Less than 24 hours after requiring additional oxygen and being hospitalized by COVID-19, President Donald Trump has already talked about the virus in the past.
“I learned a lot about COVID. I learned it by going to school,” Trump said in a video filmed Saturday from his hospital suite. “And I perceive it, and I perceive it, and it’s a very attractive thing. “
It is a rare and disturbing sight to see the President of the United States being flown to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to be treated for a disease that has killed more than 210,000 Americans and made millions more sick. , and with more than a dozen White House officials and Republicans around him also infected, Trump gave a rare note of uncertainty, tweeting, “I think it’s okay!”Messages of surprise and sympathy came from all over the world.
But if public fitness officials, and even some of Trump’s own aides, were hopeful that the fun would punish him for turning his message after months of wondering the severity of the disease, it will soon have become apparent that they were wrong. Don’t be afraid of Covid,” he repeated to Americans 72 hours later the president, who won America’s most productive health care.
While making his triumphant return from the hospital on Monday night, still inflamed and highly medicated, the feeling that the president’s delight showed that the virus had been exaggerated had exploded in the conservative media ecosystem. as a backup war hero, in a competitive crusade to cover all the obvious vulnerabilities of a president who has valued the appearance of strength above everything else. The implication was that Trump was cured of the disease, which is not the case, and that the country deserves to be too, which is not the case.
Trump’s message, which not only urges Americans not to be afraid of the fatal disease, but also promises that they will “beat it” if inflamed, has been greeted with disbelief by many doctors and fitness experts who have spent more than nine months watching patients. “What the president says is false and irresponsible,” Carlos del Río, an infectious disease expert at Emory University in Atlanta, told TIME. “It gives the impression: “I am strong, I did, the weak who did not succeed. “I think it shows a lack of compassion. “
On Tuesday morning, Trump continued to minimize the severity of the virus. “The flu season is coming! Every year, many other people, more than 100,000 people, and despite the vaccine, die of the flu. close our country? No, we have been informed to live with, as well as we are informed to live with Covid, in the maximum of the much less fatal populations !!!, posted on social media.
His claims are, of course, false. Over the past decade, the number of Americans killed by influenza has never exceeded 61,000 in a given year. Facebook took the rare step of deleting the message and Twitter reported it with a warning about “spreading misleading and destructive information. “
This is just the latest in Trump’s series of false statements about the pandemic. In August, Facebook released a video clip falsely stating that young people were “almost immune” to the virus, calling it a “violation of our destructive COVID misinformation policies. “. ” An exam published last week through researchers at Cornell University, who analyzed 38 million articles on the pandemic in the English media, found that Trump is the main driving force of the so-called “infodemic,” or lies about COVID-19 The president’s mentions or comments accounted for approximately 38% of the overall “disinformation conversation” Discovered.
In words, the president of the United States is the greatest spreader of lies about the deadliest disease that has hit humanity in more than a century.
Once Trump gave the signal that he did not intend to translate his message about the virus despite his infection, many of his allies in Congress and in the conservative media temporarily amplified his claims, describing his release from the hospital as a sign of strength. Many of those lawmakers and supporters, who a few days earlier had grimly asked for the president’s mind and prayers, promptly followed suit and largely amplified their rejection of the severity of the virus on all sides. in fact, it probably wouldn’t kill you, “Fox News analyst Brit Hume told viewers. Fox News host Tucker Carlson gleefully recounted that Trump entered the White House:” Seventy-four years and the virus is not it has stopped it . . . concludes that the coronavirus is not as scary as they tell you . . »
Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler of Georgia tweeted a modified video featuring Trump in a match with a COVID-19-ranked opponent with the message “COVID had no chance of opposing @realDonaldTrump. “Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz tweeted: “President Trump won’t have to do it since COVID. COVID will have to do it from President Trump. ” The two articles, which have been viewed millions of times, have been widely criticized for suggesting that the 210,000 Americans who died from the virus were not difficult enough to combat it.
Echoing a line that had been repeated in television interviews through his replacements over the weekend, Trump presented himself as a hero who sacrificed himself to take on the burden of getting COVID, so Americans can see how simple it is to overcome it. “As a leader, I had to,” he says in the video broadcast Tuesday night. “I knew there was danger, but I had to. I covered up. Drove.
It also temporarily became a fully defined crusader issue: Trump confronted the virus and won. “Listen, he’s reveled as commander-in-chief, he’s reveled as a businessman, now he’s reveled in the opposing fight. “to the coronavirus as an individual,” Trump crusade spokeswoman Erin Perrine told Fox News Monday. “These first-hand revelry: Joe Biden, he doesn’t have them. “
As a TV producer of truth, the president has meticulously orchestrated the message of his release from the hospital and his victory over COVID. Staff installed lights around Walter Reed’s golden door before he left the hospital in front of the assembled chambers. through staff in a high-definition film and became two videos posted on social media.
The first 37-second video shows Marine One moving slowly arriving at the White House, flying over the south lawn, lifting debris. After the helicopter lands at dusk, dramatic background music is heard when the president emerges dressed in a mask of white and military cloth. suit, and crescendos when he removes his mask, breathes with his teeth clenched and greets the helicopter from the first dirt balcony.
A one-moment video, which plays in 86 moments, shows Trump talking directly to the camera about how he controlled to succeed over his illness. “Don’t be afraid of him,” Trump says in the video. ” And now I’m better and immune?”I don’t know. But don’t let him rule your lives. Come out, be careful.
Television cameras captured Trump returning outdoors with the film crew to retake his forehead to the White House, still unmasked. By Tuesday afternoon, the two videos had been viewed more than 7 million times and shared across more than 110,000 people.
Lost in all this, Trump has benefited from exquisite care at a leading hospital and some of the most productive doctors and staff on the planet, a mix virtually no other human being on the planet has. it was not publicly disclosed, although doctors said it was a competitive experimental medicinal cocktail that deserved a special license.
“What we’re seeing now is a framing contest. The president is aggressively running to give the impression that he is fine, that he is healthy, and that, for practical reasons, COVID has had no effect on him, in fact, feels “20 years younger,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Public Policy Center at Annenberg University in Pennsylvania, which has tracked the spread of misinformation about coronaviruses on conservative and social platforms. “But what science says is that those over the age of 65 are at specific risk. When you minimize your belief in gravity, you’re less likely to have a maximum interaction in protective behaviors, which means it suggests to the vulnerable maximum population that the virus is not something taken as seriously as otherwise. “
People who trusted conservative media or social platforms at the beginning of the pandemic were probably misunderstood on how to save the virus or accept it as certain conspiracy theories about it, according to the May study co-written through Hall. Jamieson. Much of the incorrect information has been aimed at minimizing the virus as nothing more than a “cold,” a comparison amplified through Trump as recently as Tuesday. Nearly one in five said the CDC was exaggerating the severity of the virus to undermine Trump’s presidency.
As of Tuesday, at least 17 other people who were on white house grounds or in contact with President Trump had been infected. It remains to be seen whether Trump’s choreographed message will resonate if any of them, many prominent Republicans, become seriously ill or even die, Hall Jamieson says. “We see it create a narrative in real time and we don’t know where the end point is. “
The United States remains stuck in about 7 million CASES of COVID, according to the knowledge of Johns Hopkins University. As the country enters the autumn and winter seasons, there are clear symptoms of a third resurgence that resembles the numbers of early June. Only Hawaii, Kansas, Missouri and South Carolina have downward trends in new cases until last week.
The gap between this stark truth and Trump’s bravado has not been lost for some members of the presidential party. “I think he’s let his guard down, and I think in his preference to check to show that we’ll get out of it one. “way or some other way and that danger is not with us, I think it’s in your skis,” Senator John. Cornyn, a Texas Republican, told the Houston Chronicle editorial board. “I think it’s a lesson for all of us who want to be self-disciplined. “
As the stories of many Americans have shown in recent months, there is a genuine danger in minimizing the virus. A woman, Kristin Urquiza, crossed against her father’s death after saying she accepted as true the president’s assessment of her father’s death. threat posed through COVID. ” His only pre-existing condition was to accept Donald Trump as true, and that’s why he paid with his life,” he said in a moving speech at the Democratic National Convention in August. Cain, a supporter of the president who refused to wear a mask, died of the virus and was diagnosed nine days after attending a Trump crusade rally where few people wore masks.
Trump’s latest infusion of incorrect information on national verbal exchange and social media may pose an even greater risk if Americans, seeing the president’s symbol tanned consciously, take off their masks on the White House lawn less than 4 days after testing positive for the virus. , your assessment that, as Array claims to have done, “you’re going to hit him. “