A good read about the ramifications of Trump being infected. Apologies beforehand on not getting the link from the WP.
A dozen questions to gauge the political ramifications of Trump’s coronavirus diagnosis
The novel coronavirus has
disproportionately harmed racial minorities and the poor, but President Trump’s 12:54 a.m. announcement that he and first lady Melania Trump tested positive is a reminder that no one is safe – not presidents,
not princes, none of us.
The president joins at least 7,248,000 other Americans who have
tested positive since March. Unlike virtually all of them, he is ensconced in a highly-secure cocoon. Despite Trump’s
cavalier comments and scoffing at public health guidelines, many people get tested before being allowed in close proximity to him. Access to the Oval Office has been restricted. All visitors have their temperatures taken before entering the White House grounds.
This October surprise upends the presidential campaign with just over a month until Election Day. This will draw fresh attention to Trump’s public and private squabbles with a number of the medical experts in his administration over how seriously to take the virus. The diagnosis will also make it difficult for the president to deflect attention to other issues. But it is impossible at this moment to state anything with certitude. How exactly this development impacts the final 32 days of the race depends on the answers to these dozen questions:
1) How sick will the president get?
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An unnamed White House official
told the Associated Press this morning that the president is experiencing “mild symptoms” but did not specify.
The president’s physician, Sean Conley, said in a statement that the Trumps “are both well at this time, and they plan to remain at home within the White House during their convalescence.”
“We are feeling good,” the first lady tweeted this morning.
Ronny Jackson, Trump’s former White House physician who is now running for Congress in Texas,
called into Fox News overnight to claim, without appearing to have first-hand information, that the president is asymptomatic. “I will bet you that he does not develop symptoms, that he moves on and this does not become a big deal,” Jackson said, adding that the president will “weather this storm.”
“Covid-19 has proved particularly lethal for older people, especially those who are obese and have preëxisting conditions. Trump is seventy-four and overweight,”
writes New Yorker editor David Remnick. “According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, eight out of ten covid-19-related deaths in the United States have been of people sixty-five and older. Trump’s doctors say that he is generally healthy—though, on November 16, 2019, Trump was taken to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, and Vice-President Mike Pence was reportedly placed on standby. The reasons for that hospital visit remain obscure. At one point, the President went out of his way to deny that he had suffered ‘mini-strokes.’”
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Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel disclosed this morning, through her spokesman, that she tested positive a few days ago. McDaniel appeared Thursday on Fox News but did not mention her diagnosis. She was with last with Trump at a Sept. 25 fundraiser and has been at her home in Michigan since last Saturday. The RNC statement said McDaniel received confirmation on Wednesday afternoon that she was positive and that she had chosen to get tested after a member of her family had tested positive.
The president got tested after his senior aide Hope Hicks came down with the virus. “Hicks traveled with the president to Pennsylvania for a rally Saturday, to Cleveland for the first presidential debate Tuesday and to Minnesota for another campaign rally Wednesday. Hicks was around the president and top political advisers extensively in recent days preparing for the debate,”
Josh Dawsey and Colby Itkowitz report. “She was photographed without a mask at the Pennsylvania rally clapping to the Village People’s ‘YMCA’ with other Trump aides and in Cleveland on the tarmac deplaning Air Force One. Her positive test came after she began showing symptoms at the Wednesday rally. A person familiar with the situation said Hicks was quarantined on the plane trip back from Minnesota. …
“After White House officials learned of Hicks’s symptoms, Trump and his entourage flew Thursday to New Jersey, where he attended a fundraiser at his golf club in Bedminster and delivered a speech. Trump was in close contact with dozens of other people, including campaign supporters, at a roundtable event. The president did not wear a mask Thursday, including at the events at his golf course and on the plane … Two people who spent time with him said he did not show noticeable symptoms although he seemed tired and acknowledged to other aides later Thursday that Hicks was ill. … Some aides are expected to stay at home for the foreseeable future … Some members of the Secret Service have also contracted the virus while preparing for presidential events, The Washington Post has reported.”
Vice President Pence and second lady Karen Pence both tested negative this morning, according to the White House.
In May, Pence spokeswoman Katie Miller caught the virus. In July, the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. tested positive and so did national security adviser Robert O’Brien. But the president continued to test negative at that time.
| Grey clouds loom over the White House on Friday morning. (Amanda Voisard/for The Washington Post) |
3) How transparent will the White House be about the president’s condition?
The White House’s willingness to make demonstrably false statements has undermined its credibility going into a perilous period for the presidency. Moreover, there is a long history of White Houses downplaying the severity of presidential health problems, from President Ronald Reagan’s condition after he was shot in 1981 to President Franklin Roosevelt’s polio.
4) What kind of schedule will Trump keep while convalescing?
Even if he’s feeling fine, how long does the president stay inside the White House? Aides say Trump still plans to host a conference call on covid-19 support for vulnerable seniors at 12:15 p.m. from the residence. But a fundraiser at Trump’s hotel in Washington and a rally in Florida that were scheduled for later in the day were both scrapped.
5) Will Trump change his tone about the virus? If so, for how long?
During a prerecorded speech that played at the Al Smith charity dinner in New York on Thursday night, just hours before he revealed his diagnosis, Trump exuded the same optimism that he has for months. “I just want to say that the end of the pandemic is in sight,” the president declared, “and next year will be one of the greatest years in the history of our country.”
6) How will Joe Biden adjust?
The Democratic presidential nominee is scheduled to hold two in-person events today in Grand Rapids, Mich. His running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), is scheduled to stump in Las Vegas. Neither trip has been canceled. Biden’s campaign has not answered questions about when he was last tested, but he tweeted this morning that he and his wife wish the first couple a swift recovery: “We will continue to pray for the health and safety of the president and his family,” Biden wrote.
Only hours before Trump tested positive, the Biden campaign
announced plans to begin knocking on doors of prospective voters this weekend after saying for months that doing so was unsafe and unnecessary during the pandemic. But the Trump campaign’s advantage on in-person canvassing had made Democrats nervous. Republicans have said their canvassers have already knocked on 19 million doors. Will the Biden campaign still move forward with its door-knocking plans?
Biden is also on television with attack ads against Trump. If the president’s condition worsens, that could seem to be in poor taste. Will either campaign pull any of its commercials off the air?
7) Will there be more debates?
The hot topic of conversation in politics yesterday was what changes might be made to the format for the second and third presidential debates to keep them more orderly than the first. Now the question is whether there will be any more in-person debates at all. The vice-presidential candidates are scheduled to debate next week in Salt Lake City.
8) Will Trump resume large-scale campaign rallies?
Trump really hoped to rev up his travel schedule in the final weeks. This throws a wrench in those plans. Already, he was under fire for going to Wisconsin on Saturday despite the state becoming a coronavirus hot spot. Wisconsin reported a record-high 2,887 new cases and 21 more deaths on Thursday. The number of people hospitalized with the virus has skyrocketed over the last week, and Gov. Tony Evers (D) has urged Wisconsinites to stay home, according to the
Journal Sentinel.
At Tuesday’s debate, Trump defended having big rallies where no one is required to wear facial coverings or to socially distance. “We’ve had no negative effect,” the president said. Biden said that was “totally irresponsible” and his opponent is being foolish. Trump replied: “If you could get the crowds, you would have done the same thing. But you can’t. Nobody cares.”
If Trump resumes rallies, it’s possible that some supporters who might have gone choose to stay away out of an abundance of caution.
9) Will public sympathy lead to a bounce in the polls or are attitudes too hardened for that?
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson saw a bump in his approval rating this spring after he recovered from the coronavirus. The 56-year-old was treated on a ventilator in an intensive care unit. “His personal approval ratings skyrocketed from 44% in mid-March to 66% on April 13, immediately after he exited the ICU. But Johnson’s spike in approval coincided with the U.K.’s national lockdown, which enjoyed broad public support in the spring. Johnson’s approval ratings sank to 35% in late September amid accusations his government has mishandled the pandemic,”
Time magazine reports.
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, 65, also tested positive in July but had a very mild case. ““Bolsonaro’s approval ratings also rose a month after he contracted the virus, though this coincided with a push by his government to provide $47 billion of emergency aid money to vulnerable parts of society. Support for the Brazilian President hovered around 33% between April and June, according to Datafolha polling, but rose to 37% in August,” Time notes. “In both cases, the absence of detailed polling on the link between the leaders catching the virus and people’s support for them—not to mention all the other circumstances that impact people’s choices—means it’s impossible to say what effect catching the virus had on support for Johnson and Bolsonaro.”
Other heads of state have also been infected, including the leaders of Belarus, Bolivia, Honduras, Guatemala and Monaco. (The AP has
a running list.)
There are other precedents worth studying, as well: President Woodrow Wilson
got sick in 1918 amid the influenza pandemic.
“One of Biden’s front-row guests during the debate Tuesday night, whose father died of covid-19, was sharply critical of the president and his family for potentially putting others at risk in the debate hall,”
Matt Viser reports. “Kristin Urquiza, co-founder of the group Marked by COVID, said that while everyone attending the debate had to test negative, they were also supposed to wear masks. ‘And though every one of Biden’s guests managed to do this, Trump’s guests were shockingly barefaced,’ she said in a statement. … ‘Irresponsible is an understatement: this is criminal.’ Urquiza was invited to the debate to represent her father, who died in June at age 65. … Urquiza said she is working to get tested as soon as possible, and would quarantine until she knew she wasn’t putting others at risk. ‘I am terrified,’ she said. ‘I know the darkest result of COVID: an undignified and lonesome death.’”
10) Does the president’s diagnosis cause businesses and schools to rethink reopening plans?
The Labor Department announced Friday thatU.S. economy added just 661,000 jobs in September — the smallest monthly job gain since the recovery began in May, another signal that the labor market is cooling off. “In what will be the last monthly jobs report issued before the election on Nov. 3, the unemployment rate dropped to 7.9 percent, putting the rate closer to that of other recent recessions,”
Eli Rosenberg reports. “The modest gains in jobs were driven by hiring increases in leisure and hospitality, which added 318,000 jobs back in September, mostly at restaurants and bars. … Government employment fell by 231,000 driven by declines in local and state education, a decline economists have been warning about for months. … There are still 10.7 million less people with jobs than there were in February before the pandemic, but now more than half of the jobs lost in March and April are now recovered.”
11) Will this cause Trump supporters who have been skeptical of the dangers of the virus to take it more seriously?
“The virus doesn’t care if you’re rich or poor, a Republican or a Democrat, young or old. No one is immune. Not even the president,” said Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D), who has faced attacks from Trump for being overly cautious. “My sincere hope is that today’s news will serve as a wake-up call to every single American.”
12) To what extent do our adversaries seek to capitalize on the potential chaos?
“There's already an onslaught of misinformation about the diagnosis circulating on social media,” said former FBI special agent Clint Watts, a distinguished research fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “It's as if a nuclear information bomb exploded on social media,” he told Cat Zakrzewski for
the Technology 202. “I would expect Russia to amplify, heavy, the uncertainty and play up disastrous scenarios. Or speculate about Biden.” Watt said that Russian media sources such as RT are already spreading speculation about Biden's health.
“Any time the president of the United States is at risk is an opportunity to foreign adversaries,” added Graham Brookie, the director and managing editor of the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Lab. “It’s why the United States has contingency and continuity plans in place across the government before a crisis happens,” he told Cat. “Those continuity plans need to account for the low likelihood for things like military attacks but a near guarantee of foreign adversaries adjusting ongoing influence operations to the event.”
