Corona Bug Catches Up with the President: What Did He Know and When Did He Know It?

There is some reason to believe that he did: The president and his close staff are tested at least every day or every other day, if we are to believe their own reports going back months. If Trump was starting to have symptoms even as late as Wednesday, October 1, then he should have been testing positive prior to that. This is particularly true if we notice that he has the upper respiratory/respiratory version of the virus. Most ominously, as moderator Chris Wallace has observed, the Trump group arrived at the debate site too late to be tested, in contradiction to what was apparently the agreement. Wallace pointed out that they were all on the honor system, and he assumed that the president had been cleared. But the whole Trump entourage arrived too late to do Covid-19 testing. How convenient. 

And as the videos showed, the family sat in the audience without wearing masks, the very embodiment of arrogance and entitlement. I don’t know how social and financial entitlement saves you from catching a virus, but that seems to be how these peoples’ minds work. 

As the events of the past few days have made clear, Trump did in fact have a Covid-19 infection as early as Thursday of that week, and if we go by one remark made by his doctor, the symptoms started on Wednesday. 

The clear implication is that Donald Trump is likely to have been tested sometime between Sunday and Tuesday (as he should have been) not only as a routine but in anticipation of the debate, and that (given his symptoms less than 48 hours later), he probably would have tested positive. That’s what a nasal swab test should have shown given the nature of his current infection. 

Yes, this is speculative and based on circumstantial evidence as of this moment. But it is in keeping with what we know now about the way Trump thinks, and is – sadly enough for this nation – clearly in keeping with what we know about narcissism and sociopathy. 

It is a fair inference that Donald Trump may have walked out onto the debate stage knowing that he was infected and infectious, but did it anyway. 

Notice by the way that numerous journalists have asked for the date of the president’s most recent negative test, and the White House has not told us. In fact, the press secretary bluntly said she would not give out the specific dates and times. 

Hmmm. 

I am not willing to go so far as to say (as anonymous others have) that Trump was trying to give the virus to Joe Biden, but I would point out that distain for other peoples’ health and willingness to flaunt the accepted rules is purest Trump. We might even recognize a closely related corollary – that even though the official rules for the engagement specified that only the two debaters and the moderator were allowed to be present without masks, almost the entire Trump entourage also broke the rule. 

The flaunting of being maskless has been a signature of the Trumpists over the past several months. Still, it was just a little shocking that the Trump family would continue to make this overtly political statement at a moment when they were clearly in the public eye. 

So now the president has admitted that he has it, has gone to the hospital, and is getting an experimental cocktail of strong drugs, while slowly – ever so slowly – word filters out that he had decreased blood oxygen levels, trouble breathing, a cough, and a fever. That’s not a trivial head cold. As medical experts have said, it sounds like Covid-19 pneumonia. 

We have to admire Joe Biden and his campaign for the restraint they have shown in the first couple of days. Biden wished the president and the first lady well in his on-camera remarks, and told a (masked, socially distanced) audience that the situation wasn’t political. 

But it is, of course, profoundly political, because it illustrates the one most direct Trump characteristic that undermines his capability of being president: 

Trump shows contempt – dislike, even – for expertise. Even when he pretends to have “the best” people advising him, he puts his own feelings above the pronouncements of those who are extremely competent in medicine, those who understand the physics of global climate, and even those who are professionals in law enforcement tactics. It wouldn’t be surprising to imagine that Trump walked out onto the debate stage knowing full well that he had tested positive, but in his warped mind figuring that he was exempt from what other people have to endure because that, after all, has been his life story. 

The Rose Garden scene 

I don’t know where to start – should I focus on the failure of the mass media to remark (and be shocked) by what they saw? Or should I focus on what we all have seen. 

In looking at the ceremony in which Trump introduced Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the assemblage, we can recognize that there were a large number of people  (now reported to be more than 200). They were dressed in finery, a lot of them were fairly elderly, and just about none of them were wearing masks. The president was not wearing a mask, nor was the nominee. The audience members were seated closely. In short, they were, en masse, violating every rule that the rest of us followed during the lockdown. 

And at the end of the ceremony, they were hugging, hand-shaking, and otherwise smooching each other. Those who weren’t actively embracing were at least in close proximity. They were being breathed on and were breathing on each other. 

This is the signature of the modern day Republican. 

How could the president of Notre Dame University allow himself to be this kind of example? As one colleague remarked, they punish fraternity kids who hold a kegger, but the president of the university breaks every one of the rules on camera. 

An analogy and a possible explanation 

Let me share an example from the time I was taking a class in scuba diving. There are a few risks in diving, but getting eaten by a shark is fairly low. Likewise, even though you are likely to see moray eels up close, you are not likely to get bitten on your snout by one. But there are a couple of things you can do to yourself that are bad. We’ll skip the issue of air embolism, which can happen if you shoot to the surface too quickly from the depths. Instead, let’s talk about the bends. 

Any time you go underwater, breathing compressed air, and go deep enough (considerably deeper than 30 feet, for you non-divers), you are going to have some of that gas you are breathing dissolve in your blood. The oxygen doesn’t matter, because your body will metabolize it, but nitrogen, being 80% of the air and fairly inert to our bodily processes, will just stay there in your blood until you (kind of slowly) lose it by breathing it out. 

So imagine somebody who has been at 100 feet for an hour, which is well beyond what the published diving tables say is safe. What will happen to that diver when he returns to the surface and all that dissolved nitrogen in his blood is no longer being kept in solution by the pressure that being at 100 feet confers? 

The curious answer is that much of the time, over the course of many dives, there will be no obvious physical result. (I should insert an exclamation point here, but I will leave it to you to marvel.) That same diver might go to 140 feet and be there for nearly an hour on his next dive, and still no obvious untoward effects. 

And then one day, that same diver does a similar dive and ends up paralyzed from the chest down. What happened? After every one of those dives, that diver had nitrogen bubbles forming in his blood. Most of the time, they didn’t do any harm, or at least enough harm to be obvious to himself or his family. And then, by chance, the effect of the bubbling in his blood interfered with the circulation in his spinal artery. Anyway, that is how it was taught to us. 

The bends, as this condition is called, can be avoided by following the dive tables, and can even be avoided by plain blind luck a lot of the time. But if you are the type of person who believes more in yourself (because you have survived a bunch of dives in spite of violating the dive tables) and you think that therefore you can ignore them with impunity, you may be headed to a permanently damage knee or that wheelchair, or even death. 

Some people don’t seem to learn from books and lectures, and have to learn the hard way. 

So there were 200 or so healthy and wealthy people in the Rose Garden, the type who have managed to avoid many of life’s difficulties, and they just continued to do what they have always done. They shook hands and hugged and got in close. In terms of the coronavirus, they were doing the analogous behavior to ignoring the dive tables. 

The fact that people are dressed up in expensive suits and are in the White House garden at the express invitation of the President of the United States does not mean that they are not being reckless. They were being equally as reckless as the motorcycle riders bellying up to the bar in Sturgis. 

Interestingly, Donald Trump himself made clear that he is one of those people who doesn’t seem to learn from what others are trying to teach him. In one of his talks from Walter Reed, he explained that he is getting a course in Covid-19, and went on to say that it wasn’t what you get from books. Apparently it is necessary for Trump to get the disease and feel the pain himself before he can make the intellectual connection to reality. 

This arrogance mixed with intentional ignorance was reflected in his car trip past his adoring fans the other day. It appalled the experts, who pointed out that it endangered the people in the car with him. 

Breaking: Now even the press secretary is testing positive. It must be quite the experience to work for this White House. 

Less than a month from election day, with lots of people already voting . . .

(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])

-cw