It appears that Trump has decided that he is just fine and that he can go about his normal activities. But both he and his doctors have been cagey and inconsistent about the status of Trump’s illness and it is not clear if the doctors are being dictated to by Trump about how he should be treated and what they should tell the media. Dan Froomkin writes that there are whole host of questions that need to be asked from the doctors and the White House spokespersons that they need to provide answers for.
Amid all the essential questions that the White House refuses to answer about Donald Trump’s COVID-19 infection, journalists should pay particular attention to the ones it is refusing to answer most aggressively.
Possibly chief among those is: When was Trump’s last negative test? Reporters have repeatedly asked and the Trump team steadfastly refuses to say, even though there ought to be nothing remotely controversial about it.
…What this strongly suggests, of course, is that Trump’s last negative test was not recent and, in particular, that he either wasn’t tested — or perhaps even tested positive – before Tuesday night’s debate.
…Another hugely important topic that Trump’s team has been cagey about is contact tracing. Assuming that the Sept. 26 Rose Garden party for Amy Coney Barrett was a super-spreader event, which it certainly appears to have been, you’d think they’d want to find out what happened and try to stop the spread going forward.
But, oddly, they don’t.
In fact, they seem to be preventing it.
He goes on to describe other troubling unanswered questions, the lack of answers to which seem to suggest that Trump was exceedingly cavalier about the safety of the people he came into contact with before he was diagnosed with covid-19 and even after. Froomkin concludes:
There are of course many important questions about Trump’s medical condition that remain unanswered. For instance, Conley unsubtly dodged questions on Monday afternoon about whether Trump had pneumonia or any other kind of lung problems. We actually know very little, factually, about his current condition.
But the unanswered questions regarding his past conduct have something important in common: They address whether Trump considered the moral as well as personal consequences of his actions.
And although most of us know the answer to that already — because it’s always the same answer — members of Trump’s team are fighting to obscure these specific facts, presumably because they would depict Trump’s astonishing lack of personal responsibility with even more resonance than usual.
So whenever the un-cover-up finally happens, it could be brutal.
Froomkin follows up by saying that the relentless stonewalling by the Trump camp strongly suggests that Trump broke the testing rules that were in place for his disastrous first debate by not getting tested before it, thus putting at risk the many people involved with it.
Donald Trump recklessly and corruptly violated agreed-upon presidential debate commission rules by not getting tested for COVID-19 shortly before the Sept. 29 debate in Cleveland.
That’s the obvious conclusion from the White House’s relentless stonewalling about when he last tested negative. And it’s time the news media said so.
The latest in an unending series of unbearably blatant dodges came Friday morning, when NBC News White House correspondent Hallie Jackson elicited maybe the smarmiest stonewall yet. She asked six times!
Here’s the exchange. The evasiveness of the White House spokesperson is really telling.
WATCH: @HallieJackson presses White House Deputy Press Sec. Brian Morgenstern repeatedly over the date of President Trump’s last negative Covid-19 test. pic.twitter.com/5nhGPnoCYE
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) October 9, 2020
It seems obvious that Trump ignored the testing requirements before the debate and he and his spokespersons are now lying about it.
They must have thought this would never be found out but then Trump got covid-19 and now they are scrambling to cover it up.
raven says
At least 11 people involved with the first Trump-Biden debate have tested positive for Covid-19.
This was clearly a virus spreading event if not a superspreading event.
It’s likely that Trump or one of the other positive cases could have infected Joe Biden. Biden is 78 and in a high risk group for death or serious disease.
Biden dodged a bullet here, and a lot of it was probably pure good luck.
PS Herman Cain caught the Covid-19 virus at one of Trump’s campaign rallies. It turned out badly for him inasmuch as he ended up dead from it.
grandolddeity says
Surreality 2020:
Trump base: TRUMP 2020 -- FU[K YOUR FEELINGS (flag waving off 4X4 truck)
sonofrojblake says
Said this over a week ago…
https://freethoughtblogs.com/singham/2020/10/03/what-does-the-trump-hospitalization-mean/#comment-4603497
Heidi Nemeth says
Before the debate I read that the campaigns were to be tested upon arrival at the Cleveland Clinic. After the debate I read the Trump campaign got to the Cleveland Clinic debate site too late to be tested. I also read that the campaigns were to have done their own testing and that both campaigns certified that everyone they had brought to Cleveland Clinic had tested negative before the debate.
Last Monday, just as Trump was getting out of the hospital, I hiked with a former neonatologist here in Cleveland. The doctor told me the Trump campaign requested and took a tour of the Cleveland Clinic before the debate. When they got to the place where they were to have been tested for covid-19 by the Cleveland Clinic, President Trump ducked into a doorway and avoided being tested.
I have no way of verifying the good doctor’s information. I’m inclined to believe him though.