally — and before announcing her own positive test for Covid-19 — that 60 percent of rally attendees in Duluth were not Republican and, more important, more than 17 percent did not vote in 2016.
Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for Trump’s re-election effort, said of the prospect of Trump returning to in-person events that “we’ll leave that to the president’s medical team.”
But he was not apologizing for holding the rally in Duluth. Noting temperature checks and other safety precautions taken there, he said that “if people can protest in the streets by the thousands, then they can gather peacefully under the First Amendment to hear from the president of the United States.”
David French (from the very conservative National Review) tweets:
‘This is insanity’: Walter Reed physician among critics of Donald Trump drive-by visit
President briefly left hospital for surprise drive past supporters with at least two others in vehicle
Donald Trump drives past supporters after saying he has 'learnt a lot about Covid' – video
Donald Trump drew immediate rebuke from doctors on Sunday afternoon for an “insane” surprise drive-by visit to supporters outside the Walter Reed military medical center, where the president is being treated for an infection of Covid-19.
At least two other people, probably Secret Service agents, wearing respirators and eye protection, were seen on video in the vehicle accompanying Trump, who was also masked, during the short drive.
James Phillips, doctor of emergency medicine at George Washington University, who is an attending physician at Walter Reed, called the stunt “insanity”.
“Every single person in the vehicle during that completely unnecessary Presidential ‘drive-by’ just now has to be quarantined for 14 days. They might get sick. They may die,” he wrote in a tweet .
“For political theater. Commanded by Trump to put their lives at risk for theater. This is insanity.”
In a second tweet , Phillips added: “That Presidential SUV is not only bulletproof, but hermetically sealed against chemical attack. The risk of COVID19 transmission inside is as high as it gets outside of medical procedures. The irresponsibility is astounding. My thoughts are with the Secret Service forced to play.”
Jonathan Reiner, professor of medicine and surgery at George Washington University school of medicine and health services, said in a tweet : “By taking a joy ride outside Walter Reed the president is placing his Secret Service detail at grave risk.
“In the hospital when we go into close contact with a Covid patient we dress in full PPE: Gown, gloves, N95, eye protection, hat. This is the height of irresponsibility.”
NBC pointed out that a White House official told them Melania Trump would not leave her residence to visit her husband because: “That would expose the agents who would drive her there and the medical staff who would walk her up to him.”
Trump signalled his intention to visit his flag-waving supporters in a video tweet of his own , released only moments before a cavalcade of black SUVs drove through the gates of the Maryland medical center. Trump was seen waving animatedly through a fully-closed window, before the vehicles doubled back into the hospital grounds.
“This is the real school,” Trump said in the video, describing his experience with Covid-19, and his second full day at Walter Reed after being admitted on Friday. “I get it and understand it. [It is] a very interesting thing and I’m going to be letting you know about it.”
Questions also arose about who in the White House knew of or authorized the stunt. Reporters in the White House press pool had been told there would be no more presidential activity on Sunday.
A White House spokesman, Judd Deere, said the drive had been “cleared by the medical team as safe” and that “appropriate precautions were taken in the execution of this movement to protect the president and all those supporting it, including PPE.”
Shortly after the drive, the White House published Trump’s schedule for Monday. It states: “The president has no public events scheduled.”
James Clapper, former director of national intelligence, said on CNN that the moment was “pure Trump”.
“The president [is] always a showman and concerned about the optics,” he said. “Let’s hope this comports with his rate of improvement.”
Clapper added: “This will be of great interest to foreign countries, friends and adversaries alike. At least temporarily this is a good message.”
Fox Business Network journalist Lou Dobbs tweeted shortly after the drive that Trump was “A bad patient, but a great leader.”
As recently as Friday, Secret Service agents were expressing their anger at how Trump’s perceived recklessness was placing them at risk.
“He’s never cared about us,” one agent told a confidant, according to the Washington Post .
The newspaper said some agents had become convinced in recent months that the president was oblivious to them being in harm’s way, citing as evidence a policy that agents on duty at Trump rallies were no longer routinely being tested when they returned home.
Don't they understand that they are merely staff to trmp. Staff are to be ignored until one is needed
I suppose that someone who's employed at the White House automatically feels important. So the shock, when they realize that they're just cannon fodder, has to be pretty tough.
Stupid is as stupid does. The new administration motto.
This is what I have thought all along, when things start to fall apart, the family can use his illness to blame for losing and will continue to milk his illness in order to avoid or delay all prosecution for financial crimes. This is their dream come true. He and his family will gain sympathy from his supporters and then the family can move on into running their own television empire, their reall goal.