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      Donald Trump drives past supporters after saying he has 'learnt a lot about Covid' – video

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      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’. 
       

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      Welcome to Flatland, where shallow appeal ousts substance and reason | Kenan Malik

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      Four international art galleries decide to “postpone” a controversial exhibition. Donald Trump and Joe Biden take part in what has aptly been called a “shitshow” of a presidential election debate. Celebrity activist Laurence Fox launches a political movement to reclaim “British values”. On the surface, these disparate events have nothing in common. However, that is also what they have in common – each shows how art and politics are now lived on the surface with little consideration of depth or meaning.The four galleries – Tate Modern in London, Washington’s National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts – decided to postpone, until 2024, a long awaited show by the artist Philip Guston because the Black Lives Matter movement has shown the need for “the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the centre of Philip Guston’s work… [to] be more clearly interpreted”.But why should the galleries do all the “interpreting”? Art, after all, is about engagement – the same painting, novel, play or film can have many readings. That’s one reason why art can be so thrilling. We live in a world, though, in which many insist that there can only be one way of interpreting contentious issues, whether racial justice or trans rights.The other side of the denial of independent interpretation is the tyranny of the literal: that what’s on the surface is all that matters, that the external form cannot be distinguished from deeper meaning. The problem with Guston’s paintings, for the show’s curators, seems to be that many depict the Klu Klux Klan in white hoods. Guston was unswervingly anti-racist – one of his works, The Studio, shows him painting in a hood, to illustrate what he saw as his own complicity in white supremacy. If any artist fits the current political mood, it’s Guston.Politicians today seem more interested in feeding the outrage machine than in illuminating debateHowever, the galleries seem to think it impossible for audiences to be able, without their aid, to tell the difference between racism and a critique of racism. So the cultural gatekeepers have taken it upon themselves both to interpret the paintings for us in the right way and to protect us from being upset or discomfited.A world in which we fetishise surface appearance, in which people cannot be trusted with their own interpretations and in which we fear being offended or unsettled, leads also to the spectacle that was the US presidential election debate. It was less a forum for politics than a form of real-life trolling.The character of the debate was clearly shaped by Trump’s needs and his insistence on dragging politics into the gutter. But it also exposed in a particularly extreme form an aspect of politics that extends well beyond Trump. Politicians today seem too often to be more interested in feeding the outrage machine than in illuminating debate, preferring slogans to reasoned argument, dismissing scrutiny as “partisanship” and treating truth as if it were a form of entertainment.And then we have Laurence Fox’s Reclaim, “a new political movement that promises to make our future a shared endeavour, not a divisive one”, the seeming opposite of the Trump approach. It has apparently already received £5m in funding.A political movement, though, needs, well, politics. And on this, we have so far heard nothing. Where does Reclaim stand on the question of “offshoring” asylum seekers? On whether people should be fined for breaking self-isolation rules? On how far we should be able to offend others? More

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      'I feel much better': Trump releases first video message from hospital room

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      Donald Trump

      President says next few days will be the ‘real test’ as he battles Covid-19
      Donald Trump diagnosed with coronavirus – live updates

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      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.”

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      in US Politics

      The Observer view on Donald Trump's coronavirus infection | Observer editorial

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      Donald Trump’s infection has given another dramatic twist to an already tumultuous and perilous US election year. The president’s illness is a significant personal blow. Hopefully, both he and the first lady will recover quickly. The fact Trump has succumbed to a disease he spent many months downplaying and dismissing is also a serious political setback. It raises basic questions about his judgment as well as his health with less than a month remaining before the 3 November poll.Impartial observers may say that Trump’s very human misfortune in catching a virus that has killed more than a million people worldwide, including 208,000 Americans, should not adversely affect his political prospects. But such generosity of spirit ignores the harshly subjective realities of the Trump era. Ever since he emerged as a candidate for national office, it has been all but impossible to separate the personal from the political. That’s primarily because Trump invariably makes everything about him.Trump has used the multimillion-dollar personal fortune he inherited from his father to relentlessly boost his political profile. His business ventures are routinely branded with his name. He demands personal credit for almost anything positive that happens in Washington. And when his political actions as president are criticised, Trump, his ego affronted, invariably takes it personally. A recurring theme in his speeches and tweets is a self-centred grievance over perceived unfair treatment.His persistently reckless conduct over Covid-19 will incur an unavoidably high political priceTo ask that Trump’s outspoken, damaging and dangerous denialism about the threat the virus poses should not now colour the way voters regard him, or affect the way opponents react, is to ask too much. Sympathy for his personal plight will certainly grow, the more so if his condition deteriorates. But his persistently reckless conduct over Covid-19 will incur an unavoidably high political price. Trump must now face the consequences of his actions in a way that, during the course of a highly privileged life, he rarely has.Thanks to his illness, the pandemic he sought to wish away now heads the election agenda. His record, stretching back to the arrival of the disease in the US last winter, is being endlessly re-examined and replayed. It was Trump, not his more cautiously responsible Democrat rival, Joe Biden, who declared in January that “we have it totally under control”. It was Trump who likened it to ordinary flu and predicted that “one day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear”.Trump has since claimed he played down the pandemic to avoid panic. But what seemed to panic him most was the thought it might harm his re-election chances. He failed to develop a national testing strategy, passed the buck to underfunded and unprotected states and cities, undermined scientific advice and public messaging, promoted quack cures, such as injecting bleach, and mocked crucial social distancing and mask-wearing measures. However ill he is, this saga of lethal incompetence cannot be glossed over.As late as last Tuesday evening, while debating with Biden face to face when he himself may have been infectious, Trump continued to mock the Democrat for taking sensible precautions, as if mask wearing somehow compromised his manhood. “Trump is now in the position of becoming Exhibit No1 for the failure of his leadership on coronavirus,” said Democratic pollster Geoff Garin. “It’s hard to imagine this doesn’t end his hopes of re-election,” said Rob Stutzman, a Republican consultant.For all that his opponents may wish it, that latter verdict sounds premature. Other major issues – the economy, racial justice, a Supreme Court replacement for Ruth Bader Ginsburg – will continue to influence voter choices. And while Trump has been a prime source of misinformation about Covid-19, a new Axios/Ipsos survey found that, on this subject, more than two-thirds of Americans do not trust anyone in the federal government.Trump may portray a reprieve as proof of his contention that the Covid-19 threat is overratedIf Trump can ride out the infection in hospital, overcome potentially negative factors such as his age (74) and his obesity, and emerge from quarantine within 10 days or so, it’s conceivable he could again turn the personal to political advantage. Boris Johnson briefly managed this trick in Britain after he left intensive care in April. In such a case, Trump may portray a reprieve as proof of his contention that the Covid-19 threat is overrated.If, on the other hand, Trump’s illness gets worse or is prolonged, the United States, and the world, will enter uncharted waters. His campaign plans are already on hold. It is probable the next debate with Biden, due on 15 October, will be postponed. In theory at least, Trump could be unable to continue as the Republican candidate. In extremis, the vice-president, Mike Pence, might take his place in the Oval Office.It’s important that Trump recovers, not least for the much-challenged integrity of the electoral process. It’s important that he be called to account at the ballot box and, it’s hoped, be defeated by an indisputably large margin. For it is America’s recovery, not his, that is ultimately most important of all. The American people must, and surely will, find a peaceful, healthy, and constitutional way through this dark crisis year for US democracy. This can only be achieved if all work together. E pluribus unum – out of the many, one. More

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      Trump films message before leaving for Covid treatment in hospital – video

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      Donald Trump has been flown to a military hospital after contracting Covid-19. Officials said the president would spend ‘a few days’ at the Walter Reed national military medical center. While he was in transit, a video was posted to Trump’s Twitter account in which the president addressed the camera directly, thanking people for their support
      Trump taken to hospital by helicopter after Covid diagnosis
      Coronavirus live news: Trump treated with remdesivir in hospital

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