WASHINGTON POST - Years of the White House obscuring health information add instability at a tricky moment

 

Years of the White House obscuring health information add instability at a tricky moment

If the Hicks test hadn’t leaked, would we even know about Trump?

 

By 

Philip Bump

Oct. 2, 2020 at 8:07 a.m. CDT

The White House didn’t confirm that President Trump’s personal valet tested positive for the novel coronavirus until the media broke the story in May. It didn’t confirm that Vice President Pence’s press secretary contracted the virus until the media reported it a few days later. It didn’t confirm that Trump’s national security adviser had it until the press reported it, and it was only after Bloomberg News — which first reported several of these cases — revealed that counselor Hope Hicks had tested positive that the White House acknowledged it.

 

It appears that the first time the White House was the first to confirm a positive coronavirus test in the administration was Trump’s tweet about his own positive test early Friday morning.

 

The diagnosis immediately destabilized a broad range of institutions and efforts. Stock futures dropped by hundreds of points. Questions immediately arose about possible succession plans or preparations. Trump's ongoing reelection campaign lost its candidate for some to-be-determined period — and lost any hope of redirecting the race away from the ongoing pandemic.

 

That instability will only be heightened by the long track record of obscuring or misrepresenting health information related to the president.

 

During the 2016 campaign, there were ongoing questions about Trump's health, given his advanced age. (He was the oldest person ever to be inaugurated as president.) Presidential campaigns generally release health records in an effort to assuage any such concerns, but the document released by the Trump campaign was bafflingly effusive.

 

“If elected,” it read at one point, “Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”

 

It later emerged that the doctor who'd signed the letter had simply signed something dictated by Trump or his team. That doctor, Harold Bornstein, later claimed that people working for Trump had seized the president's medical records shortly after the president took office.

 

Once in office, this uncertainty continued. Trump's first physical, conducted by then-White House physician Ronny L. Jackson, determined that Trump was just tall enough and just light enough not to be categorized as obese.

 

“He has incredible genes, I just assume,” Jackson said at a news briefing, echoing Trump’s own descriptions of his vitality. “Based on his cardiac assessment, hands down, there is no question he is in the excellent range,” the doctor said at another point — though he doubled the president’s cholesterol medication.

 

Most curious was Trump’s unexpected trip to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., last November. Then-press secretary Stephanie Grisham waved the unannounced trip off as Trump “taking advantage of a free weekend” to get the first part of his annual physical out of the way.

 

He never completed that physical at Walter Reed. This summer, after questions about his health arose following a speech at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, the White House released a summary of his physical asserting that the procedure had been completed at the White House. Trump, though, later claimed that the November visit to Walter Reed was the conclusion of his physical.

 

The New York Times’s Michael Schmidt reported that the trip may have been centered on something more significant.

 

“In the hours leading up to Trump’s trip to the hospital,” Schmidt reported, “word went out in the West Wing for the vice president to be on standby to take over the powers of the presidency temporarily if Trump had to undergo a procedure that would have required him to be anesthetized.”

 

Pence later said that he didn't recall any such order.

 

All of this contributes to an unusual amount of uncertainty about the president’s health in a normal moment. Now, with Trump having contracted covid-19, a dangerous and mostly untreatable disease — in the middle of his reelection campaign, no less — it becomes far more problematic.

 

It will be difficult to take at face value any assertions about Trump’s condition as the disease runs its course. It will similarly be difficult for Trump to resist wanting to return to the campaign trail, regardless of how he’s feeling or how contagious he might be. If the White House assures the public that Trump has been cleared to once again hold fundraisers or to resume his regular schedule, one would be justified in treating that claim with skepticism. Any assertion about Trump’s health will need to clear a higher bar for confirmation than normal given how often the administration has both obscured information about Trump.

And, of course, because of its willingness to pressure health experts in particular to offer optimistic assessments about the pandemic. Over and over, the government agencies running the response to the pandemic have faced pressure from the White House to make the situation seem less stark. Pressure to limit the number of tests being completed or to make it easier to open schools has increased skepticism about any pronouncement from the government.

 

One has to wonder what would have happened had Bloomberg News not uncovered Hicks’s positive test, which was conducted Thursday morning. The president continued his schedule as normal despite her diagnosis — and despite perhaps not feeling 100 percent himself, according to Bloomberg’s Jennifer Jacobs. That included a closed-door fundraiser at Trump’s private club in New Jersey on Thursday. Business as usual, as best he could.

 

If the Hicks diagnosis hadn’t become public, when, if ever, would we have learned about Trump’s?

 

 

Here’s how Trump’s recklessness affects us all and the VP debate

 

Opinion by 

Jennifer Rubin

Columnist

Oct. 2, 2020 at 9:56 a.m. CDT

President Trump announced early Friday that he and first lady Melania Trump tested positive for the novel coronavirus, two days after close aide Hope Hicks displayed symptoms. While appalling, it should be no surprise to learn, as The Post reports:

 

After White House officials learned of Hicks’s symptoms, Trump and his entourage flew Thursday to New Jersey, where he attended a fundraiser at his golf club in Bedminster and delivered a speech. Trump was in close contact with dozens of other people, including campaign supporters, at a roundtable event.

 

The president did not wear a mask Thursday, including at the events at his golf course and on the plane, officials said. He was tested after he returned to the White House, but he also appeared on Sean Hannity’s TV show from the residence by telephone.

This is grotesquely irresponsible, but no more so than Trump’s insistence on eschewing masks (and mocking former vice president Joe Biden for wearing one, as recently as the debate on Tuesday), holding large rallies, pushing quack remedies, lying to the public about the severity of the pandemic and goading local officials to reopen schools. All these actions reflect his utter lack of regard for others, his inability to think of the welfare of anyone but himself.

 

We should also note that unlike the Biden family, the Trump contingent reportedly entered the debate hall wearing masks, took them off and refused to put them back on despite a request from a doctor with the Cleveland Clinic, which hosted the debate. They share Trump’s contempt for others’ well-being.

 

No one should wish Trump or his family harm, but neither should his illness — which potentially wreaks havoc in government — excuse his recklessness. It matters little whether those affected by his actions are his closest aides, a crowd of supporters or hundreds of millions of Americans. Trump acts in whatever way he thinks is in his interest at the expense of others.

 

Trump’s dishonesty and willingness to endanger others have set the tone in a White House where masks are frowned upon. ABC News White House reporter Jonathan Karl pointed his ire to White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, who held a news conference Thursday despite having been exposed to Hicks’s symptoms herself.

Karl tweeted: “My question for @PressSec: What did you know, when [you] went into a room full of reporters for your briefing yesterday at 11:20am?” And if she did not know, why did the small coterie of aides who did know about Hicks’s condition not inform her so she could protect White House journalists? The disdain for others’ health and lives is gob-smacking.

 

This news will take Trump off the campaign trail and may well prevent his appearance at the next debate scheduled for Oct. 15. (It was not clear that he was going to appear anyway, given the debate commission’s determination to impose new rules to keep him from disrupting the event and embarrassing the country in front of the entire world.) In any event, the Trump family should be required to wear masks or be barred from entry at further events.

 

The news also puts a spotlight on the vice-presidential debate. According to two sources with knowledge of the negotiations between the teams for Vice President Pence and Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), Pence’s team is demanding the candidates be seated just seven feet apart from one another. While six feet is the recommended distancing for casual conduct, it is not enough, especially for a 90-minute debate that could result in a shouting match or raised voices, which increases the potential for emission of airborne particles. In the last VP debate involving a woman, Sarah Palin, then vice-presidential candidate Biden acceded to her request to stand. It is unsurprising that Pence would want to avoid facing Harris’s commanding presence, but in light of the health risk, it becomes an outrageous and irresponsible demand.

 

Fortunately, Pence has tested negative, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has not interacted with Trump in months. Whether Mark Meadows, who regularly appears unmasked at the U.S. Capitol, or other White House aides have spread the virus to others will become clear in the days ahead. Likewise, we do not know whether, for example, the news forces Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett (who appeared maskless in the Rose Garden with her family on Saturday) to quarantine. Congress might want to reconsider its decision not to utilize regular testing.

 

The Republican tendency to wish away reality to “own” Democrats has had deadly consequences. That contempt for science and unpleasant facts now comes crashing down with the news that the leader of the anti-reality cult himself is infected.

 

Fortunately, the voters can hold Trump and his Republican enablers, who have refused to condemn his efforts to deceive the public, accountable four weeks from Tuesday. It will not bring back the more than 200,000 Americans we have lost, but it will honor their memory. A Trump defeat would be an emphatic statement that a president must put the lives and concerns of others before his own.

 

Backstage Hypocrites at the Debate

 

BRUNI FROM THE TIMES - Defiant, Now Infected: Trump Is a Morality Tale

 

Defiant, Now Infected: Trump Is a Morality Tale

The president has the coronavirus. Let’s learn from that.

 

By Frank Bruni

Opinion Columnist

·         Oct. 2, 2020

It’s a measure of the cynicism that has infected American politics — and, yes, me — that among my initial reactions to the news that President Trump had tested positive for the coronavirus was: Are we sure? Can we trust that? A man who so frequently and flamboyantly plays the victim, and who has been prophylactically compiling ways to explain away or dispute a projected election loss to Joe Biden, is now being forced off the campaign trail, which will be a monster of an excuse.

I couldn’t help thinking that.

I couldn’t help thinking, too, about karma, and I immediately felt and still feel petty for that. Trump has spent much of the past six months, during which more than 200,000 Americans died of causes related to the coronavirus, downplaying the pandemic, flinging out false reassurances and refusing to abide by the very public health guidelines that officials in his own government were fervently promoting.

He didn’t wear a mask. He encouraged large gatherings — including the Tulsa, Okla., rally that Herman Cain attended before falling sick with the coronavirus and dying, and his big convention speech, at which hundreds and even thousands of people, many without any facial covering, packed in tight. At the first presidential debate on Tuesday night, he mocked Biden for so often wearing a mask, suggesting that it was a sign of … what? Timidity? Weakness? Vogueishness? Moral vanity?

With Trump it can be hard to know, and it’s hard to know whether his own defiance was a kind of wishful thinking about the coronavirus’s true prevalence, a reflection of his belief in his own physical invincibility, some combination of the two or none of the above.

But it’s easy to identify the morals of this story.

The most obvious is that the coronavirus has not gone away and there is no guarantee, contrary to the president’s sunny prophecies, that it’s going away anytime soon, certainly not if we’re cavalier about it.

Which brings up another moral, also obvious but apparently necessary to articulate: There is a real risk in being cavalier. The president is now the embodiment of that. The first lady, too. Also Hope Hicks, one of his closest advisers, and who knows how many others in his immediate circle? That question exists because, from the start, there has been a culture of cavalier attitudes and behavior at the White House when it comes to the coronavirus.

That culture was on flabbergasting display during those evening briefings the president used to do, the ones that he used primarily to congratulate himself and his administration on their fantabulous job battling the pandemic. They battled it all the way to America’s exceptional status as the world leader in recorded cases of, and deaths associated with, the coronavirus.

That culture was evident in the rallies that the president arranged and insisted on doing over recent weeks. That culture persisted on Thursday, when, according to an article by Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman in The Times, Kayleigh McEnany, maskless, held a briefing with reporters after Hicks’s infection with the virus was confirmed and after McEnany was on a plane with her and exposed to her.

I read that and I winced and I gasped — and then I wondered why in the world I was wincing and gasping when it was par for the course. When it was business as usual. When it was an explanation for why we are where we are as a country and why Trump is where he is as a president and patient.

It is time, at long last, to learn. To be smarter. To be safer. To be more responsible, to others as well as to ourselves. We cannot erase the mistakes made in America’s response to the coronavirus but we can vow not to continue making them. The way to treat President Trump’s diagnosis is as a turning point and a new start. This is when we woke up.

The presidency and the president are always national mirrors, in many different ways at once, and that’s another moral. Trump has shown America its resentments. He has modeled its rage. Now he personifies its recklessness. How extraordinary and helpful it would be if, when he talks to the country about this, whether on television or in tweets, he reflects on that in a civic-minded way.

I’m certainly not counting on that: He may wind up having a mild, largely asymptomatic experience with the coronavirus and feeling somehow vindicated. But I’m rooting for a more mature tack.

Because I don’t want us to be cynical, no matter how much cause we’ve been given. I want us to be better.

SUCKER

 

 

Pope rejects US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo meeting

Published

1 day ago

Related Topics

• US election 2020

IMAGE COPYRIGHTREUTERS

image captionUS Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is in Italy on a state visit

The Vatican has denied US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo an audience with Pope Francis.

The Holy See said the Pontiff does not receive politicians during an election period.

The move adds to a diplomatic row following comments by Mr Pompeo about China and the Catholic Church.

The Vatican accused Mr Pompeo of trying to use that issue to attract voters in November's US presidential election.

In an article earlier this month, Mr Pompeo said the Catholic Church was risking its "moral authority" by renewing an agreement with China regarding the appointment of bishops.

Donald Trump receives support from conservative religious movements, including conservative Catholic voters, some of whom think Pope Francis is too liberal.

Human rights groups say many Catholics in China are persecuted and driven underground for pledging allegiance to the Pope instead of an official Chinese Catholic association.

Despite this, in 2018 the Vatican made a deal with China to have some say over the appointment of Chinese bishops.

At the time Pope Francis said he hoped the deal "will allow the wounds of the past to be overcome" and bring about full Catholic unity in China.

• China, the Vatican, and a controversial deal
• Why many Christians in China turn to underground churches

The agreement is expected to be renewed next month in the face of opposition from some Catholics, including in the US.

In a speech on Wednesday in Rome Mr Pompeo called on the Vatican to defend religious freedom in China, saying "nowhere is religious freedom under assault more than in China."

IMAGE COPYRIGHTGETTY IMAGES

image captionThe Vatican said the Pope does not receive politicians during an election period

The Vatican's two top diplomats, Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin and Foreign Minister Archbishop Paul Gallagher, said Pope Francis will not receive Mr Pompeo.

"The Pope had already said clearly that political figures are not received in election periods. That is the reason," Cardinal Parolin said, according to AFP news agency.

The two politicians also described Mr Pompeo's public criticism of the Pope as a surprise and Archbishop Gallagher commented that issues for discussion should be negotiated "privately".

Cardinal Parolin also said it is possible Mr Pompeo's comments were designed to encourage Catholics to support Mr Trump at the polls in November.

"Some have interpreted it this way - that the comments were above all for domestic political use. I don't have proof of this but certainly this is one way of looking at it," he suggested.

He added that the Vatican's deal with China is nothing to do with the US.

A Debate That Can’t Be Ignored

 A Debate That Can’t Be Ignored 

Americans need to face the man who is their president. 

By The Editorial Board 

The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom. 

• Sept. 30, 2020 
  
  All Americans, whatever their political inclinations, should make time to watch Tuesday night’s presidential debate, and every minute of the two forthcoming debates. 
  
  President Trump’s performance on the debate stage was a national disgrace. His refusal to condemn white supremacists, or to pledge that he will accept the results of the election, betrayed the people who entrusted him with the highest office in the land. Every American has a responsibility to look and listen and take the full measure of the man. Ignorance can no longer be a tenable excuse. Conservatives in pursuit of long-cherished policy goals can no longer avoid the reality that Mr. Trump is vandalizing the principles and integrity of our democracy. 
  
  It’s a tired frame, but consider how Americans would judge a foreign election where the incumbent president scorned the democratic process as a fraud and called on an armed, violent, white supremacist group to “stand by” to engage with his political rivals. 
  
  The debate was excruciating to watch for anyone who loves this country, because of the mirror it held up to the United States in 2020: a nation unmoored from whatever was left of its civil political traditions, awash in conspiratorial disinformation, incapable of agreeing on what is true and what are lies, paralyzed by the horror of a pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands and beholden to a political system that doesn’t reflect the majority of the country. 
  
  The debate featured one politician trying his best to do his job, trying to bring some normalcy to America’s battered public square, and one politician who seemed incapable of self-control — petulant, self-centered, rageful. 
  
  After five years of conditioning, the president’s ceaseless lies, insults and abuse were no less breathtaking to behold. Mr. Trump doesn’t care if you think he’s corrupt, incompetent and self-centered. He just wants you to think everyone else is just as bad, and that he’s the only one brave enough to tell it to you straight. It is an effort to dull Americans’ sense of right and wrong, making them question reality itself and, eventually, driving them to tune out. 
  
  Yet there was a new sense of desperation in Mr. Trump’s performance. He knows, as most observers do, that he is on track to lose the election. His solution to that predicament is not to reach out to more voters, like a normal president would. 
  
  Instead he spent the debate as he has spent the past several months: claiming the election will not be legitimate unless he wins. This threat to the democratic process is no less real because it is a threat made in public. 
  
  At one point the moderator, Chris Wallace of Fox News, asked Mr. Trump if he was willing to condemn the white supremacists and right-wing militants who have grown emboldened under his administration — specifically, a group called the Proud Boys who have been involved in numerous street fights in the past few years. (“We will kill you. That’s the Proud Boys in a nutshell,” their founder said.) 
  
  It was the slowest, fattest softball a president could be tossed. Once again, Mr. Trump whiffed. “Proud Boys?” Mr. Trump said. “Stand back and stand by,” before pivoting to accuse left-wing agitators of being the true threat. (False, according to the F.B.I.) 
  
  The campaign tried to walk back the “stand by” comment on Wednesday, but a different message had already been received: “This makes me so happy,” one Proud Boy wrote in an online forum. “Well sir! We’re ready!!” 
  
  Mr. Wallace later asked both candidates to commit to respect the outcome of the election. The fact that such a promise needed to be extracted in the first place is alarming. More ominous was that only one candidate, Joe Biden, agreed to it. Mr. Trump used the opportunity to warn of a “fraudulent election,” falsely claiming that mail-in ballots would be corrupted — again, despite his own F.B.I. saying there is no evidence of any fraud in mail ballots. Undeterred, Mr. Trump called on his supporters to “go into the poll and watch very carefully” — in other words, to intimidate voters in areas where Mr. Biden is likely to draw more support. 
  
  Should all else fail, Mr. Trump said that the election will be decided by the Supreme Court — which will most likely have a full complement of nine members by Election Day. The court will “look at the ballots,” Mr. Trump said. It bears repeating that it is not the court’s job to decide the election. 
  
  No one handled himself perfectly on Tuesday night. But that acknowledgment is by no means an equivalence. Mr. Biden exhibited remarkable restraint given Mr. Trump’s unwillingness to actually debate. 
  
  As the dust settled, there were calls for Mr. Biden to skip the rest of the debates. That is an understandable reaction; Mr. Trump’s behavior makes it essentially impossible to have a civil, substantive conversation. 
  
  But that is the exact opposite of what needs to happen. Mr. Biden will show up for all of the remaining debates, and Americans should too. Donald Trump is their president. They need to face him, and the reckoning he has brought on the Republic. 
  
  Most of all, they need to vote. In person, by mail — however they can, and as soon as they can. Mr. Trump wants Americans to be either too disgusted or too afraid to cast their ballots. Throughout the nation’s history, tens of millions of Americans have been made to feel this way. They never gave up the fight for a fairer and freer democracy. Neither should Americans today. The best response to a would-be autocrat like Donald Trump, and the only way to begin to extricate the country from this long nightmare, is to show up and be counted. 
  
   

RUMP'S LATEST AND SLEAZIEST TRICK YET...HE'S A TOTAL PIG

 I was sent this by a friend:

I did not write this, but knew exactly what was happening last night!
>
Please read!  I didn’t write it, but I love it   Just read this:

 Joe Biden is a stutterer.  Like many others, he has overcome the disability by understanding it and exercising extraordinary perseverance and discipline.  If you know and love a stutterer and you watched the presidential debate last night, within minutes it became obvious what was going on.  Abusive tone of voice, rapid fire interruptions,  zigzagging change of topic, personal insult and humiliation, and family pain are all tripwires that scramble a stutterer's ability to speak.   There was nothing unplanned or spontaneous in the President's strategy.   The bastards did not prep him to attack Joe.  They prepped him to attack Joe's disability hoping that by triggering his stuttering they might deceive an audience unfamiliar with the disability into thinking that Joe was stupid, weak, uncertain, confused, or lost to dimentia.

If you have ever gotten in the face of bully on the playground protecting a stutterer that you love, the game being played last night was nakedly and painfully obvious.  If you watched with glee while it happened, then you haven't made much progress since the playground.

However,  the stutterer that I love taught me early on that he did not so much need my protection.  He fought back by owning and integrating his disability into who he is.  He learned how to stand his ground as master of perseverence, knowledge, and empathy.  Without his example, I would not have recognized the game that was being played last night.  I would  not have been able to recognize the subtle but intense struggle against  the disability that Joe was winning at the same time he was struggling  to advance his positions on the issues in the midst of a rhetorical shit  storm.

But, like the stutterer that I know, Joe didn't need any help on the playground.  I was proud of him.

The President flushed his family fortune down a gold-plated toilet and somehow wants us to believe that he is the poor victim of mean people. Then he tries, and fails, to beat up a kid with a disability on the playground.

> I'm done with this, guys.  I want my country back. 

> Thanks, Joe.

NO WONDER THAT SCUMBAG RUMP DIDN'T BOTHER WITH DEBATE PREPARATION - HE PLANNED TO CHEAT ALL ALONG AS HE HAS DONE IN EVERY STAGE OF HIS LIFE.