By J. Michael Springmann
This business of Trump and the coronavirus is news for a variety of things. The president's health in the United States is a major issue always going back to Woodrow Wilson at the beginning of the last century. He had a stroke and his physical condition was kept from the American people for fear of setting off crashes on Wall Street, and general panic.
Another instance, when Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s had had a couple of heart attacks. This had been kept from the press for fear of, again, crashes in the financial markets and worrying the American people about the strength of their leadership. And the president somehow is seen as a superman, a god on earth, someone whose health reflects that of the country.
And in Donald Trump's case, he's been very, very critical of the hysterical nature of the reaction to the virus. And I think that news media are zeroing in on that and playing up any changes, however slight in his condition. They worry that his blood oxygen level has sunk below 95 or 96%, on one or two occasions, not deeply crashing, but you know, a couple percentage points above, or I'm sorry, below normal, which they here got the bottom limit is about 95% and then given him oxygen supplemental in the hospital.
Well, I've been in the hospital and I've been given supplemental oxygen, that is a matter of course, it's pure protection on the part of the doctors. They can't see their patient having problems especially the President of the United States. The man has to be seen as getting the best of care. And the information that keeps coming out that goes up and down wildly. They are talking about releasing him Monday at the same time they worry about he is taking a variety of steroids and experimental drugs like Remdesivir. And they are not really clear on what's happening. I think that it's probably politics and is partly the natural question of the doctors especially given the fact that their patient is the President of the United States.
So I think that things working against Trump. The fact that he's somewhat overweight, and his age, I think he's 74. And people who are older and in not perfect physical condition like Trump might be, or I guess is would be seen as someone very much at risk for very difficult consequences for the virus. Yet you see people who were young, who were children, who were young adults, getting the virus as well, and then being hammered by it.
I've seen reports from a Russian journalist who's somewhere around 30 and she said she was very much hammered by the disease, and she's young and fit.
So with Trump, who is somewhat older and somewhat fatter than the average member of the American populace, you've got to worry about this. The issue of course is that he has been critical, as I mentioned before, of the virus and the virus people want to keep the hysteria going, raving about the hundreds of thousands of deaths so far.
And in my view, I think they're playing with numbers. I've seen news reports of a fellow who was killed in a motorcycle crash, and the man was deemed to have died of the coronavirus. I know the former CIA officer, Ralph Magee, he was listed as dying at the age of 92 from the virus yet he was 92 years old. He had been in nursing in Maine for years. And he told me over the telephone a couple of years ago that he really didn't want to talk to me about international politics when I had some questions for him, because he was feeling so poorly. He was well along in years, and his health was not good.
So I marveled at the fact that someone who was old and sick, can die of the virus. And that's the primary cause, not the fact that he was old and because he had been healed, to begin with. I think the same thing goes for Trump. Trump was reasonably fit. And you've got the news media which hates him and is looking for ways to influence the election, saying this man is too weak to be reelected president. We have to have Joe Biden who is older and in fact and has mental problems.
So I think that the problem is really one of politics, one of virus politics in particular, because as I noted, Trump was critical of the hysteria about the virus. And while I think it's a significant issue, I think that the death rate from the virus isn't that much different from the death rate from a real bad case of the flu, which we've had a couple of times in the last few years.
So I think that we have to wait and see. I think we have to discount a lot of these comments that are coming out in the press. They're very sketchy. They change from day to day and hour to hour. And if they're willing to release him tomorrow and send him home to the White House apparently he's not that bad at office, some of the news media seems to claim.
J. Michael Springmann is an American political commentator, author and former US diplomat in Saudi Arabia. He is based in Washington. He recorded this article for Press TV website.
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