President at hospital overnight after putting staff ‘at risk’
Walter Reed physician among critics of Trump drive-by visit
Niece says president sees illness as sign of ‘unforgivable weakness’
Poll: Trump 14 points behind Biden month before election
Sign up for Fight to Vote – our weekly US election newsletter
LIVE
Updated More
Play Video
11:34
Donald Trump’s election campaign in 2016 targeted nearly 3.5 million Black Americans to deter them from voting, and the battle for the right to vote is just as important in 2020. Kenya Evelyn travels to Florida where it’s the Democrats’ most loyal bloc, Black women, who are also bearing the brunt of the coronavirus outbreak, with its impact accelerating the fight for voting rights. From mail-in ballots and early voting, to felon disenfranchisement, Black voters are wielding their power to demand more from Democrats ahead of November
Black voting power: the fight for change in Milwaukee, one of America’s most segregated cities
Topics
US elections 2020
Black voting power
Joe Biden
Democrats
Florida
Miami
US voting rights More
Maybe Donald Trump got Covid-19 at the Rose Garden ceremony announcing his nomination of Amy Coney Barret to the supreme court. On Saturday 26 September, Donald Trump gathered major Republican party leaders at the White House to celebrate his nomination of the rabidly anti-choice judge, along with national leaders in the anti-choice movement. At the event, onlookers were seated uncomfortably close together, and virtually none of them are wore masks. Barrett and her pointedly large family huddled around Trump both indoors and outdoors, without a thought of social distancing. Later, videos emerged from the event of Republicans hugging. In one, the attorney general, William Barr, wipes snot from his nose on to his hand, and then goes on to shake hands with many others – a metaphor for his time at the justice department that is perhaps a bit too on the nose. As numerous national Republicans sicken, at least eight cases of the virus have now been linked to that event.Or maybe Trump got it the night before, on Friday 25 September, when he mingled, again unmasked and indoors, at a campaign fundraiser at the Trump International hotel in Washington. He rubbed elbows there with members of the Republican National Committee, including Ronna McDaniel, the committee chairwoman. McDaniel flew home to Michigan the next day, and began exhibiting symptoms of the virus a few days after. She has since tested positive.Or maybe he got it at the presidential debate in Cleveland the following Tuesday, 29 September. Trump and his entourage were supposed to be tested upon their arrival at the venue, as the Biden camp was. Instead, the Republicans showed up late, and refused both testing and masks. Trump proceeded to scream, unmasked and nearly uninterrupted, for 90 minutes. Viewers watching on high-definition screens could see droplets of spittle flinging from his mouth. Among other things, at the debate he disparaged his opponent, Joe Biden, for wearing masks in public. Eleven cases have now been traced to that event.It’s not clear when Trump last tested negative for the virus, and the White House has been elusive at best and deceptive at worst in their public accounts of when the administration became aware that the virus was circulating in the president’s inner circle and just how bad his condition has gotten. This past Friday, 2 October, Trump was airlifted to the hospital – but not until after financial markets had closed for the weekend. When a team of doctors gave a rosy depiction of his condition to assembled news cameras on Saturday, saying his prognosis was good, his chief of staff promptly contradicted them in an attempted off-the-record conversation with pool reporters, in which he said that the president was doing much worse than the doctors had made it seem.The administration’s handling of the president’s illness has had the shambolic quality of Wile E Coyote attempting to catch Road Runner. They are caught in such absurdly transparent lies that one almost expects their noses to grow long as they speak, or a cartoon anvil to drop on their heads in divine retribution. It would be funny, if only these people did not also possess such terrifying power along with their ostentatious incompetence.But even the Trump camp have not been able to deny that the president knew he had been exposed by Thursday, when Hope Hicks, the senior White House aide to whom the president is usually in breathingly close proximity, tested positive for the virus. Hicks had begun feeling ill while traveling with Trump on Wednesday night, but accompanied him on flights both before and after the onset of her symptoms. Despite Hicks’s positive test, Trump departed on Thursday for a campaign fundraiser at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, where he schmoozed with guests both indoors and outdoors, did not wear a mask and welcomed donors to a buffet dinner.Why would Trump endanger his own supporters like that? It has long been clear, both from their own statements and from reporting done by outlets such as Vanity Fair, that the Trump administration considers deaths and illness from the virus in blue states to be insignificant, acceptable casualties. But the choice in Bedminster to endanger his own supporters defies that logic. Unless of course, you are Donald Trump, who views every interaction as transactional and every human being as a number. The Bedminster event, remember, was a campaign fundraiser – it ultimately raised more than $5m for his re-election bid. To Trump, even those who fulfill his own need for constant adulation are less valuable as human beings than they are as sources of revenue. And Trump certainly does not care about the workers whose labor is necessary to put on such events – the security and janitors and caterers and tech staff whose health, lives and families are threatened by his carelessness. The reason Trump continued on to the Bedminster fundraiser even after knowing he had been exposed is simple: he cares less about even his supporters’ safety than he does about getting their money.There is something poetic, even perversely satisfying, about seeing Trump’s delusions about his own power and imperviousness defied by his infection. Here is a man who has wielded money, privilege and deception to evade consequence in every manmade system. He is not capable of being shamed, and he is seemingly invulnerable to the law, with prosecution of his crimes suspended until he leaves office and civil lawsuits impacting him with all the effectiveness of spitballs launched at a tank. Bad things don’t usually happen to Donald Trump, no matter how much recklessness he exhibits or how much suffering he inflicts, because he is usually able to lie, buy or cheat his way out of his comeuppance. Not so with the virus, which has infected him even though he has treated the disease more as an inconvenient nuisance rather than a national emergency.Donald the Super-Spreader is an insult to those Americans who have altered their own lives beyond recognition in order to fight the coronavirusBut more than anything, Donald the Super-Spreader is an insult to those Americans who have altered their own lives beyond recognition in order to fight the coronavirus. As lockdowns began in March, the Americans who retreated to their homes were told that the extreme measures were temporary ways to slow the speed of the disease and buy time for the government to come up with a viable response. But the Trump government did not respond, and instead our lives warped and narrowed. Millions have lost their jobs. Children’s educations have suffered as schools have been forced to close. Women who must supervise their children’s online learning have been forced from the workforce at a disproportionate rate, and many of those women’s careers will never recover, their dreams dashed permanently by the incompetence of the federal response. Meanwhile, many of us have not seen our parents in months, for fear of infecting them. More than 210,000 Americans have now died from the virus, most of them alone and all of them needlessly.Meanwhile, nothing about national Republicans’ lives seem to have changed. They go on hugging and gathering in close together, wiping their noses on their hands and then shaking them, yelling wide-mouthed about the ineffectiveness of masks. Watching the videos of the Rose Garden ceremony, I couldn’t help but think of the funerals I have attended over the past year over Zoom. Trump and the national Republicans have been living in a different world from the rest of America. Now that the virus has reached them, maybe they will have to know what our world feels like. More
Play Video
1:13
After releasing an upbeat video message from the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, US president Donald Trump left hospital to wave to his supporters in a motorcade. Throngs of flag-waving Trump supporters gathered outside the hospital where Trump was being treated for Covid-19. The move was criticised as insanity’ by one Walter Reed doctor. In the video message Trump thanked the medical team, saying: ‘The work they do is just absolutely amazing.’ He added that his time in hospital has been ‘a very interesting journey’ and that he has ‘learnt a lot about Covid’.
Topics
Donald Trump
Trump administration
US elections 2020
Coronavirus outbreak More
Donald Trump
President says next few days will be the ‘real test’ as he battles Covid-19
Donald Trump diagnosed with coronavirus – live updates
Play Video
4:09
Trump films first message from hospital: ‘We’re going to beat this coronavirus’ – video
Donald Trump released a new video message on Saturday evening saying that he is “doing well”, his wife Melania is “doing very well” and the next few days will be the “real test” after he was taken to hospital with Covid-19.
“I came here, wasn’t feeling so well, I feel much better now. We’re working hard to get me all the way back,” Trump said from behind a desk in his suite at the Walter Reed hospital in Bethesda, Maryland.
The US president, looking pale, said: “I’ll be back, I think I’ll be back soon, and I look forward to finishing up the campaign the way it was started and the way we’ve been doing and the kind of numbers that we’ve been doing.”
The video countered some reports that Trump’s prognosis had worsened since he was admitted to the military hospital on Friday evening, several hours after he announced on Twitter that he and the first lady, Melania Trump, had contracted the virus.
Shortly after the video was released, White House doctor Sean P Conley said Trump was free of fever and making substantial progress, but was “not yet out of the woods”.
“He spent much of the afternoon conducting business, and has been up and moving about the medical suite without difficulty,” Conley said in a statement.
Earlier on Saturday, the White House had sent contradictory messages about the president’s health, with a senior official saying his vital signs were “very concerning” even as doctors portrayed a patient recovering well from Covid-19.
While one doctor said Trump had told them “I feel like I could walk out of here today”, the White House chief of staff Mark Meadows gave reporters a less rosy assessment, saying: “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.”
In his message, Trump did not directly contradict Meadows, saying: “I just want to tell you that I’m starting to feel good. You don’t know over the next period of a few days, I guess that’s the real test, so we’ll be seeing what happens over those next couple of days.”
Trump said his wife was “doing very well” and joked about their age gap.
“Melania is really handling it very nicely. As you’ve probably read, she’s slightly younger than me – just a little tiny bit – and therefore, just, we know the disease, we know the situation with age versus younger people, and Melania is handling it statistically like it’s supposed to be handled. And that makes me very happy, and it makes the country very happy.”
The president thanked his medical team – “the incredible medical professionals, the doctors, the nurses, everybody, at Walter Reed Medical Center – I think it’s the finest in the world – for the incredible job they’ve been doing.”
And he referred to the coronavirus epidemic, which has taken the lives of around 200,000 Americans, derailed the US economy and in recent days threatened Trump’s re-election campaign as White House staff and Republican senators have become infected.
“This was something that happened, and it’s happened to millions of people all over the world, and I’m fighting for them. Not just in the US, I’m fighting for them all over the world. We’re going to beat this coronavirus, or whatever you want to call it, and we’re going to beat it soundly,” Trump said.
The decision to put Trump in hospital came after he had experienced difficulty breathing and his oxygen level dropped, according to a source familiar with the situation.
In his message, Trump said he had “no choice because I just didn’t want to stay in the White House”.
“I was given that alternative. Stay in the White House, lock yourself in, don’t ever leave, don’t even go to the Oval Office, just stay upstairs and enjoy it, don’t see people, don’t talk to people and just be done with it and I can’t do that,” he said.
“I can’t be locked up in a room upstairs and totally safe and just say: ‘Hey, whatever happens happens.’ I can’t do that.”
After being admitted to Walter Reed, Trump was placed on a cocktail of drugs including a five-day course of Remdesivir, an intravenous antiviral drug sold by Gilead Sciences that has been shown to shorten hospital stays.
He is also taking an experimental treatment, Regeneron’s REGN-COV2, one of several experimental Covid-19 treatments known as monoclonal antibodies, as well as zinc, vitamin D, famotidine, melatonin and aspirin, according to Conley.
During his message Trump made no mention of being placed on supplemental oxygen before he was admitted. “If you look at the therapeutics, which I’m taking right now, some of them, and others are coming out soon that are looking like – frankly, they’re miracles if you want to know the truth. They’re miracles,” he said.
Trump is considered vulnerable because of his age and weight. He has remained in apparent good health during his time in office but is not known to exercise regularly or to follow a healthy diet.
Trump also thanked Americans for their “almost bipartisan” well wishes and concluded his message by saying: “I think we’re going to have a very good result.”
Topics
Donald Trump
Trump administration
US politics
US elections 2020
Coronavirus outbreak
news
Share on Facebook
Share on Twitter
Share via Email
Share on LinkedIn
Share on Pinterest
Share on WhatsApp
Share on Messenger
Reuse this content More
Play Video
4:09
Donald Trump has posted his first video message from Walter Reed hospital, saying: ‘I came here, wasn’t feeling so well. I feel much better now. We’re working hard to get me all the way back … I’ll be back, I think I’ll be back soon.’
During the four-minute video posted to Twitter, the president said that he could have stayed isolated at the White House after his Covid-19 diagnosis, but that he ‘can’t be locked up in a room and totally safe’ – adding that ‘as a leader you have to confront problems’.
Trump acknowledged that the ‘next few days will be the real test’ and said the first lady, Melania Trump, who also tested positive for coronavirus, was ‘really handling it very nicely’ – with the president joking about their 24-year age gap during his video message
Trump’s Covid diagnosis: how it happened and what to expect
Trump’s base stays loyal as president fights Covid
Sign up for Fight to Vote – our weekly US election newsletter
Topics
Donald Trump
Coronavirus outbreak
US politics
US elections 2020 More
Third Republican senator tests positive
How healthy is Trump?
Liberals respond to Trump infection
Trump’s base stays loyal as president fights Covid
Sign up for Fight to Vote – our weekly US election newsletter
LIVE
Updated More
Donald Trump
News that the president has contracted coronavirus prompted alarm, confusion and schadenfreude among Trump supporters More
