👑 Portrait of a President

dragonfly9 · October 5, 2020, 7:34pm

Lots of dodging from Dr. Conley…

adding

matt · October 5, 2020, 9:39pm

As America locked down this spring during the worst pandemic in a century, inside the Trump White House there was the usual defiance.

The tight quarters of the West Wing were packed and busy. Almost no one wore masks. The rare officials who did, like Matthew Pottinger, the deputy national security adviser, were ridiculed by colleagues as alarmist.

President Trump at times told staff wearing masks in meetings to “get that thing off,” an administration official said. Everyone knew that Mr. Trump viewed masks as a sign of weakness, officials said, and that his message was clear. “You were looked down upon when you would walk by with a mask,” said Olivia Troye, a top aide on the coronavirus task force who resigned in August and has endorsed former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

In public, some of the president’s favorite targets were mask-wearing White House correspondents. “Would you take it off, I can hardly hear you,” Mr. Trump told Jeff Mason of Reuters in May, then mocked Mr. Mason for wanting “to be politically correct” when he refused.

matt · October 5, 2020, 9:39pm

After days of internal and external snafus as the virus spread through all levels of the White House, President Trump left his hospital suite just before 5:30 p.m. yesterday, and took an SUV ride outside the Walter Reed gates to wave at the supporters who have lined the road ever since he arrived Friday evening.

Frustration and anxiety built among White House staffers, who say they went days with no internal communication from Meadows about protocols and procedures — including whether they should show up to work — as COVID tore through the West Wing.

A senior White House official said it was “ridiculous’” that there had been no proper internal communication from the chief or operations officials since COVID started rapidly infecting their colleagues: “A bunch of us are talking about it and just gonna make the calls on our own.”

matt · October 5, 2020, 9:40pm

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/10/04/trump-covid-19-discharge/

The assertion by President Trump’s doctors that he could be discharged from the hospital as early as Monday astonished outside infectious-disease experts, who said he remains in a dangerous period of vulnerability when some covid-19 patients decline precipitously and require urgent intervention.

During a midday briefing Sunday on the president’s medical condition and treatment, White House physician Sean Conley and his team twice referred to planning to release Trump as early as the next day “if he continues to look and feel as well as he does today.”

The talk of the president’s release from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center came as Conley and two other physicians treating Trump gave an upbeat but incomplete characterization of his condition. Outside doctors said they were mystified by what they said was an inconsistent portrayal of the president’s illness as relatively mild despite the aggressive mix of treatments he is getting.

The president’s medical team was at times cryptic: Asked whether CT scans showed any signs of pneumonia or lung damage, Conley replied, “Yeah, so we’re tracking all of that. There’s some expected findings, but nothing of any major clinical concern.” He declined to elaborate. At another point, Sean Dooley, a pulmonary critical care doctor, said the president’s “cardiac, liver and kidney function demonstrates continued normal findings, or improving findings.” He did not disclose which of those had been subpar.

matt · October 5, 2020, 9:40pm

Trump sought to dispel any perception of weakness on Sunday with a surprise and seemingly risky outing from his hospital bed to greet supporters even as his doctors once again rewrote the official narrative of his illness by acknowledging two alarming episodes they had previously not disclosed.

The doctors said that Mr. Trump’s blood oxygen level dropped twice in the two days after he was diagnosed with the coronavirus, requiring medical intervention, and that he had been put on steroids, suggesting his condition might be more serious than initially described. But they insisted that his situation had improved enough since then that he could be released from the hospital as early as Monday.

Windthin · October 5, 2020, 10:55pm

Insane.

You can preorder a $100 ‘Trump defeats COVID’ commemorative coin at White House Gift Shop

https://www.yahoo.com/news/now-pre-order-100-trump-195033939.html

He’s turned something that has killed 210,000 Americans into a gaudy business venture.

dragonfly9 · October 6, 2020, 12:21am

Windthin · October 6, 2020, 3:10pm

Trump’s return means more anxiety for White House reporters

My father was a Navy medic; were he with us now, he’d be so ashamed of this man.

Sean Conley, Donald Trump’s doctor and cheerleader-in-chief

Ex-Navy medic turned president’s physician struggles to answer questions about his patient

Windthin · October 6, 2020, 3:15pm

Lawyers for E. Jean Carroll contest DOJ intervention in Trump defamation case

Attorneys for writer E. Jean Carroll filed a motion in a New York court Monday contesting the Department of Justice’s notice seeking to replace President Trump’s private lawyers in her defamation lawsuit against him.

Details: “There is not a single person in the United States — not the President and not anyone else — whose job description includes slandering women they sexually assaulted,” Carroll’s lawyers said in response to the DOJ’s argument that Trump was “acting within the scope of his office” as president when he said in 2019 that she was “lying” about claims that he raped her in the 1990s.

Why it matters: Carroll’s lawyers’ filing against the highly unusual intervention of the DOJ comes less than a month before the presidential election.

The Elle magazine columnist has requested a DNA sample from the president as evidence of her sexual assault allegations in the defamation case.

If the court permits the DOJ to replace Trump’s attorneys, “Carroll’s complaint would effectively be dismissed,” per the New York Times.

What they’re saying: The Trump administration did not immediately respond to Axios’ request for comment. But a White House spokesperson told Axios last month that Carroll “was trying to sell a book” when she sued Trump for defamation “for denying her baseless claims” and that the DOJ’s action was warranted because of a law called the Federal Tort Claims Act.

Carroll said in an emailed statement that Trump “knows that I told the truth.”

Read the memorandum of law, via DocumentCloud:

https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/7222505/Carroll-Opposition-Brief.pdf
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/7222505/Carroll-Opposition-Brief.txt

Eric Trump deposed in New York probe into family business

President Trump’s son Eric Trump was questioned under oath Monday as part of New York’s investigation into the Trump Organization’s financial dealings, Bloomberg first reported and Axios can confirm.

The intrigue: The deposition comes less than a month out from Election Day, after a judge denied Eric Trump’s motion to have it delayed until after Nov. 3. The 36-year-old Trump Organization executive vice president had argued he did not want the questioning to be used “for political purposes,” per the New York Times.

Attorney General Letitia James asked a judge to compel Eric Trump’s testimony in August, and the judge gave the Trump Organization executive until Oct. 7, the Times reports.

Background: The investigation is focused on whether the Trump Organization inflated the values of four properties “to obtain favorable terms for loans and insurance coverage, while also deflating the value of other assets to reduce real estate taxes,” according to a previous statement from the office.

The probe is civil, and does not allege that crimes have been committed.

What they’re saying: The N.Y. attorney general’s office declined to comment on the latest developments.

The Trump Organization did not immediately respond to Axios’ request for comment. But Eric Trump accused James in an August Twitter post of “prosecutorial misconduct” for pursuing the Trump organization.

“Without any basis, the NYAG has pledged to take my father down from the moment she ran for office,” he said.

dragonfly9 · October 6, 2020, 8:47pm

From House Armed Services Committee Chair on T’s character.

dragonfly9 · October 7, 2020, 1:27am

Some cautions for people visiting 45 when they enter the President in his residence…surgical gowns but no full hazmat type suit, and some eye goggles, and masks.

On Monday, the White House Management Office sent out an email to senior staff who routinely interact with Trump, aimed at protecting both the president and his advisers. The memo, obtained by The Washington Post, urges staffers to “limit all foot traffic on the first floor of the West Wing as well as in the Residence” and says that “staff should only go to the Oval Office or the second floor Residence when they are requested and expected.”

For staffers who do visit the Oval Office or the second floor of the residence, where Trump lives and holds meetings, and who expect to be within six feet of the president, the memo also requires that they wash their hands or use hand sanitizer before entering; remove any outer garments; and don personal protective equipment provided in an “Isolation Cart” — including a yellow gown, surgical mask, protective eyewear and gloves.

The White House has not changed its mask guidance and is still following Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines that recommend, but do not require, wearing a mask. Several administration officials said nearly everyone in the White House has been wearing a mask in recent days, including Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, who usually does not sport one.

022888 · October 7, 2020, 1:37am

Boo

matt · October 7, 2020, 4:41pm

matt · October 7, 2020, 4:42pm

Trump mounts bizarre and misleading White House return despite warnings

A strongly medicated President Donald Trump bolted from his VIP hospital bubble Monday, staging a bizarre White House comeback that included an irresponsible mask removal and a reckless pronouncement there is nothing to fear from Covid-19, which has already killed 210,000 Americans.

His actions show him, if anything, entrenched deeper in denial over the virus than ever before and more committed to trashing scientific protocols that could slow the pandemic.

“We’re going back. We’re going back to work. We’re gonna be out front. As your leader I had to do that. I knew there’s danger to it but I had to do it,” Trump says in a strange campaign video whipped up by aides within an hour of his return to the White House, in which the President framed himself as a warrior who took on the virus and won.

“I stood out front. I led. Nobody that’s a leader would not do what I did. I know there’s a risk, there’s a danger,” Trump said, despite his doctors earlier saying he is still not fully “out of the woods” in his fight with the virus.

A still infectious Trump ignored advisers who wanted him to stay admitted and instead rode Marine One from Walter Reed Military National Military Medical Center back to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

On Tuesday morning, he was back on Twitter again equating the novel coronavirus to the seasonal flu, continuing his tendency to downplay the disease in public even though he fully understands its seriousness, once telling Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward it was “deadly.” Trump tweeted falsely that “in most populations” Covid-19 was “far less lethal” than flu.

“Are we going to close down our Country?,” Trump tweeted. “No, we have learned to live with it, just like we are learning to live with Covid.”

matt · October 7, 2020, 6:18pm

Tacking on a few other goodies:

Windthin · October 9, 2020, 9:58am

Coughing Trump tells Hannity he’s healthy and ready to hold rallies

Recuperating from the coronavirus and plunging in the polls, President Trump is retreating to his safe spaces: Twitter, Fox, and rallies.

On Thursday Trump started and ended his day on Fox. And, as if those appeals to his base weren’t enough, he is also holding a “virtual rally” on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show Friday afternoon.

In the morning, the President phoned into Fox Business for a rambling, off-the-rails conversation with journalist-turned-sycophant Maria Bartiromo. At this point she might as well be a spokesperson for the Trump campaign. As Washington Post’s Philip Bump wrote, she has “served as little more than a hype woman, setting Trump up with softball questions and encouraging his responses. It wasn’t the first time she has played such a role, but it was nonetheless remarkable to see the scope of her disinterest in posing any challenge to the president.”

While speaking with Bartiromo, Trump ranted and raved about his political enemies. He implored Attorney General Bill Barr to “indict these people for crimes,” specifically naming Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

Hours later, after Trump’s interview with Bartiromo had faded to a degree from memory, Jeffrey Toobin tweeted: “Just so it’s clear. [Trump] today called for [Obama] and [Biden] to be indicted and prosecuted. Have our standards fallen so far that this kind of antidemocratic authoritarian behavior passes without criticism? Is this now normal?”

A coughing Trump insists he’s well

Trump continued to careen from topic to topic on Sean Hannity’s show, promoting conspiracy theories, peddling falsehoods, and launching attacks on Democrats and the media during a roughly 25 minute conversation. But it was arguably the President’s health that took center stage. During the interview, Hannity twice asked Trump if he had been tested for the coronavirus since he became ill last week. It was a question that the President apparently couldn’t answer. Trump instead said that he will “probably” be tested on Friday. Medhi Hasan quipped about the non-answer, “Mark the date, we have reached the point where even Sean Hannity is asking Trump simple questions that the president can’t or won’t answer.”

It wasn’t just Trump’s comments on his health that drew attention. It was what the audience could hear at home. At least twice during the interview, Trump had to pause his sentences and audibly clear his throat and cough. The President insisted he was feeling great, claiming he saw his doctors earlier in the day and that they believe him to be in “great shape.” But he sure didn’t sound like he was cured, as he claimed to be.

…says he might hold rally Saturday

After Trump boasted about how great he felt and the treatment he had received, he told Hannity, “I think I’m going to try doing a rally on Saturday night. If we have enough time to put it together. But we want to do a rally in Florida probably on Saturday night. Might come back and do one in Pennsylvania the following night.” His comment aligned with reporting from the New York Times’ Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman, who wrote earlier that an “angry” Trump who was watching the news coverage of the political race had “been imploring aides to let him resume campaign rallies as soon as this weekend.”

Reminder: The President’s doctor has not held a news conference to brief the pubic about Trump’s health and allow for reporters to take questions since Monday — all as Trump, sick with the coronavirus, coughs during a national TV interview while suggesting he might do a rally in days. This is an unacceptable level of transparency from the White House.

Trump on Rush

From a strategy point of view, it’s always been bizarre to me that Trump hasn’t called into nationally syndicated right-wing radio shows more often. Yes, Fox News reaches a large swath of his base. But Rush Limbaugh is a powerhouse. Limbaugh, who has been off the air this week while undergoing treatments, said Thursday that Friday will be the “largest virtual rally in radio history.”

Brian Stelter adds: “I’d like to make a little bit of a prediction here. There has been lots of talk about whether Trump would launch a TV network if he loses the election. What if the speculation has been right but the medium has been wrong? What if he ends up with a high-profile talk radio gig next year?”

Speaking of right-wing media’s influence…

CNN’s Sandee LaMotte reports: “Viewers who trust Fox News coverage more than CNN’s are slightly less likely to take preventative measures against the novel coronavirus and a little more likely to put themselves at risk, according to a new study published Thursday in the journal BMJ Global Health.”

Also this week, a new report from Pew found that 90% of Republicans who only listened to Fox News or talk radio as major sources of political news said the country has controlled the outbreak as well as it could. Fox loyalists were also more likely to feel like the pandemic has been overblown: “As of early September, among Republicans with only Fox News and/or talk radio as major news sources, 78% say the coronavirus has been made a bigger deal than it really is.” Only small numbers of Democrats made similar assertions…

Fourth member of White House press corps tests positive

Another member of the White House press corps tested positive for the coronavirus on Thursday — meaning that four journalists have now been infected ibecause of the outbreak that has swallowed the West Wing. The White House Correspondents Association emailed members to let them know that a journalist “received a preliminary positive result for COVID-19 today after undergoing a rapid test.” The person is now awaiting results from a PCR test and is “currently asymptomatic.” According to WHCA, the person was last at the White House on October 1, a full week ago.

dragonfly9 · October 9, 2020, 2:32pm

Here’s her news conference on introducing the 25th Amendment to remove President Trump for his erratic health concerns.

dragonfly9 · October 9, 2020, 2:38pm

Zeroing in on T’s readiness for getting back to regular business, considering his recent Covid diagnosis.

President Donald Trump insisted Thursday that he is ready to resume campaign rallies and feels “perfect” one week after his diagnosis with the coronavirus that has killed more than 210,000 Americans, as his doctor said the president had ”completed his course of therapy” for the disease.

The president has not been seen in public — other than in White House-produced videos — since his Monday return from the military hospital where he received experimental treatments for the virus. On Thursday, his physician, Navy Cmdr. Sean Conley, said in a memo that Trump would be able to safely “return to public engagements” on Saturday, as the president tries to shift his focus to the election that’s less than four weeks away, with millions of Americans already casting ballots.

While Trump said he believes he’s no longer contagious, concerns about infection appeared to scuttle plans for next week’s presidential debate.

“I’m feeling good. Really good. I think perfect,” Trump said during a telephone interview with Fox Business, his first since he was released from a three-day hospital stay Monday. “I think I’m better to the point where I’d love to do a rally tonight,” Trump said. He added, “I don’t think I’m contagious at all.”

matt · October 9, 2020, 9:38pm

Couple of notables:

Isolated in the White House, Trump struggles to project a sense of normalcy after canceled debate

Trailing in the polls, stricken with the novel coronavirus and stuck in isolation at the White House, President Trump has tried to project an image of strength and normalcy that belies his troubled circumstances.

On Thursday, he spent an hour phoning into a television interview, released two video messages aimed at key voting groups, began planning rallies for next week and promised senior citizens free access to the experimental drug he falsely claimed was “a cure” for covid-19.

“I want you to get the same care that I got,” Trump said in a video message to senior citizens released Thursday afternoon on Twitter. “You’re going to get the same medicine — you’re going to get it free, no charge.”

But the president’s attempts to depict a back-to-normal presidency were punctured when the Commission on Presidential Debates announced Thursday morning that next week’s scheduled town hall meeting with Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden would take place virtually rather than in person.

Trump’s Struggles Ripple Across the Sun Belt, Endangering G.O.P. Stronghold

President Trump is fading nationally as he alienates women, seniors and suburbanites, polls show. But private G.O.P. surveys show he is in close races in solidly red states, too.

GOP plunged into crisis as Trump abruptly ends economic relief talks, dismisses virus

Facing a political reckoning as Trump’s support plummets and a possible blue tsunami looms, it is now conservatives and Trump allies who are showing flashes of discomfort with the president, straining to stay in the good graces of his core voters without being wholly defined by an erratic incumbent.

For some Republicans, the 11th-hour repositioning may not be enough to stave off defeat. But the criticism, however muted, illuminates the extent of the crisis inside a party that is growing alarmed about its political fate and confused by Trump’s tweets and decision-making.

dragonfly9 · October 10, 2020, 2:00am

T at the crossroads - knowing he could be one of the ‘diers’ of this Covid thing, and yet, he could turn it into a win. But what about his responsibility in the Nation’s lack of effective response that is rocking his chances to win in the polls…well, that just needs some more good PR.

WTFery…when do we reach the absolute bottom with this guy?

Donald Trump was on the phone, and he was talking about dying. It was Saturday, October 3, and while his doctor had told the outside world that the president’s symptoms were nothing to worry about, Trump, cocooned in his suite at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, was telling those close to him something very different.

“I could be one of the diers,” he said.

The person on the other end of the line couldn’t forget that unusual word the president used: dier. A seldom-said dictionary standard, it was a classic Trumpism, at once sinister and childlike. If being a loser was bad, being a dier was a lot worse. Losers can become winners again. Diers are losers forever. But aren’t we all diers in the end? Donald Trump, the least self-reflective man in America, was contemplating his own mortality.

He said it again: “I could be one of the diers.”

The previous day, at 12:54 a.m., he had announced that he and the First Lady, Melania, had tested positive for COVID-19 in an outbreak that would sideline dozens across the West Wing, the East Wing, the highest levels of the federal government, the military ranks, Trump’s 2020 campaign team, and prominent supporters in the religious community. The virus had barreled into the very White House that allowed its spread throughout the United States, where 213,000 were dead and 7.6 million more were infected amid the biggest economic collapse since the Great Depression.

As infections swelled nationwide, the virus made its way inside the president himself — an epic security failure with no modern analog. It was over a century ago, amid a pandemic in 1919, that Woodrow Wilson got sick in Paris. His White House blamed what it called a cold and a fever on the dreary weather. But, in fact, Wilson was sick with the virus now known as the Spanish flu, which killed hundreds of thousands of Americans as his administration looked away. One hundred and one years later, the story of Trump’s “mild symptoms” became less and less true as the hours ticked by. His fever crept up. His cough and congestion grew worse. Doctors gave him oxygen and administered a high dose of an experimental antibody treatment unavailable to the ailing masses and made using fetal tissue, a practice his administration opposes, from the drugmaker Regeneron. Still, he resisted going to Walter Reed. “I don’t need to go,” he said, according to a person who spoke to him. “I’m fine. I’m fine. We have everything we need here.”

Persuading him to leave the White House required an intervention from his doctors, members of the White House operations staff, the Secret Service, and his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner. They had failed to stop the mass deaths of high-risk Americans, but they were going to save Trump, the most important high-risk American of them all. They told him, “This isn’t just your choice. This really isn’t about you. It’s about the presidency. Our job is to protect the presidency, and you occupy it.” They asked him to think about the military and everyone else whose life would be upended if the state of the country’s leadership was in doubt.

Fine. He agreed to walk across the South Lawn and board Marine One. The White House said the move was made “out of an abundance of caution.” In a video posted on social media, the president hinted that things weren’t so great. He put it this way: “I’m going to Walter Reed hospital. I think I’m doing very well, but we’re going to make sure that things work out.”

In the hospital, Trump’s world shrank overnight in a way it hadn’t since he arrived in Washington from New York to be sworn into office nearly four years ago. Contagious and isolated from his family and closest aides, he was accompanied by Dan Scavino, the social-media director who had first been his caddie and had survived at his side longer than anyone who wasn’t blood, and Mark Meadows, his highly emotional chief of staff, who slept in a room nearby, and was attended to by a team of camera-conscious doctors. In this sterilized confinement, he tried to distract himself from his illness. He plotted his escape, planned public-relations stunts, watched TV, and took calls from friends, members of his staff, and Republican lawmakers. But he remained consumed by what the doctors told him about his chances of survival. It wasn’t a sure thing.

Nine months into the pandemic and one month away from Election Day, the president considered for the first time that the disease killing him in the polls, threatening his political future, might just kill him, too. On the phone he remarked sarcastically, “This change of scenery has been great.”

He asked for an update on who else in his circle had contracted the virus, though he expressed no regret, no indication that he understood his own decisions could have led to the infections. Unable to process the irony of his own misfortune, he tried his best to find the Trumpiest spin. Looked at one way, he was having the greatest and most important illness of all time. He had the best care in the world, and he raved about the virtues of the drugs the doctors had him on, including dexamethasone, a steroid pumping up his lungs that can induce euphoria. He was awed by the wonders of modern medicine. He said he was feeling really good, and it didn’t sound like he was lying. Then he admitted something scary. That how he felt might not mean much in the end.

“This thing could go either way. It’s tricky. They told me it’s tricky,” the president said. “You can tell it can go either way.”