By Alahednews,The Guardian
Seven doctors in face masks emerged from Walter Reed military hospital outside Washington attempting to assure a skeptical world that its most famous patient was beating the coronavirus.
They had rushed Trump on to experimental antiviral drugs and prescribed an aggressive course of steroids not available to the average patient.
But they could not cure what many critics regard as Trump’s chief pathology: chronic narcissism. He took a triumphant helicopter flight back to a White House ravaged by Covid-19, staged a tough guy “Mussolini moment” on its balcony and unleashed a blitzkrieg of tweets so erratic that they shocked even battle-hardened Trump watchers.
Doctors said his physical vital signs were improving; pollsters said his political vital signs were flatlining, with his rival, Joe Biden, leading by 16 percentage points in a CNN survey less than a month before the presidential election. Some said that, if Trump was deliberately trying to sabotage his own campaign, he could hardly do a better job than the past week.
“This @POTUS has turned his own political suicide into a surreal reality show,” tweeted David Axelrod, a former chief strategist for Barack Obama.
Trump, 74 and clinically obese, woke up last Saturday in the presidential suite at the Walter Reed medical center in Bethesda, Maryland, with his diehard flag-waving supporters massing outside. He had flown there the previous evening after testing positive for Covid-19, a virus he spent months downplaying in both words and actions even as it killed more than 210,000 Americans.
With global speculation at fever pitch, his team of doctors emerged on the hospital steps to insist their star patient was improving. But as spin doctors, they were less practiced. Sean Conley, the White House physician, repeatedly declined to say when the president received his last negative test [the White House still refuses to disclose this].
He also made excruciating efforts to avoid directly answering whether Trump had received supplemental oxygen. Twenty-four hours later, standing at the same spot, he admitted that Trump had. “I didn’t want to give any information that might steer the course of illness in another direction,” Conley haltingly explained. “And in doing so, you know, it came off that we’re trying to hide something, which wasn’t necessarily true.”
Trump’s other treatments consisted of an experimental antibody cocktail, the antiviral drug remdesivir and, after his blood oxygen level twice dropped suddenly, dexamethasone – a steroid typically only recommended for the very sick.
On Sunday evening Trump, a former reality TV star, sprang another surprise, riding in an armored limousine outside the hospital and waving to supporters. Experts warned that he was endangering his Secret Service detail in the airtight vehicle. An attending physician at Walter Reed called the stunt “insanity”.
To further consternation, Trump announced via Twitter on Monday that he would be returning to the White House and the medical team said they backed the decision. Just in time for the evening news, the president flew across Washington to the White House, climbed a staircase to the balcony, gave a double thumbs up – and promptly peeled his mask off.
He went on to tweet videos of his sunset return accompanied by heroic music and remarks in which, breathing more deeply than usual, he claimed: “Nobody that is a leader would not do what I did. And I know there’s a risk, there’s a danger, but that’s OK. And now I’m better. Maybe I’m immune! I don’t know. But don’t let it dominate your lives. Get out there. Be careful. We have the best medicines in the world.”
It was the opposite of what any science or public health official would advise as the US continues to report more than 44,000 new Covid-19 infections each day.
Indeed, Trump walked into a building very different from when he left it. The White House complex was described as a “ghost town” with more than a dozen staff, including the senior adviser Stephen Miller and the press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, having tested positive.
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