Capping off an insane weekend in which the White House got caught in its cover-up re: when Donald Trump tested positive for COVID-19, if he was ever put on supplemental oxygen, and how serious his case is, the president of the United States decided the best thing to do while sick with a highly contagious disease was to force his Secret Service detail to drive him around Walter Reed National Military Medical Center so he could wave to his fans like the Queen of England, if the queen was an unhinged lunatic hell-bent on infecting as many people as possible with a disease that has killed more than 209,000 in the U.S alone.
While the people responsible for protecting the president rarely, if ever, speak to the press, Trump’s absurd P.R. stunt was apparently too much even for them, given that it literally put their lives at risk. Speaking to the Washington Post, current and former agents reacted with outrage over Trump’s little trip, which he reportedly undertook because he was “bored” in the hospital. “He’s not even pretending to care now,” one person said after the president’s jaunt. “Where are the adults?” asked a former Secret Service member. Acknowledging the fact that Trump deigned to wear a mask for the drive, Saad Omer, director of the Yale Institute for Global Health, wrote on Twitter that the face coverings help but “they are not an impenetrable force field.” Or as James Phillips, a professor at George Washington University and a doctor associated with Walter Reed, put it:
Asked about the reckless stunt that had no purpose other than to feed Trump’s ego, chief of staff Mark Meadows, who told reporters over the weekend that the president’s vitals were “very concerning,” basically claimed Monday that the Secret Service was probably exposed to the president when he was taken to the hospital, so what’s one more time?
The joyride underscored not only the fact that the administration still isn’t taking the coronavirus seriously, but that Trump’s mental state—questionable even in the best of times—may be even more compromised:
And speaking of the president’s mental state, here’s what he got up to Monday morning:
All of which could just be Trump at his normal, i.e. crazy, baseline, or, as a doctor specializing in emerging infections who’s testified before Congress as an expert witness on COVID-19 surmised:
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