White House Tales: How Trump Works as President from a Hospital Bed

Elena Ivanova

Its chief of staff, Mark Meadows, has already announced to the public that the president is ready to return to the White House. But there is a small snag - the doctors do not know about this yet and have not yet given their consent. During his stay at the military hospital, Donald Trump wrote unusually little on Twitter, but he treated the public with video messages. Not a word about his illness or about the criticism that fell upon him after yesterday's visit to the public - we are talking only about the elections.

The American media yesterday talked about only one thing all day: how the president, who should actually be under quarantine so as not to infect anyone, got into an armored jeep and went with two guards to visit his supporters who had camped in front of the hospital. The scene was remarkable - Trump was waving to them from the car, the crowd roared, the car made a circle and returned to the hospital grounds. This whole action took no more than 5 minutes.

“He loves to be the star of the show,” said Presidential Adviser David Gergen on the PR campaign.

Doctors were shocked by this trick, Trump supporters were delighted. Trump in all his glory, writes Spiegel: Donald Trump is his own director of his own reality show, he is both the scriptwriter and the main actor. Covid was a twist in his script that will give him the opportunity to prove himself a hero.

The future will show if the propaganda machine can beat the covid. Even if Trump is recovering by leaps and bounds, even if recovery becomes a heroic odyssey, the consequences - both for his health and for his politics - can not be said now.

"The Trixer in the Oval Office may not be able to outplay the virus," warns NYT .

The reality is that since Friday, the heroic president, waving off the crown like an annoying fly, has been lying with a covid in the hospital. A month before the elections, this is a crisis with global consequences. But instead of the truth about the state of the most influential politician in the world, the public gets another show from doctors and administration. Instead of a bulletin about health - PR campaigns.

The test results are hidden, who is saying what is not clear. This is typical of Trump, says his biographer Tim O Brien: "Trump is constantly dealing with bad news, so his answer is to suppress, distort and lie."

Take the story of his assistant Hope Hicks, for example. It was revealed last Thursday that she had contracted covid. But at first it was carefully hidden. A journalist from Bloomberg told about the disease. Immediately, everyone started asking about Trump himself. If Jennifer Jacobs had not written about Hicks, Trump's illness would not have been known for a long time.

Trump's personal doctor, Sean Conley, is also impossible to understand. He says the president is doing well. At the same time, Mark Meadows, in charge of the press, tells reporters that "the state of the president inspires concern." After that, both the doctor and the official change their statements many times during the day.

When reporters asked White House officials what information they have about President Trump's condition, the answer was surprising - they have no information.

President Trump has often been caught in a lie. He lied about his sex life, about his condition. I couldn't even tell the truth about the height of my skyscraper in New York. “Honest exaggeration” is what Trump called these stories in his book The Art of the Deal, which, according to its true author Tony Schwartz, contains a lot of fiction.

Everything about his TV program was also fake. His office, where he shouted to the candidates: "You're fired!" - Scenery. But Potemkin villages fulfilled their goal - the program saved him from bankruptcy, and the image of a "successful businessman" brought Trump to the White House.

The Washington Post calculated that Trump lied 20,000 times during his presidency. His lies began with the number of guests attending the inauguration and accompanied him all the time. But more often than not, he deceived the public about his health. Even before being elected in 2015, he submitted the "Medical Certificate" to the press. It said that Trump is "the healthiest person ever elected president." As his then personal physician confessed, the future president himself dictated this "conclusion" to him.

And after Trump was taken to the hospital, it didn't get better. Even from the hospital, his family circulated photographs of the president working at his desk. How can one fail to recall the catch phrase about “working with documents” and “strong handshake” by another president, Boris Yeltsin.