What does a TRUMP presidency look like?

[Syt]

Presumably Secret Service in Trump's car?

[celedhring]

I get that the Secret Service chaps are willing to die for the president, but usually it is not the president itself being the threat.

[Maladict]

James Phillips, doctor of emergency medicine at George Washington University, who is an attending physician at Walter Reed, called the stunt "insanity".

"Every single person in the vehicle during that completely unnecessary Presidential 'drive-by' just now has to be quarantined for 14 days. They might get sick. They may die," he wrote in a tweet.

"For political theater. Commanded by Trump to put their lives at risk for theater. This is insanity."

In a second tweet, Phillips added: "That Presidential SUV is not only bulletproof, but hermetically sealed against chemical attack. The risk of COVID19 transmission inside is as high as it gets outside of medical procedures. The irresponsibility is astounding. My thoughts are with the Secret Service forced to play."

[Maladict]

Or rather:

Walter Shaub
(@waltshaub)
Trump is freaking out on Twitter today because being sick is no fun when the other kids are playing outside.

October 5, 2020

Maybe he saw that Yougov poll where Pence is getting (slightly) better odds against Biden than he is. 

[jimmy olsen]

In some cases they may cause psychiatric effects, leading to feelings of grandiosity and mania, or even delirium and psychosis.

Oh no.

You remain one of my favorite internet people of all time.

Are you on Twitter? I think you would just be awesome at it.

Thanks.

I don't know if I could compete with the titans on Twitter.

You could

[The Larch]

When trying to understand Trump's behaviour during his convalescence, I think it is important to remember what a bizarre, warped and ultimately self-defeating view he has of disease. He's not going to be a model patient.

Mary Trump says president sees illness as sign of 'unforgivable weakness'
Donald Trump's niece tells NPR US is in a 'horrible place' because president and his father saw any malaise as unacceptable

Mary Trump, the niece of Donald Trump, has said the United States is "in the horrible place we're in" because members of the family, including the president, see illness as "a display of unforgivable weakness", whether it is in themselves or others.

Speaking on NPR's Fresh Air, Mary Trump, who recently published a tell-all book about her family, said: "That's why we're in the horrible place we're in, because he cannot admit to the weakness of being ill or of other people being ill."

[garbon]

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/05/maga-supporters-walter-reed-trump-covid-426295

'Trump was sent from God!': MAGA country brings the rally to a stricken president

An impromptu festival-meets-vigil popped up outside Walter Reed on Sunday, with Trump fans from around the country coming to help their president recover.

They came from all over the country, determined to help their stricken president recover.

Some had homemade signs, others held "GET WELL" balloons and dozens brought bouquets to lay in front of Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where President Donald Trump has been combating his own coronavirus infection since Friday.

By Sunday afternoon, hundreds of people had congregated outside the hospital. They handed out water and candy and stacks of pizza the Trump campaign sent over. They flew every brand of MAGA flag in the sky — the most devoted carried 20-foot pipes with four flags apiece mounted on them — marching them up and down the sidewalks. "YMCA" and "Proud to Be an American," both Trump rally staples, blared on repeat on boomboxes and generator-powered amps.

MAGA Country had gathered to celebrate and pray for their leader — an impromptu festival-meets-vigil for its venerated, living saint.

And then suddenly, there he was. After hours of listening to their cheers and acknowledging them via tweet, Trump emerged from his isolation chamber to greet the crowd, creating his own impromptu spectacle. In a brief appearance, Trump rolled past in his motorcade, waving from the window of his massive armored SUV, offering blessings from a hermetically-sealed Popemobile.

The gathering was, in a way, the spiritual center of Trump's rattled base. Across the country, religious leaders had called on the country to pray for the president and Trump surrogates organized a candlelight vigil on Saturday night. On Fox News, Trump's favorite hosts were vowing to fight for Trump, because "you fought for us," as Laura Ingraham put it. Those strains were all present outside Walter Reed on Sunday, where a community that had regularly downplayed the pandemic's severity, and shrugged off social distancing and mask wearing were now grappling with the reality that the 74-year-old president was now seriously ill, caught by that same pandemic.

As the crowd grew larger and louder on Sunday, police put up barricades trying to contain the crowds from spilling into the streets. Ad hoc caravans drove up and down, honking their horns in jubilant support. Social distancing seemed a distant concern, secondary only to the camaraderie and joy of supporting their convalescent leader — often maskless, often yelling over the din of cars into the ears of their newfound friends.

Tamara, a nurse from North Carolina in a star-spangled MAGA hat who declined to give her last name, had driven five hours that morning to keep vigil for a short while with her teenage daughter and small dog. She had to drive the five hours back home that night so she could make her shift the next morning.

"I feel that there's more power in prayer, to be honest," she said, trying to keep a giant homemade "WE HEART TRUMP" sign from flying off a barricade. "So I wanted to come here and be with people and actually be near him as much as possible to pray for him."

In the days since Trump's diagnosis was announced — and in the endless hours that he was silent online — Trump's followers and allies, both online and in the media, have pinned their hopes on his well-cultivated image of robust health and spiritual fortitude. A full recovery from the coronavirus — which has killed over 200,000 Americans — would only bolster that image and, his supporters hope, help him win the election.

But for a certain brand of Trump fan, a little display of devotion didn't seem to hurt. Across the country, Trump supporters organized candlelit vigils in front of Trump properties and hosted prayer events. Thousands and thousands of supporters posted their prayers online, and on Fox News, pundits praised his bravery.

"I'm here to pray for Trump," said an elderly Vietnamese woman who declined to give her name. She was holding a massive shofar — a ram's horn used in Jewish religious ceremonies — that she blew repeatedly, calling others to prayer.

...

[garbon]

White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, has now also tested positive.

[Sheilbh]

Interesting piece on the media challenge of covering US leaders who are all so old:

How to Cover a Sick Old Man
The president is hospitalized and reporters are fighting for basic facts. What should elderly leaders — many of America's top politicians are over 80 — reveal about their health?
By Ben Smith
    Oct. 4, 2020

When John Bresnahan was starting out as a reporter in the mid-1990s, he approached Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who had run for president in 1948 as a segregationist and was still shuffling through the Capitol. Senator Thurmond, born in 1902, gave no indication that he'd understood Mr. Bresnahan's question and responded with a non sequitur.

The young reporter saw his older colleagues shaking their heads and snickering. The kid had expected the elderly senator to be able to carry on a conversation! They didn't report on Senator Thurmond's infirmity — that wasn't how things were done — but they all knew about it.

These days, Mr. Bresnahan is the congressional bureau chief for Politico. A Navy veteran with the demeanor of a guy you've dragged out of a dive bar in the eighth inning of the Yankees game, he has become Capitol Hill's grim reaper, a rare reporter with the stomach to print some obvious truths: that some top lawmakers aren't all there.

In 2017, Mr. Bresnahan and his colleague Anna Palmer wrote that the powerful Republican chairman of the Senate's appropriations committee, Thad Cochran, was "frail and disoriented," a story that sped his retirement. Last month, Mr. Bresnahan and Marianne LeVine reported that fellow Democrats were worried whether Dianne Feinstein was up to leading her side of the Amy Coney Barrett confirmation hearings because she gets "confused by reporters' questions, or will offer different answers to the same question depending on where or when she's asked."

This kind of reporting is impolite. It's also totally obvious, and a natural feature of America's recent slide toward gerontocracy. On Capitol Hill, everyone "knows this stuff," Mr. Bresnahan said. "I just am the one to write it."

I was thinking of Mr. Bresnahan as I watched reporters arrayed at Walter Reed military hospital on Sunday facing yet another moment of crisis for the news media, one even more basic than many of the hard challenges of the Trump era. The White House press corps is trying to perform a fundamental job of journalism — delivering simple facts about President Trump's condition — in the face of Mr. Trump's years of casual fabrication and his doctors' clumsy evasions and contradictions. They're covering the biggest policy failure of his administration in the most literal sense imaginable.

And yet they're also doing something obviously uncomfortable. It's hard not to feel some human revulsion for the sight of healthy, TV-ready young journalists braying for the vital signs of a sick old man. But there is no question that this prying is in the urgent public interest, and the White House press corps is working with admirable aggression and openness. We need to know who is in charge of the government, and to understand the outcome of President Trump's long evasion of the coronavirus crisis as Americans begin to vote.

By refusing to speak honestly about basic facts, the White House is really "annihilating the press's role," said Elizabeth Drew, a former New Yorker Washington correspondent who covered President Ronald Reagan's shooting in 1981 and his staff's success at playing down the grave risk to his life.

Physical decline is likely to be a major feature of the next few years of American politics, at least. The current line of succession, after Mr. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, features Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is 80, and the Senate president pro tempore, Charles Grassley, 87, who also runs the Senate Finance Committee. Ms. Pelosi's two most powerful deputies in the House, James Clyburn and Steny Hoyer, are both 80 or older. Over in the Senate, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee is 85 and coasting to re-election. The chairman of the Appropriations Committee is 86. Joe Biden, who turns 78 next month, is nearly a year younger than the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, who is also seeking re-election in November.

This concentration of power in the hands of the old is an American phenomenon, Derek Thompson recently wrote in The Atlantic, noting that our leaders are getting older as European leaders get younger.

"If government of the elderly, by the elderly, and for the elderly will not perish from the Earth, the rest of us might suffer instead," he lamented.

But it also means that journalists must get past the taboos and be frank about the normal process of aging, and must emulate Mr. Bresnahan's stomach for blunt truths. Typically, whispers about age and health have remained on the margins of the political conversation, often driven by the right-wing aggregator Matt Drudge, whose visceral grasp of news has always included obsessions with age and health. In 2007, Mr. Drudge briefly capsized the presidential campaign with news of a new spot on John McCain's head, for instance. His site is consumed, to the dismay of Mr. Trump's supporters, with the president's illness. (One of Drudge's 18 headlines about Mr. Trump's condition on Sunday morning: "Blind mystic predicted it!")

Among the people scrambling this weekend at American newspapers are obituary writers, as major outlets assigned top reporters to update Mr. Trump's obituary — Peter Baker at The New York Times, Marc Fisher at The Washington Post and Mark Z. Barabak at The Los Angeles Times, people at each paper told me. But the easiest solution to this media quandary is for citizens to elect leaders of working age. A friend recently told me sadly how nice it had been to see a national politician, Kamala Harris, jog down a few stairs.

But for the next few years, at least, our leaders' age and health will remain big news. We need a reporting culture that's ready to handle the public decline of this generation of leaders, as long as they insist on declining in public. Searching questions about everything from sleep to cognition shouldn't be off limits.

"It will help if reporters are medically knowledgeable, and ask the right questions, e.g. blood pressure, heart rhythm, sleep disorders," Dr. Mark Fisher, a professor of neurology and political science at the University of California, Irvine, told me on Sunday. "The more specific and precise questions reporters ask, the better. A robust fund of knowledge by the reporter is a great advantage."

When politicians won't share honest results, health experts' long-range diagnoses should be treated as news. The whispers by reporters and lawmakers' aides about feeling as if they work in a nursing home should find their way onto the record. And the most powerful people in the country should learn from Mr. Trump's disastrous example that if you lie consistently about your health, nobody will believe you in a crisis.

None of this comes easily.

"Reporters are human beings and we cover these people," Mr. Bresnahan told me. "You have respect for who the person was. It's difficult."

Ben Smith is the media columnist. He joined The Times in 2020 after eight years as founding editor in chief of BuzzFeed News. Before that, he covered politics for Politico, The New York Daily News, The New York Observer and The New York Sun. Email: [email protected] @benyt

[garbon]

Olivia Nuzzi
(@Olivianuzzi)
"He has experience now fighting the coronavirus as an individual... Joe Biden doesn't have that." — Trump campaign spokesperson @ErinMPerrine, trying to make Joe Biden's lack of infectious disease a strike against him.

October 5, 2020

[Syt]

Jeez.

[merithyn]

Olivia Nuzzi
(@Olivianuzzi)
"He has experience now fighting the coronavirus as an individual... Joe Biden doesn't have that." — Trump campaign spokesperson @ErinMPerrine, trying to make Joe Biden's lack of infectious disease a strike against him.

October 5, 2020

No shame. They literally have no shame.

[celedhring]

Olivia Nuzzi
(@Olivianuzzi)
"He has experience now fighting the coronavirus as an individual... Joe Biden doesn't have that." — Trump campaign spokesperson @ErinMPerrine, trying to make Joe Biden's lack of infectious disease a strike against him.

October 5, 2020

So they pivoted from "Biden is too unhealthy for the presidency" to "Biden is too healthy".

[Valmy]

He also has far more personal experience with bankruptcy. Any other forms of self destruction that make you more fit for high office?

[grumbler]

He also has far more personal experience with bankruptcy. Any other forms of self destruction that make you more fit for high office?

Being blackmailed by porn stars?