Tuesday, October 6, 2020

The Trump Show hospital episode closes

While being asked “Are you a super spreader, sir?" US President Donald Trump left Walter Reed Hospital via Marine One helicopter Monday to return to the White House, and the campaign trail. Apparently, Trump was bored with the hospital already. Insiders were saying he is “done with it.” Normally, remdesivir is given only in a hospital setting, but his doctors are planning to give him the fifth, and final dose, at the White House today. His doctors are justifying his early release by pointing out that the White House has fully staffed, state-of-the-art medical facilities, with the equivalent of an ICU room. With all that at home, and his illness being so mild, it's likely he never really needed to go to the hospital at all, but coming, or going, you can bet it was Trump, and not his doctor, that was calling the shots. I mean shots, as in film. This has all been political theater, a Trump Production,  

Both the video message he sent out yesterday:

“It's been a very interesting journey. I learned a lot about COVID, I learned it by really going to school. I get it, and I understand it.”

And this tweet:

Which he sent out before he left the hospital were designed to downplay the potency of COVID-19, while re-framing his campaign in relationship to it, much as I had predicted on Saturday, when I wrote:

For eight months now, Trump has been trying to “beat” Covid as a political problem with “magic,” snake oil, and other tricks of the con man. None of that is working; a vaccine can't come soon enough, and now, between the Rose Garden fiasco, and the general uptick in cases we are seeing all over the country, he is about to lose that battle for good. So, instead, he checks himself into the hospital, and neutralizes all that. Later he can emerge victorious, saying: “It was just like the flu, just like I said.”
Trump is nothing if not predictable. He sent out the tweet below this morning. A similar message saying the flu was worst than COVID-19 was taken down by Facebook, and in record time. [Tweet]:

On Monday morning he also said, “As your leader, I had to do that. I knew there was danger, but I had to do that.” Again with the cryptic messaging! Had to do what? Had to get the virus? Wouldn't it be safer just to act like you got the virus?

Later came sooner than I expected on Saturday. Still, many questions remain about his disease, and its treatment. 

The most troubling thing remains its timeline, which his doctors, and the White House staff, have gone to great lengths to obscure. We have been told that the president is tested often, even daily, for the virus. So, it's hard to imagine that the disease had progressed so quickly, and so drastically, that in less than 24 hrs. after first being discovered in testing, he already required admission to the hospital, even out of an abundance of caution. Especially now, when he is being released but still, “not out of the woods yet.”

At the first briefing on Saturday Dr. Conley said Trump is “doing very well,” and they were “just 72 hours into the diagnosis now,” which he later corrected to say he meant 3 days, he also said on Saturday “in particular days seven to ten, are the most critical in determining the likely course of this illness.” Well, that would be this Wednesday through Saturday. So, given he probably didn't need the hospital when he went there, why bring him home now?

If Trump has COVID-19, which I doubt, he is lucky enough to have a very mild case, the kind that tens of thousands of Americans catch everyday, and work through in their basements without any fanfare. I think it far more likely that he isn't really sick, but the old con man saw the advantages, even the necessity, of appearing to take a loss along with everyone else, while close to a thousand Americans are dying of COVID-19 everyday, and positive test results are popping up like mushrooms, even in his inner circle. So, to deal with this messy situation at work, he simply called in sick.

On Saturday, his doctors said he had “a mild cough and some nasal congestion and fatigue.” That had been on Thursday, but that was all behind them on Saturday. Later, they said “he did have a fever Thursday into Friday,” but that was gone too, although on Sunday it was reclassified as a “high fever.”  On Sunday, they also said he had "two episodes of transient drops in his oxygen saturation,” and he was given 2 liters of supplemental oxygen one time. They “debated the reasons for this," because transient drops in oxygen saturation, can be caused by many things besides COVID. For example, it is commonly associated with COPD and sleep apnea. According to this article “Normal oxygen saturation levels range between 95% and 100%.” Home oximetry, used to measure this at home are designed to trigger for a drop of more than 4% below a person's normal daytime level for at least five minutes. Dr. Conley said that late Friday morning Trump had a high fever, “and his oxygen saturation was transiently dipping below 94%," so it might have made the machine go beep.

The whole problem with trying to read these tea leaves left by his doctors is that Trump has no credibility, and he is giving the orders, not them. Therefore, his doctors have no credibility. I would really like to see enough information to determine whether his COVID was “slim” or “none,” because I wouldn't put it past him to make the whole thing up. That might have looked like a smart move, given the circumstances. Or he may have genuinely caught a mild case, just like 7 million other Americans, and played it into the same con. I don't know; when I looked at him squeezing at the top of the stairs last night...One thing is certain, if he doesn't already have COVID, and he goes back into his White House maskless, he soon will have it.

There is also this: I must tell you that there is one dataset that I looked at that strongly indicated that he really was feeling bad for a few days, his Twitter output. In September, Trump averaged 44 tweets a day, even while traveling, campaigning, and running the country😒. On Thursday, 1 Oct., it was 32 tweets, on Friday, the day he checked into Walter Reed, he tweeted only twice, on Saturday only three times. Sunday was 9 tweets, Monday it was up to 21 tweets, on Tuesday, he'd already done that many by noon. That's what I call a "V" shaped recovery. Now, in defense of my theory that Trump's COVID really is a hoax, I could argue that not tweeting much for a few days was necessary to make his story stick, and he knew it. But, I don't think he would have the discipline, do you? He had to be one sick puppy to get his tweets below one an hour.

Meanwhile Kayleigh McEnany, White House Press Secretary became the 18th or 19th person that was at the Rose Garden super spreader event, or close to Trump, that has tested positive for COVID-19, as Trump's White House emerges as the newest novel coronavirus hotspot. 

 Clay Claiborne 

My other posts on Trump's illness:
Is Trump really sick?
Trump's doctor isn't a very good Spin Doctor

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Monday, October 5, 2020

Why is Trump's doctor lying?

President Donald Trump's lead physician, Dr. Sean Conley, is no doubt a first rate doctor. His current problem is that he isn't a very good liar. He led another Trump doctor's press conference today, and much of what he said contradicted what he had said just the day before, or it contradicted what White House chief of staff Mark Meadows had been saying.

If these doctors' press conferences aren't expensive photo ops, they seem to be a terrible waste of some very expensive talent. Yesterday's press conference involved Dr. Conley and nine other white lab coats. This morning he was joined by seven medical workers in white lab coats. Most of these people are clearly just there for show; they say nothing. The few that do speak always prefix their remarks with praise for their team, and their commander-in-chief. It's important to remember that they are all Naval officers in the chain of command, and Trump is their boss.

It should be expected that they will lie about the true condition of the commander-in-chief if ordered to. One could easily imagine a situation where telling such lies could be a matter of national security, but there could be less scrupulous reasons as well. Theirs is not to reason why. If we could see their orders, we'd probably understand why they sound so stupid.

When I think of the meters running over the heads of all these medical people, not only the time in front of the camera, but the time in staging as well, I can't help but think, “Don't you have something else to do?” You'd never put up with it; nor would I. I'd tell Dr. Conley to go around and talk to every member of his team, and then come back here, and give us a report - and no more meetings to discuss who will say what. Only on the taxpayer's dole! Trump's $750, on a good year, might pay for about 15 minutes of this. If all this is for the political purposes I suspect, Trump is in violation of campaign finance laws, and should reimburse the taxpayers.

Dr. Conley began,  “Since we spoke last [on Saturday], the president has continued to improve.” That was good news, because on Saturday he said Trump was “doing very well.” But while his condition may have improved going forward from Saturday to Sunday, in retrospect, it seemed to be getting worse as we looked back to Friday! Whereas on Saturday, Dr. Conley had described Trump as having had a “fever” on Friday, now it had been a “high fever,” and we found out that the drug therapies he was on included not just Regeneron, and remdesivir, which we were told about yesterday, but the steroid dexamethasone too. This has raised a lot of questions among medical experts because the combined use of these three treatments at the same time is unprecedented. Much of what we were told, combined with what was said yesterday, both by the doctors and the White House, has created more smoke than light about the state of the president's health.

The most curious thing Dr. Sean Conley said was this:

“I didn't want to give any information that might steer the course of illness in another direction, and in doing so, you know, it came off that we're trying to hide something, which wasn't necessarily true. The matter is, is that [Trump's] doing really well.”

That first part comes off as very unscientific, even mystical. How could any information he gave to the public affect the course of the illness one way or another? Is he confusing the public's perception of the disease with the disease itself, the way Trump confuses the number of COVID-19 cases found by testing with the number actually existing? Of course, this is the doctor that prescribed him hydroxychloroquine. Fortunately, that is out of the picture now. 

The reason Trump is “doing really well” is that Trump isn't really sick. The only way Dr. Conley's information could steer the course of illness is if the “illness” being treated is Trump's poor standing in the polls. 

It came off that they were hiding something because they were. It's just that simple. They are doctors, yes soldiers, but doctors first, not actors or politicians. Dr. Conley gives the “tell” to that in this very statement; “wasn't necessarily true?”, who talks like that? Don't hold your breath waiting for Trump to say he's not necessarily lying to us.

If Trump really has COVID19, then why was he not wearing a mask in the hospital videos? To me, he sounds as healthy as ever, certainly not like someone just recovering from a serious respiratory virus, but what do I know? I'm not a doctor. 

Trump says in this video:

“It's been a very interesting journey. I learned a lot about COVID, I learned it by really going to school. I get it, and I understand it.”
Just as I predicted yesterday, he is going use his “illness” to present himself as “re-born” on the COVID issue, and try to reframe his relationship to it ahead of the election.

Minutes after he posted this video, he had the secret service take him on a presidential motorcade so that he could wave to his supporters on the street, and then right back to the hospital. This is in sharp contrast to the visitation rights of your average hospitalized novel coronavirus patient. They may die there without ever being allowed a visit from a family member. Then there is the small question of subjecting two secret service agents to close contact with a Covid patient, in a sealed box with recirculating air. So much for Blue Lives Matter. They promised to take a bullet for the president, not a virus.


Trump knows that British PM Boris Johnson was hospitalized with COVID-19, and his popularity soared, at least for a while, when he came out. Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro never had to go into the hospital, but recovering helped his popularity nonetheless.

And Trump is very familiar with the old medical excuse. He used bone spurs to avoid service in the Vietnam War. Trump may be the greatest con man that ever lived, but in this case, he is playing a trick that may be the most primal, and basic, con of all times. What child hasn't feigned a stomach ache, or such, to avoid going to school because of a test, a bully, or another reason that had nothing to do with illness? Later, this same ploy, or con, may be employed to avoid a sticky situation at work. That is precisely what Trump is doing. He is just doing it on the grandest scale possible.

Clay Claiborne

Read yesterday's post on Trump's illness here: Is Trump trying to pull a #ConGimmick?

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Is Trump really sick?

“The bigger the lie, the more they believe it." 

I know most of you will think me a cynic for what I am about to suggest, but actually, I think this view is rather optimistic, for if I am right, it means our commander-in-chief is in no serious jeopardy. Besides, when it comes to Trump, I find that cynicism is the best policy.

What if Trump isn't really sick? What if he is just gaslighting us?

Let's first start by looking at Trump's

Week In Review 

Last Saturday was truly the high point. In the last weeks of his re-election campaign, Trump as able to move one step closer to delivering on one of the campaign promises most cherished by his right-wing Christian base with the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, and they celebrated in the Rose Garden. Of course, being called upon to deliver on a campaign promise likely to lead to the overturning of the very popular Roe v. Wade decision, or ending the very popular Affordable Care Act, isn't likely to win him more votes. More likely, with six right-wing Justices in the bag, some who support him for those reasons, despite some ethical squeamishness, may decide they don't have to do that any more, but what could he do?

You can see the Rose Garden affair here, but fast forward for eleven minutes because that's how long Trump made them wait, maskless, seated cheek by jowl, for him. I nominate him the least likely person to get Covid at this affair because he was up front, away from the others. The only person he was close to for any length of time was Amy Coney Barrett, and she wasn't a danger because she's already recovered from Covid. 



Monday was not a good day. Thanks to the New York Times, we finally got a good look at his tax returns, and Donald Trump was revealed as a tax fraud and a failed businessman. The next day brought more of the same from the NY Times. This is very bad for him. He was already running 8% behind in national polls, and 4-6% in some key battleground states.

Tuesday was debate night. It was his big chance to turn things around, but it did not work out well for him. His adolescent antics didn't win him any new supporters, and pissed off many formerly undecideds. His refusal to just say no to white supremacy, and his marching orders to the Proud Boys, did manage to push his tax returns off the frontpage, but only at the cost of spending Wednesday denying the obvious. Trump, besides being perhaps the greatest con man that ever lived, is also a racist.

Wednesday was also the day Cornell University release a study naming Trump “the single largest driver of misinformation around Covid.” Not “a good look” when a quarter-million of the citizens you are suppose to serve are likely to be killed by Covid before election day.

The incubation period for the novel coronavirus is from 5 to 12 days, so the first indications of the Saturday super spreader now known as the #RoseGardenMassacre would have started trickling in on Wednesday. By Thursday, they would have known they were looking at another big public relations disaster. Never mind how many might die.

By Thursday morning, Trump's unwillingness to disavow white supremacy was competing with his refusal to guarantee a peaceful transition of power if he loses, for headlines, and post-debate polls were shouting that this was the most likely scenario. With only two days to go, it was turning into a pretty lousy week for candidate Trump, one month ahead of the election.

His campaign has been flailing around for weeks. They pulled their ads because they weren't working. They were running out of money. Local officials were rejecting his super spreader rallies, and the campaign manager he just replaced turned suicidal. But his most intractable problem remained the novel coronavirus. With more than 7.4 million infected, and more than 210 thousand killed in the United States, he just couldn't con enough people into believing it's a hoax. He needed a reset for his whole campaign. More than anything, he needed a face saving way of re-aligning his Covid policy in the face of the big spike in both infections and deaths this Fall is likely to bring ahead of the election.
 
Doctor, my eyes ..Just say if it's too late for me

Then he changed everything in an instant. At 10:44 PM ET Thursday, Trump tweeted out that Hope Hicks had tested positive for COVID-19, and that he and Melania were awaiting results:



Two hours and ten minutes later, Friday @ 12:54 AM ET, he tweeted out that they both had tested positive. White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said Trump had received the test results only an hour before announcing them.



Suddenly, it's as if he had turned the world on its head. The news all day Friday was about Trump and his illness. In the morning, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows was outside the White House telling reporters that Trump had “mild symptoms.” It was topic #1 for White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany's morning press conference. About 4 PM ET, the White House announced that Trump had received a dose of Regeneron, and would be checking into the hospital soon, “out of an abundance of caution.” A few hours later he took a helicopter ride to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. It's as if all that had gone before was behind him. From being the perpetuation of their misery, he had joined the Covid victims. All concerns went to him. All the criticisms, even from the beginning of the week, were drowned out. The Biden campaign even pulled its negative ads without expecting, or receiving, reciprocity.

"If you can't beat'em, join'em"

This age-old wisdom is never lost on the good con man. Sometimes a change in tactics may be necessary, and sometimes this can be a guide. For eight months now, Trump has been trying to “beat” Covid as a political problem with “magic,” snake oil, and other tricks of the con man. None of that is working; a vaccine can't come soon enough, and now, between the Rose Garden fiasco, and the general uptick in cases we are seeing all over the country, he is about to lose that battle for good. So, instead, he checks himself into the hospital, and neutralizes all that. Later he can emerge victorious, saying: “It was just like the flu, just like I said.”

It's very strange that he should first test positive less than 24 hours before he needs hospitalization, for someone who is tested regularly. That's much faster than the normal progression of the disease. It's certainly possible that his doctors wanted him there, out of an abundance of caution, even for a mild case, but I don't think he'd go along with them if he thought it would hurt him in the election. If he had listened to his doctors about wearing a face mask, we probably won't be having this conversation in the first place.

As we've all been told a thousand times over: You wear masks, not just to protect yourself from the virus, but also to protect others from you, if you happen to have the virus without knowing it. If it was only the former, only for self-protection, I might be inclined towards a libertarian bent, and say the wearing of masks should be optional. But even then, not in the case of the president. To the president I would say: We provide you with special cars, special planes, a big security detail, and a whole suite of rooms waiting at the local hospital while some Covid patients lie on gurneys in the hall waiting for a bed, not because you are Donald Trump, but because you are the President of the United States, and the welfare of the president is important to the welfare of the country. We spend billions on your security, and they can protect you from many things, but they can't protect you from a virus. So, while you may not like it. this is the job you signed up for. So once again, WEAR THE DAMN MASK!

They can't get him to wear a mask, so I don't think they could get him to check in to the hospital unless he wanted to. I suspect there are enormous resources that can be bought to bedside in the White House, if he wanted to avoid the spectacle of checking into the hospital. No, if Trump wasn't at death's door, he checked into the hospital with his “mild case” because he thought the drama of it all would help, rather than hurt, his efforts to stay in the White House. Being in the hospital assures that his illness will remain the top story, even as so many others are reporting sick.

Note, this scenario is only the slightly more honest version of the totally unscrupulous one I am proposing. In this one, he is overplaying a mild case of Covid for effect, in mine, his Covid is made out of whole cloth. Either way:  Cui Bono?
Saturday morning, the whole world waited so patiently for an update on Trump's condition. When the doctors were finally shepparded out by Mark Meadows, we got more doctors than answers.

To hear Dr. Sean Conley describe Trump's condition, it sounded like he had no problems at all. True, “Thursday he had a mild cough, some nasal congestion, and fatigue,” but that was all better now. He did quite a bit of gaslighting around the question of whether Trump had received any supplemental oxygen with repeated comments like “He's not on oxygen right now.” He wouldn't answer the question directly, like “yes, he has received oxygen.” Most reporters took it that he was trying to strongly imply that Trump had received oxygen, but wasn't being allowed to say. Later “sources” confirmed that he had received oxygen. I think he hadn't received any oxygen at the hospital, and the doctor's coy answer was the closest he would come to supporting that particular lie. Doctors have ethics. Conley led with the same kind of opiate line with regards to Trump's temperature, saying, “He's been fever free for the past 24-hours.” Only during the Q&A did he clarify, “He did have a fever Thursday and Friday,” although he was shy about giving us any numbers. He said all his organs were good, everything else was fine, and his blood-oxygen levels were normal. It sounded as if he had never been sick at all. Nevertheless, they started a five day treatment of Regeneron on Friday, and that needs to be administered in the hospital, so he is likely to be there through Tuesday. They didn't say that. I deduced it. Mark Meadows shepherded them back into the building before the questions got too specific.

A little later Meadows returned as “a source familiar with the president’s health” to sharply contradict the rosy picture painted by the doctors:
The president’s vitals over the last 24 hours were very concerning and the next 48 hours will be critical in terms of his care. We’re still not on a clear path to a full recovery.
Apparently the rosy picture wouldn't do. Looking at all those doctors telling us what a picture of health Trump is, I was reminded of the line from The Usual Suspects: “Sure you brought enough guys?” Meadows knew he needed to give us all something to worry about to keep the story interesting. A lot more people than Trump are getting sick, even in his small circle. All the talk about the contradiction between what Trump's doctors said, and what his White House said, amounted to today's distraction.

Later on Saturday, Trump tweeted out a well-produced four-minute video to a waiting, and sympathetic audience. If you ask me, he doesn't look, or sound, like someone even recovering from the flu. He looks more like someone who took off his tie to act like he is recovering from Covid.



I hope Trump comes home from the hospital soon, but if he does, we may never know whether his Covid's first name was Slim or None. In anycase, he is going to try to use this to reset his campaign. All that has gone before is in the past. He now “sees the light” on masks. He will be re-born in the fight against #COVID19. He will try to leverage his “near-death experience” into four more years in the White House. This is his first October Surprise.

Actually, this gambit isn't even all that creative. I mean, it won't exactly be the first time someone called in sick to deal with a sticky situation at work.

Just my 2¢ worth.

Clay Claiborne

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