The word lunacy is derived from the ancient notion that the full moon can cause madness. Last night’s full harvest moon rose as Donald Trump was getting the results from his and Melania’s COVID-19 tests, taken that day after Hope Hicks was diagnosed with the coronavirus. The scene in the past 24 hours in the White House has been panic, with two thoughts competing for dominance: One, who is going to be diagnosed next and two, how the hell do we spin this, 32 days out from the election? Wall Street Journal:

White House aides were rattled by the developments and alarmed by the absence of internal communication, people familiar with the discussions said. One White House official described the mood as “hair on fire.” Aides texted each other to ask if they were healthy and whether they had been tested.

White House officials are discussing restricting access to the president in the future or testing all officials in the West Wing, rather than only those who come into contact with the president, though no decisions have been made, the people said.

FAULT LINE

Some people close to President Trump tested positive for Covid-19, and others negative. Here is a list of key officials.

Positive:

  • President Trump

  • First Lady Melania Trump

  • White House adviser Hope Hicks

  • RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel

Negative:

  • Vice President Mike Pence

  • Chief of Staff Mark Meadows

  • Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin

  • HHS Secretary Alex Azar

  • Attorney General William Barr

  • White House adviser Dan Scavino

  • White House adviser Jared Kushner

  • White House adviser Ivanka Trump

  • Press secretary Kayleigh McEnany

  • Source: White House, Justice Department, HHS, Treasury

It couldn’t be determined whether other White House officials who had come into contact with the president planned to quarantine. Some aides in the West Wing were working from home, and all East Wing staffers were directed to work from home until further notice, an administration official said.

Mark Meadows proudly trumpeted, “We have a president that is not only on the job but will remain on the job.” That’s simply not reality. The man has a fever and he’s being treated as we speak with an experimental drug.

I would not expect this White House to be any more truthful about Trump’s actual condition than it has been about anything else. This silence from Trump speaks volumes. The Atlantic:

The longer Trump stays out of view, the less anyone will take Pence’s word for it [that the first couple are “both well.”] The president has made himself such a steady presence in American lives, tweeting through every controversy, at all hours, and never missing a chance to weigh in—that the roughly 14 hours of silence (as of this writing) feel monumental. (When Trump went 46 hours without a tweet in June 2017, it made headlines; his posting frequency has actually increased since then.)

Even when Trump is in his personal quarters, he tends to tweet incessantly. He seldom sleeps for long. Many reports have said he likes to sit in bed watching TV and tweeting. If the president is on bed rest, he isn’t using it on his normal pastime.

The silence is all the more remarkable because Trump so values the appearance of vigor. At several moments in the past year, the president has appeared physically shaky—struggling to drink out of a glass, or to descend a ramp—at times when he is, ostensibly, healthy. Trump has bristled at any questions about his health, in part because he has invested a great deal of effort in spreading the message that his opponent, Democrat Joe Biden, is not fit enough to hold the office. (Voters seem to have largely rejected that message.) […]

Trump is hardly the first president to offer fishy information about his health. Grover Cleveland secretly had surgery on a boat to remove a tumor. Woodrow Wilson and Dwight Eisenhower covered up acute health incidents; Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan hid chronic issues. But given public worries about COVID-19, and given the president’s poor record for honesty, especially about his health, the public will rightly have more questions the longer it takes for him to reemerge. A tweet will no longer be enough, given that aides, including Dan Scavino, are known to sometimes tweet from the president’s account.

Former Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney acknowledged as much during a Fox appearance this morning, saying, “I’m not too concerned about the health; I’m just concerned about the perception.”

The perception isn’t getting any better as long as the fluffers and sycophants say how wonderful everything is and Trump himself is as quiet as the grave. That’s not a good image.

This is what my gut tells me: Trump is a profound coward. Right now he’s mewling and puking and complaining about an unkind fate, unless I miss my guess. I think his wretched physical condition prior to catching the virus has rendered him sicker than a dog and I think that the White House medical staff is moving heaven and earth to try to cover it up and stall for time. This is all conjecture, because we’re getting fed pieces of information selectively from the White House. But I don’t see him going out on the Truman balcony and waving to the crowd. I think that COVID-19 is the game changer and it is his Waterloo. And he made it that way, it didn’t have to be so.

News just broke at approximately 5:20 EDT that Trump was being helicoptered to Walter Reed. I think his condition is being underplayed.

“Out of an abundance of caution, and at the recommendation of his physician and medical experts, the President will be working from the presidential offices at Walter Reed for the next few days,” the White House said in a statement, according to CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.

We’ll see what we shall see. Just bear in mind all the facts: 1. The man is in lousy physical condition; 2. He’s in an age bracket where COVID-19 hits hardest; 3. Last but emphatically not least — he’s got no guts, either morally or physically. I give it 50/50 he doesn’t walk out of Walter Reed. All the presidents’ horses and all the presidents’ men can only do so much. They’re doctors, not magicians.

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1 COMMENT

    • One thing you can always depend on from this White House and that is that you’re always going to get a fragment of the truth. Going on that basis alone, I think that whatever dire outcome we speculate cannot be that far from the truth.

      • The fact that they whipped him out on a chopper tells us they are risking his life on a chopper in a busy area for the speed of delivery with outboard devices and personnel … MD’s/RN’s/oxygen/ventilation/breathing tube/monitors

        Probably slapping his hands off his phone …

        • I agree. If he was going “to work from offices” at the hospital, they would have driven. How stupid do they think the American people are?

    • They did not want to spoil Trump’s October surprise … 🙂

      Are we sure he’s getting an experimental drug or just a med better known as a Clorox product …. ?! 🙂

  1. Those that are negative – too soon to say they won’t get it. They’ve been exposed. Best case – quarantine for 14 days. Even Pence. This is a security situation for our country and f*ck 45 for causing it.

  2. Well, thanks for letting me know how close to the Reaper he’s getting! Bet you his nonexistent fortune he’ll be on a ventilator by the end of the weekend.

  3. The longer I see Marine One sitting there the more I think you’re right on that 50/50 of him leaving Walter Reed in anything than a casket. It might well be his last ride on Marine One. I hope not. I want him alive and healthy to witness the whupping he’s gonna get at the polls a month from now. You’re also right that he’s sicker than what they’ve let on. Some Covid patients go bad fast. He’s got enough risk factors that he could well be one of those who seem sick but stable and then their condition falls over a cliff.

    One other thing I will note. I think when a timeline is established it will be that super spreader event of nominating Barret that will prove to have been the source.

    • I think Trump might end up dying and I don’t know where that would take things. I think we need to see if power gets transferred to Pence. That’s the first sign that’s all over. They have to inform Pelosi when they do that, by law, so she will tell us the truth. I don’t trust any of these people.

      • If Count Christian gains hold of supreme executive power, go out & buy crosses, garlic, stakes, & a wooden mallet. Also watch ur children & don’t go into the moors, stick to the road.

      • It would depend on when. I hope it doesn’t come to that. I really do. It’s not out of any compassion for Trump. Quite the opposite. I want him a alive and conscious to know he’s gotten an electoral ass whipping. Anyway, should he die before the election the RNC has the right to designate a new candidate. They (like us) have a “just in case” process for this that can make for a new nominee very quickly, assuming a fight doesn’t break out within state delegations. Each state and territory has three members, who have the option of (with their delegate’s consent) giving all that state’s delegates to one candidate or splitting them either two or three ways. The process could be carried out within a day thanks to modern telecommunications. It only gets weird and “charlie fox” if no one emerges with a majority of delegates. The problem would be (and you can bet the farm the GOP would try to go to court) that there simply wouldn’t be time to reprint ballots, not to mention that so many ballots are in people’s hands already and a good deal have been turned in with more coming in every day. However, staunch GOP voters would still cast their vote and it wouldn’t matter if it was Trump’s name on the ballot or someone else’s. Things are different if a President- Elect dies during the transition period. That gets us into a mess of varying state’s EC laws and I’m not sure even with Barret on the Court that SCOTUS would want any part of it although if different Circuits issue differing rulings on the same point of law they will have no choice. But odds are the election would be tossed to the House which is why, unless we take over in certain states (mine – NC – for example) which is dicey at best the GOP has an advantage because each state gets ONE vote. Unless things change in our favor in a few state houses that means the GOP would under the Constitution be able to impose a GOP President on the country no matter how badly Trump would lose the election.

        If there’s any good news in all this the whole EC issue will get a LOT of discussion and Democrats should propose and pass a Constitutional Amendment to abolish the EC in favor of a direct popular vote. It would be a helluva fight to get three quarters of the states to ratify but enough of them might be shaken up by this current situation to allow it.

  4. Has anyone thought that this might all just be another Trump lie? Perhaps this is his “October Surprise”. If I ponder on this for a bit and wonder just what political advantage there might be to the president faking a Covid infection, I can come up a couple. But not being a lawyer or Constitutional Law expert, I suspect that there are dozes more.

    Some examples:
    — Perhaps he’s trying to play the “sympathy” card.. poor guy got Covid by attending his rallies
    — Play the “Q-Anon” conspiracy theory… “The Democrats infected the President” only to have him triumphantly leave the hospital like a white knight just 1 week before the election
    — Simply bu shutting him up, he has a better chance of winning those elusive “swing voters”
    — Allowing Mike Pence to concentrate full time on winning back disillusioned Christian voters
    — Create a perfect excuse for losing the election… “How could he campaign while he was deathly ill in the hospital?”
    — To avoid another shit-show debate performance which his campaign staff told him LOST him undecided voters
    — To attract our attention to Walter Reed while he actually left out the backdoor for someplace else, to do something else
    — To miraculously recover and show that the Corona Virus really isn’t any worse than the common flu…
    –Or perhaps to say that its all just a scam by the Democrats and that nobody actually dies from it… again, just a plot to undermine his presidency by the Democrats

    The more I write, the more possible options I see. I have ZERO reason to believe that this president is being honest about his medical condition because he has NEVER been honest about anything. Plus, as mentioned in the article above, there is a deep and rich history of presidents not telling the American public the truth about their health.

  5. I just saw his video where he meekly waves & downplays going to the hospital by helicopter to be there an undetermined period of time. He looked pale. Must be something to ‘experiment’ at this stage with an unproven treatment. The other weird thing is the news reports of it being an antibiotic cocktail. No reputable MD would advise a treatment for a bacterial infection for an previously unknown virus. Of course we can take their word as gospel. Im sure they know what they are doing. Thank you supreme leader.

    • It’s an antibody combo that’s in 2nd-stage tests, being given to him on a “compassionate use” request. And he didn’t have his makeup on.

  6. Senator Tom Tillis has tested positive and will enter quarantine. He is a member of the Judiciary Committee and met with Barrett on Wednesday. If other GOP committee members also test positive, her nomination may collapse.

  7. I believe all the positives. I don’t believe any of the negatives. Although I grant some may be true, if I were Speaker Pelosi or Senator Harris, I would NOT believe that Steven Mnuchin or Mike Pence tested negative. And i would prepare whatever it would take to protect myself from exposre to either.

    • Do give both Pelosi and Harris credit for more caution than what Trump has ever shown. Remember…there is a reason more Republicans than Democrats keep getting sick.

  8. “We have a president that is not only on the job but will remain on the job.”

    Well, when he considers that the job is for him to do what he likes and siphon loads of cash into his personbal avccounts, I’d agree that he is on he job.

    Running the country is a different matter

  9. Since Wednesday, he has tweeted four times and they all sound like they were written by someone else trying to throw in one of his signature phrases or capitalize randomly like he does. But I don’t think he wrote them.

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