Liberals Outraged After Trump Makes Visit To Supporters Outside Walter Reed

October 5, 2020 Mark Hale Donald Trump 9

Update (1200ET): Navy Commander Dr. Sean Conley, President Trump’s doctor, has just delivered his first briefing to White House reporters since yesterday’s briefing where he was later forced to retract comments, including about the progression of the president’s infection, and was cornered into suggesting that Trump had received supplemental oxygen on Friday.

With the press seemingly fixated on the “48 hours” timeline delivered by Mark Meadows during his “off-the-record” comments to reporters yesterday, Dr. Conley and Dr. Brian Garibaldi - who also spoke at the presser - said that Trump could be discharged as early as Monday (within the 48 hours timeline), and added that Trump’s experiences with a fever and shortness of breath were merely “transitory” incidents. Dr. Garibaldi said “our hope is that we can plan for a discharge as early as tomorrow to the White House.”

Trump completed a second dose of remdesivir on Saturday and “today he feels well,” Garibaldi said. Trump has shown no averse reactions to the drug. Trump’s kidney and liver functioning are normal, Garibaldi added.

Trump’s condition is steadily improving, doctors said during the opening remarks of Sunday’s briefing on the president’s health. But as with any illness, “there are ups and downs”.

Dr. Conley said there were two episodes where Trump required supplemental oxygen. But the timing wasn’t exactly clear from his comments, as he offered what appeared to be deliberately vague answers.

Doctors claimed that when pressed to try the oxygen on Friday, Trump initially was reluctant to try it, insisting that he didn’t need it.

Dr. Conley said he believed one of the episodes occurred on Saturday, but he said he had to check on the timing.

Dr. Conley insisted that Trump wears a mask every time he’s around his doctors.

Steroid dexamethasone, a powerful tool to combat inflation, has also been part of Trump’s treatment, Dr. Garibaldi said.

Pressed by reporters to explain yesterday’s dodges and “clarifications”, Dr. Conley said he had been trying to avoid giving a negative impression of Trump’s illness: “The fact of the matter is he’s doing really well.”

Asked about Trump’s condition as of Sunday morning, Dr. Conley said the president was doing “great”, contrary to Meadows’s comments about Trump’s status being “concernng”.

Cable news reporters immediately pointed out that Dr. Conley’s comments weren’t consistent with what Meadows apparently told reporters yesterday.

Dr. Conley defended Mark Meadows off-the-record statements to the press corps, though notably while Meadows appeared at the briefing, he didn’t say anything to the press.

Circling back to the briefing, Conley noted that despite the “two episodes” of respiratory distress mentioned above, Trump has endured remarkably well so far during the course of his illness. The president is now stable, with a blood-oxygen level of 98%, Dr. Conley said.

Trump was given supplemental oxygen Friday because his blood oxygen level dropped below 94%. He was on it for maybe an hour, Dr. Conley said. Trump’s oxygen level has never dropped below 90%.

But now that he’s doing better, doctors are starting discharge planning.

CNN reported that people close to Trump are saying he’s angry that he cannot address the media himself, and has been “critical” of what others have said. Most of that frustration, CNN says, has focused on Meadows, whose flip-flopping - initially saying Trump had a “mild” fever only to backtrack later in his Saturday evening interview with Fox news - has reportedly displeased Trump.

Earlier Sunday, a senior Trump campaign aide told Bloomberg that Trump will “soon be ready to go back on the campaign trail”.

As far as the Sunday shows are concerned, it looks like Jason Miller, a longtime Trump communications aide, shouldered the responsibility of appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press” where he said that Trump wanted to “remind folks to wash their hands, use hand sanitizer, make sure that if you can’t socially distance to wear a mask.”

Asked about the WSJ poll showing Biden’s lead widening over Trump’s to 14 points, Miller told ABC’s “This Week” that the campaisgn is upbeat about Trump’s prospects in the swing states. He later accused Biden of using his mask as “a prop”, while the Trump campaign had always distributed masks and hand sanitizer at its events.

Miller and other Trump aides have employed colorful language during their TV spots when discussing Trump’s return to the White House, and to the campaign trail. Trump “is going to defeat ” the virus, “and I think Trump gets to the WHite House and out on the campaign trail that it’s going to be a slingshot going forward.”

Appearing on CBS’s “Face the Nation”, Trump National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien, sounded slightly more cautious, telling the world that it’s “too soon to know how Trump will do. “Day seven and eight are critical days,” he said. An hour later, Dr. Conley and Dr. Garibaldi claimed Trump could be out of Walter Reed by Day 6.

O’Brien also revealed that Trump would receive his daily national security briefing on Sunday, as per usual.

Asked about transfer of power, O’Brien insisted: “We’ve got a great team in place and the president is firmly in control.”

During his appearances, Miller shared the Trump Campaign’s plan to try and make up for lost time: Starting Monday, “Operation MAGA” would begin, with virtual events on Monday night, then the VP debate Wednesday. After that, Trump family members and surrogates will fan out across the country to try and build momentum.

We imagine the press found Sunday’s briefing to be more helpful than Saturday’s overall, but ABC’s Jon Karl is apparently still sore about the doctor’s reluctance to answer all the press’s questions on Saturday.

Though, apparently, CNN is still not happy.

We strongly suspect Saturday will forever be remembered for the controversy surrounding White House Chief of Staff’s “off-the-record” comments to the White House press corps. The backlash was predictably intense - and revealing: it prompted Ryan Lizza and a handful of his colleagues to ‘out’ Meadows en masse, and somehow triggered a flurry of morbid rumors, attributed to “anonymous” senior administration officials, claiming Trump’s condition was “much more serious” than the administration was letting on, leading to percolating suspicions that Trump might be on his death bed.

Vaity Fair’s Gabe Sherman led the pack with this snippet of “reporting”.

That led to rumors that Trump would somehow try to tap Ivanka to lead the country in the event of his incapacitation, bypassing the 25th amendment.

In response, the White House rallied Trump to appear for a 4-minute speech where he explained that him getting ill was simply fate, and that as president, he had a responsibility to stay out front, and in the public eye, not simply hide out in the White House.

Critics tore apart the footage, and within 30 minutes of the video’s publication, amateur film analysts had zeroed in on one editing break where a cough was clearly edited out.

Mark Meadows went on Fox last night to cop to his “off the record” comments and explain that Trump really is feeling much better. Sherman reported that Trump’s worsening condition on Friday might have been partly due to a bad reaction to Regeneron’s treatment, but the unflattering portrayal published by Vanity Fair also included the following line, which appears to be the conventional view: “if Trump can get out of the hospital by Tuesday, then he’s gone through the worst of it. But if he’s still there after Tuesday, the worst is yet to come.”

In response to the growing pressure from the press, the White House released a set of photos late Saturday evening purporting to show Trump “working” from Walter Reed. But they were almost immediately attacked for being obviously staged, and only further cementing the notion that Trump, while not deathly ill, is still pretty sick.

Aviation reporter Jon Ostrower published a twitter thread where he examined the metadata embedded in the photo files and discovered that they were taken within ten minutes of each other, which would suggest that they may have been staged (according to the White House, Trump worked through the afternoon and into the evening).

Others slammed Trump for appearing to struggle to sign his name to a blank piece of paper.

With little new information out Sunday morning, the media has largely turned to speculating about what Trump’s illness will mean for the election, while Trump’s allies appeared on Fox News to talk up Trump’s condition and state of mind. Steve Cortes, a Trump campaign aide, says on Fox that Trump is “on the DL right now but very shortly he’s going to be back in the game throwing 95 mph fastballs”

CNN is apparently having troubling booking guests for its Sunday shows.

And is lashing out in true form.

Bloomberg focused on rehashing Trump’s blithe response to the virus. One ‘expert’ claimed that “[i]f you had to invent a way to transmit this virus, that’s the environment you would invent,” said Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “The only higher risk environment I can think of is the air in an ICU that is caring for lots of Covid patients.”

Even WSJ’s coverage seemed to focus on Biden’s widening 14-point lead in the polls.

Though, in one of the more useful pieces of reporting, WSJ tracked every major Trump Administration event in the last week or so and created a visual guide to the COVID-19 status of every major administration official present.

At any rate, it’s been a crazy week. We imagine we’ll be hearing more from the administration soon.

To recap, with White House aide and Trump personal assistant Nick Lunas testing positive Sunday morning, and Chris Christie testing positive and being hospitalized last night, the number infected as swelled to 26. Sen. Susan Collins has tested negative.

Christie apparently exposed a bunch of ABC News staffers to the virus, and they all now apparently need to quarantine.

As of Saturday morning, 24 people have tested positive in the White House outbreak, as the number of infected staffers who attended the Cleveland debate climbed from 1 to 11.

1+2. President & Melania Trump

3. Bill Stepien, Trump campaign mgr

4. Hope Hicks

5. Kellyanne Conway

6. Sen. Ron Johnson

7. Sen. Mike Lee

8. Sen. Thom Tillis

9. Ronna McDaniel

10. Notre Dame Pres. Jenkins

11-13. Three WH reporters

14-24. Eleven staffers from Cleveland debate

25. Chris Christie

26. Nick Lunas

Bloomberg is keeping a comprehensive tally of everyone who has tested positive and negative. We imagine we’ll be hearing more from the Sunday shows.

via zerohedge

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