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Mixed messages add to the confusion as well as suspicions that medical team were providing a misleadingly rosy account
Trump coronavirus treatment – live updates
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Donald Trump received oxygen at least twice since Covid-19 diagnosis – video
Donald Trump’s doctors have said his oxygen levels had dipped suddenly twice in two days and he was on medication normally prescribed for severe coronavirus cases, but they insisted his condition was improving and he could be discharged as early as Monday.
The mixed messages delivered outside Walter Reed hospital in the Washington suburbs, added to the confusion over the president’s condition as well as suspicions that the medical team were providing a misleadingly rosy account, on White House instructions.
The president’s physician, Sean Conley, admitted having misled reporters in a press briefing on Saturday when he insisted that the president had not been given supplemental oxygen. He revealed that Trump was put on oxygen on Friday morning after worrying signs emerged, and that Conley had not reported the development because he did not want to spoil the “upbeat attitude” of the president and his medical team.
“Late Friday morning when I returned to the bedside, President had a high fever and his oxygen saturation was transiently dipping below 94%,” Dr Conley said on Sunday, providing details he had concealed the previous day. “Given these two developments I was concerned for possible rapid progression of the illness. I recommended the president we try some supplemental oxygen. See how he’d respond. He was fairly adamant that he didn’t need it.”
The doctors appeared to have convinced Trump to take the oxygen feed. “He stayed on that for about an hour maybe, and then it was off and gone.”
Asked why he earlier denied the president had been put on oxygen, Conley responded: “I was trying to reflect the upbeat attitude that the team, the president, the course of illness, has had.”
He added: “I didn’t want to give any information that might steer the course of illness in another direction, and in doing so it came off that we were trying to hide something, which wasn’t necessarily true.”
Trump’s illness has upended the US election, which is due to take place on 3 November. His Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, pulled his attack ads off the air when Trump went into hospital.
The medical briefing on Sunday also revealed that Trump’s blood oxygen had dipped for a second time on Saturday, but it was unclear how low it had sunk in the two incidents. Conley was vague on the specifics.
“It was below 94%, it wasn’t down in the low 80s or anything,” the doctor said.
Oxygen saturation is an important measure of the seriousness of any coronavirus infection. Normal levels are between 95 and 100%, and any drop below 90% would be considered grave.
Conley was also vague on the result of a scan of the president’s lungs, saying that it had shown “expected findings”, without clarifying what that meant. The medical team ended the press conference and re-entered the hospital as journalists asked for more details.
They said that the president had been prescribed Remdesivir, an antiviral medication and dexamethasone, a steroid which the World Health Organization recommends for only “severe and critical” Covid-19 cases. Trump has also been given monoclonal antibodies (antibodies all generated from the same parent cell), an experimental treatment which has so far been prescribed to less than 10 people, before finishing trials, for “compassionate use”.
However, Dr Brian Garibaldi, another member of the medical team said Trump was feeling well and his condition was improving.
“If he continues to look and feel as well as he does today, our hope is that we can plan for a discharge as early as tomorrow to the White House where he can continue his treatment course,” Garibaldi said.
Trump is 74 years old and clinically obese, putting him at higher risk of serious complications.
The White House has advanced medical facilities, but the suggestion that Trump would return home after two incidents of hypoxia (low oxygen) and being on medication normally reserved for severe cases, surprised many health professionals.
Robert Wachter, the chair of the department of medicine at the University of California in San Francisco said “it seems like an awful call”.
“It seems like Trump is stable, but remains at high risk, given transient hypoxemia, some findings on chest imaging,” Wachter wrote on Twitter. “The happy talk and evasions are clearly at Trump’s direction, putting the docs in a terrible position. No way he’s ready for discharge tomorrow.”
Alongside the mixed signals about the president’s current health, there is also uncertainty as to when and how he was infected, how long he had known, and how many people he may have infected since becoming aware he had the disease.
The contact-tracing effort has focused on a White House event on 26 September to celebrate the nomination of Trump’s pick for the supreme court, Amy Coney Barrett, where more than 150 senior White House officials and top Republicans mingled without masks outside and inside, shaking hands, clustering in small groups and hugging each other.
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Among those who attended and have now tested positive: the former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, former White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, the president of the University of Notre Dame, John Jenkins, and at least two Republican senators, Mike Lee of Utah and Thom Tillis of North Carolina.
Also infected are the president’s campaign manager, Bill Stepien, the head of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel, and Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who were not at the Barrett event, raising the prospect that the White House and Republican party held more than one event that resulted in the spread of the virus among their top ranks.
Talking to the press after the medical briefing, the White House spokeswoman Alyssa Farah would not answer questions on when the president was first tested on Thursday. Asked why he had decided to travel to his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey, that day, even after his close adviser, Hope Hicks, had been confirmed positive, Farah said it “was a decision made by White House operations because he wasn’t deemed to pose a threat”. Trump took part in two fundraising receptions at Bedminster on Thursday as well as a roundtable with supporters. Attendees have since been sent emails from the Trump Organization, advising them to see a doctor if they started suffering symptoms.
The New Jersey health department said on Sunday the White House had supplied the names of 206 people who had attended Thursday’s Trump events in Bedminster.
Asked about Conley’s initial denial that the president was on oxygen, Farah said: “When you’re treating a patient, you want to project confidence, you want to lift their spirits and that was the intent.”
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Donald Trump’s beleaguered campaign team woke up to another setback on Sunday as the president began his second full day in hospital: a new national poll showing their candidate 14 points behind his challenger Joe Biden with less than a month until the election day.The NBC/Wall Street Journal survey indicating a 53-39% advantage for the Democratic party’s nominee injected urgency for Trump’s advisers already scrambling to find a strategy for the final weeks of the campaign until 3 November.It was becoming clear that Vice-President Mike Pence, who has tested negative for coronavirus, and members of Trump’s family, once they emerge from quarantine, will assume leading roles at virtual, then in-person rallies until or unless Trump himself recovers in time to resume campaigning.“It’s important that our campaign vigorously proceeds,” Trump campaign senior adviser Steve Cortes said on Fox News Sunday.“The Maga [Make America Great Again) movement is bigger than just President Trump. He’s instrumental of course but he is not the only key element. The other people, including of course the vice-president, campaign people, millions of regular Americans need to step up and to some degree fill the void that is left because our champion, our main instrument, is not able at this moment to vigorously campaign.”Pence has public campaign events planned in Arizona, Nevada and Washington DC, and will travel to Salt Lake City for Wednesday’s vice-presidential debate with Kamala Harris, Biden’s running mate, at which the Trump team is looking for a strong performance.The NBC poll showing Biden widening his lead over Trump was taken immediately after last Tuesday’s tumultuous first presidential debate in Cleveland, at which an argumentative president constantly interrupted both his rival and the moderator Chris Wallace.Jason Miller, another senior adviser to the Trump campaign, said he had “no concerns” about Pence travelling and campaigning.“We’re in a campaign, we have a month to go, we see Joe Biden and Kamala Harris out there campaigning,” he said on NBC’s Meet the Press.“He’s going to have a full aggressive schedule, as will the first family, Don, Eric, Ivanka. We have a number of our supporters, our coalition, Black Voices for Trump, Latinos for Trump, the whole operation Maga will be deploying everywhere.“We can’t hide from this virus forever, we have to take it head on [and] as soon as we’re able to get back out there in person we’ll do so,” he added.Meanwhile, Biden’s campaigning since Trump’s hospitalisation on Friday night has been low key. On Sunday, pool reporters covering the former vice-president at his home in Wilmington, Delaware, were informed of a “lid” – the formal announcement of the end of any public appearances or statements for the day – at 9.16am.The Biden campaign announced on Friday that it was suspending negative messages attacking the president while he was in hospital, although Amy Klobuchar, Democratic senator for Minnesota, said on Sunday that did not mean Trump’s handling of the pandemic, or his economic record, were off limits.“Not discussions about Covid, when you have 7 million people who have had this virus,” Klobuchar said on Fox News Sunday when Wallace asked her what subjects Biden would not discuss.“[Biden] has said, ‘Look, I want the president to be back,’ he wants to debate him more, he wants him to have a speedy recovery. It isn’t about politics or partisanship, but certainly the pandemic, the effect it has had on people’s lives, how they have miscalculated in this administration, of course that’s on the table.”Despite Sunday’s early cessation of campaign activity, Biden’s team has said it has no plans to scale back events as long as the candidate and those around him continue to test negative for Covid-19.“Joe Biden will be at that debate,” senior campaign adviser Symone Sanders said of the second presidential debate scheduled for 15 October in Miami. “We are hoping that President Trump can participate.”Some political analysts believe Trump’s hospital stay will be further damaging on his campaign following the damage wrought by a poor debate performance.“I’ve had conversations with Republicans working in swing states around the country and they are alarmed,” Steve Hayes, founder and chief executive of the Dispatch, told Fox News Sunday.“It’s not just affecting President Trump. People look at the debate performance negatively but it’s also starting to affect Republicans down ballot. If this current trajectory continues through November the third, we’re going to be talking about a lot more Republican senators at risk than we’re talking about right now.” More
One man was not surprised by revelations that Donald Trump does not deserve his reputation as a preternaturally successful businessman and deal maker. The man who helped create the illusion.Tony Schwartz spent hundreds of hours with Trump to ghostwrite his bestselling 1987 book The Art of the Deal, effectively creating the origin story of the brash property tycoon. It was Schwartz who coined the phrase “truthful hyperbole”, which neatly foreshadowed Trump and his supporters’ attempts to rationalize many of his false and misleading claims.The 68-year-old writer has long disowned the president as a malignant narcissist and expressed regret for his part in constructing the mythology. So the New York Times report, detailing chronic financial losses and vast outstanding loans, confirmed his view that Trump was always better at cutting fantasy deals than making real ones.“It’s the ultimate unmasking of the emperor with no clothes,” Schwartz said by phone from Riverdale in the Bronx, New York. “There’s nothing more important to Trump than being seen as very, very rich, which is why he’s expended so much effort in trying to claim a net worth far beyond what he actually was worth.“The fact the evidence is unequivocal that he was not the person he claimed to be means that he’s lost the central premise on which he’s based his own self-worth, because Trump confuses personal worth with net worth. There’s nothing Trump hates more than to feel weak and vulnerable and like a failure, so he won’t allow himself to acknowledge those feelings, but they’ll be there and they will affect him.“Unfortunately, should he be re-elected, one of the ways he’ll respond to that is he’ll take it out on everyone who he thinks diminished or belittled him along the way.”Success in business is at the core of Trump’s identity. With the help of more than $400m from his father over decades, he was property developer, celebrity and symbol of 80s excess. Enter Schwartz, a liberal journalist who, interviewing Trump for Playboy magazine, learned of his ambition to write an autobiography aged just 38. Schwartz said a book called The Art of the Deal would be a better idea. Trump asked him to ghostwrite it and, with a growing family and high mortgage, Schwartz agreed. It sold more than a million copies.Trump continued to burnish his image with a relentless self-publicity campaign in New York tabloid newspapers. Then he was cast in the reality TV show The Apprentice, sitting in judgment on would-be entrepreneurs from the boardroom at the flashy, marble-clad, gold-trimmed Trump Tower.He told viewers that his company was bigger and stronger than ever before. “It was all a hoax,” the New York Times reported on Monday. “Months after that inaugural episode in January 2004, Mr Trump filed his individual tax return reporting $89.9 million in net losses from his core businesses for the prior year.”Schwartz now says The Art of the Deal would have been more appropriately entitled The Sociopath.He admits with regret: “It did help to create the mythology of Donald Trump and, unfortunately, I do think it played a significant role. The Apprentice had a far bigger impact because it went on for years and it was seen by millions and millions of people, and millions of people don’t see a book. Or very rarely.“All of that, plus his own relentless self promotion over a 30- or 40-year period, rose up to a fantasy reality TV version of who he was that was never true. It’s been systematically dismantled, especially over the last four years by the evidence that everything he touches fails. Trump’s failures radically outweigh his successes and that is not the definition of a successful, much less a superior businessman.” More
