Trump Can’t Even Get Being Sick Right

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I take it they’re sending Trump back to the White House today. My impression is that this is at his insistence. I’ve read in a number of places that he thinks being in a hospital makes him look weak.

Since I’m not a doctor and I have no idea what the status of his health is, I can’t say whether sending him home is a good idea or not. Here it says patients with severe infections may not feel completely awful for the first four to seven days, and then they get slammed. Depending on when Trump’s symptoms began, he may not have hit the slammed stage yet. Or it may be that they’ve loaded him up with enough steroids and who knows what that he won’t be as slammed as a regular patient who isn’t getting super-duper care.

It’s also possible that they’ve set up an ICU in the White House and plan to give him the same treatment there he would have gotten in the hospital. It’s also possible the White House physician, Sean Conley, is an incompetent hack. I don’t know the man personally and cannot say.

And it’s also possible the crew at Walter Reed is exhausted with trying to deal with him and just want to get rid of him.

Gabriel Sherman has a fascinating bit at Vanity Fair:

Donald Trump’s erratic and reckless behavior in the last 24 hours has opened a rift in the Trump family over how to rein in the out-of-control president, according to two Republicans briefed on the family conversations. Sources said Donald Trump Jr. is deeply upset by his father’s decision to drive around Walter Reed National Military Medical Center last night with members of the Secret Service while he was infected with COVID-19. “Don Jr. thinks Trump is acting crazy,” one of the sources told me. The stunt outraged medical experts, including an attending physician at Walter Reed.

According to sources, Don Jr. has told friends that he tried lobbying Ivanka Trump, Eric Trump, and Jared Kushner to convince the president that he needs to stop acting unstable. “Don Jr. has said he wants to stage an intervention, but Jared and Ivanka keep telling Trump how great he’s doing,” a source said. Don Jr. is said to be reluctant to confront his father alone. “Don said, ‘I’m not going to be the only one to tell him he’s acting crazy,’” the source added.

One of the drugs he is taking, dexamethasone, is known to be dangerous and only given to the most severly infected patients. It is also known to have various mind- and mood-altering effects, and many have suggested that if the POTUS is on it somebody really ought to turn the keys to the car over to Mike Pence. However, given that it’s Trump we’re talking about, I don’t see that it matters. It’s not like he could do the job anyway. Just don’t let him nuke anybody.

More about Trump’s covid treatment:

Some experts raised an additional possibility: that the president is directing his own care, and demanding intense treatment despite risks he may not fully understand. The pattern even has a name: V.I.P. syndrome, which describes prominent figures who receive poor medical care because doctors are too zealous in treating them — or defer too readily to their instructions. …

… Using multiple drugs at once could have an impact on their effectiveness, and it increases the risk of harmful drug interactions, said Dr. McGinn.

“You’re giving remdesivir, you’re giving dexamethasone, and you’re giving monoclonal antibodies,” he said, referring to the experimental treatment by Regeneron. “No one’s ever done that, not to mention famotidine and some zinc and a mix of cocktails, or whatever else he’s on.”

Maybe he’ll grow feathers. That would be fun.

Marian Kamensky

Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent:

Because of Trump’s recklessness, we’re only just beginning to see how far the virus is spreading among Republicans. Press secretary Kayleigh McEnany just announced that she has tested positive, bringing the total number of senior Republican officials and lawmakers who have recently announced contracting the virus to over a dozen.

With Republicans tied to Trump’s utter contempt for social distancing and his cultlike command that all Republicans treat the virus as largely a nonissue, they have to hope it won’t spread much deeper into their own ranks.

I see now that Attorney General Bill Barr has decided to self-quarantine after all. I still expect him to announce he’s been infected some time this week. But Mike Pence, who also was sitting in the front row at the Amy Coney Barrett Nomination Announcement and Virus Spreading Event, is traveling around the country campaigning, I understand. Maybe he’ll get sick, too. Hello, President Pelosi.

See also:

Elaine Godfey and Adam Harris, The People Trump Is Coming Home To: The president’s behavior threatens the very employees charged with taking care of him.

Timothy Noah, Why Won’t the White House Let the CDC Contact Trace Its Rose Garden Event?

6 thoughts on “Trump Can’t Even Get Being Sick Right”

  2. Maybe he’ll grow feathers. That would be fun.

    Thank you Maha for the best laugh of today!

  3. I thought I was finally shock-proof as far as tRUMP is concerned, but I was wrong.

    I couldn't imagine that there'd be a sentient person who, knowing he's very ill, and highly communicable, then takes his mask off in front of others when he comes "home" (In "The People's House, where he's a temporarily occupant – hopefully, kicked out on January 20th 2020, at 12noon!).

    And this is AFTER sending out a tweet down-playing the seriousness of a virus that he tried to ignore, but that's already sickened over 7million, and killed over 210,000!

    But I forgot, tRUMP's not a person:  HE'S A MONSTER!

  5. Michele Goldberg:

    There is a line from Hannah Arendt’s 1951 book “The Origins of Totalitarianism” that I’ve thought about constantly during the last four years. “Totalitarianism will not be satisfied to assert, in the face of contrary facts, that unemployment does not exist; it will abolish unemployment benefits as part of its propaganda,” Arendt wrote.

    A regime dedicated to creating its own reality doesn’t just use language to lie. To truly animate lies, those in power must behave as if they’re true, no matter who gets hurt.

    For the past seven months, Donald Trump’s big lie has been that the coronavirus isn’t as dangerous as scientists say, and that his administration has the virus under control….

    The face mask is the ultimate symbol of the frightening abnormality of this moment, and so the Trump administration treated masking as a sign of disloyalty. It’s not just that Trump himself frequently declined to wear masks. He mocked Joe Biden for wearing them, and discouraged their use in his presence….

    ….What’s alarming, rather, is that each new diagnosis in the White House demonstrates how thoroughly this administration has been infected by its own disinformation. The refusal to take basic precautions against the pandemic is the starkest evidence yet of how our government has morphed into a personality cult. The out-of-control spread of the coronavirus in the White House is a microcosm of its out-of-control spread in the country, where on Friday new cases hit the highest point since mid-August.

    What matters now is whether the Covid-19 cluster at the pinnacle of Republican politics acts how the Chernobyl disaster did in the Soviet Union, further exposing a regime rotten with mendacity. That’s far from guaranteed.

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