56 minutes ago, janea4old said:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oh, FFS.  Laurel & Hardy could do a much better job covering up this [!@#$%^&*].

If Don was as robust as some in the GOP are trying to claim, everyone would be shouting from the rooftops, going into minute detail. Instead, we have obfuscations, "off the record", having "misspoke", etc. Sounds like Don is up schitt creek, to me.

 

And yes, I know about the tweet. Easy to have a family member or intern impersonate him.

 

  

 

 

31 minutes ago, Wendy said:

If Don was as robust as some in the GOP are trying to claim, everyone would be shouting from the rooftops, going into minute detail. Instead, we have obfuscations, "off the record", having "misspoke", etc. Sounds like Don is up schitt creek, to me.

 

Agree.  There's too much smokescreening going on, IMO.  He might not be ready for the boneyard just yet, but at the very least, he's probably still on a respirator.

2 minutes ago, Khan said:

 

Agree.  There's too much smokescreening going on, IMO.  He might not be ready for the boneyard just yet, but at the very least, he's probably still on a respirator.

 

Well, the new video above seems to belie my theory. But who knows...

I only could stomach a bit of it but he seems fine.  Apparently he didn’t mention anything about wearing a mask, social distancing and washing your hands (of course).

He seemed tired to me.

 

 

@Vee and everyone who posts these twitter posts, updates, and links to various sources on this Politics thread, I just want to give a shout out and thank you. I don't post much in this thread, but I'm always reading and checking out the resourceful links you post. Thank you, thank you, thank you.  There's my gratitude post.  The thing with the 103 degree fever gets no sympathy from me. 

 

None of this reassures me, but then I'm not the target audience, the media and his base are, and he always looks wretched to me so I can't tell the difference.

 

The White House offered a barrage of conflicting messages and contradictory accounts about President Trump’s health on Saturday as he remained hospitalized with the coronavirus for a second night and the outbreak spread to a wider swath of his political allies.

Just minutes after the president’s doctors painted a rosy picture of his condition on television, Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, gave reporters outside Walter Reed National Military Medical Center a far more sober assessment off camera, calling Mr. Trump’s vital signs worrisome and warning that the next two days would be pivotal to the outcome of the illness.

 

“The president’s vitals over the last 24 hours were very concerning, and the next 48 hours will be critical in terms of his care,” Mr. Meadows told the reporters, asking not to be identified by name. “We’re still not on a clear path to a full recovery.”

 

In keeping with the ground rules he had set, Mr. Meadows’s remarks were attributed, in a pool report sent to White House journalists, to a person familiar with the president’s health. But a video posted online captured Mr. Meadows approaching the pool reporters outside Walter Reed after the doctors’ televised briefing and asking to speak off the record, making it clear who the unnamed source was.

 

The comments infuriated the president, according to people close to the situation, and he intervened directly to counter the perception that he was sicker than the White House had admitted. Within hours, he posted a message on Twitter saying, “I am feeling well!” and called his friend and personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani to have him convey a message to the outside world. “I’m going to beat this,” Mr. Trump told him.

 

By evening, the president released a four-minute video meant to reassure the nation, showing him sitting at a conference table at the hospital and wearing a suit jacket but no tie. He looked wan and sounded less energetic than usual in a rambling message that included campaign talk and boasts about his record.

 

He acknowledged that he “wasn’t feeling so well” but said that he felt “much better now” and that he expected to return to work shortly. “I think I’ll be back soon, and I look forward to finishing up the campaign the way we started,” he said, although he acknowledged, like Mr. Meadows, that the next few days would be the real test.

 

His explanation for why he had gone to the hospital was muddled and unclear. “I had no choice,” he said. “I just didn’t want to stay in the White House.” He said he had been given that option but framed the decision to go to the hospital as an act of boldness rather than weakness. “I can’t be locked up in a room upstairs and totally safe and just say, hey, whatever happens happens,” he said. “I can’t do that. We have to confront problems.”

 

The mixed messages only exacerbated the confusion and uncertainties surrounding the president’s situation. During their televised briefing, the doctors refused to provide important details and gave timelines that conflicted with earlier White House accounts, leaving the impression that the president was sick and had begun treatment earlier than officially reported. The White House physician later released a statement insisting that he and his colleagues had misspoken.

 

The inconsistencies and confusion may presage an unsettling period for the president and the country. As the doctors indicated, it may be a week to 10 days before the course of Mr. Trump’s illness becomes clear, leaving America, as well as its overseas allies and adversaries, guessing as to the state of leadership in the world’s only superpower in the final days of a momentous election campaign.

 

[...]

 

But in reality, Mr. Trump has had difficult and even scary moments since being diagnosed with the virus that has killed more than 208,000 in the United States so far. Two people close to the White House said in separate interviews with The New York Times that the president had had trouble breathing on Friday and that his oxygen level had dropped, prompting his doctors to give him supplemental oxygen while he was at the White House and to transfer him to Walter Reed, where he could be monitored with better equipment and treated more rapidly in case of trouble.

 

During the televised briefing on Saturday, Dr. Sean P. Conley, the White House physician, said the president was not currently receiving supplemental oxygen on Saturday but repeatedly declined to say definitively whether he had ever been on oxygen. “None at this moment, and yesterday with the team, while we were all here, he was not on oxygen,” he said, seeming to suggest that there had been a period on Friday at the White House when he was.

 

Dr. Conley likewise appeared to indicate that the president had first been diagnosed with the virus on Wednesday rather than late Thursday night before Mr. Trump disclosed the test on Twitter early Friday morning. While describing what he said was the president’s progress, he said Mr. Trump was “just 72 hours into the diagnosis now,” which would mean midday on Wednesday.

 

Dr. Brian Garibaldi, another physician treating the president, also said that Mr. Trump had received an experimental antibody therapy “about 48 hours ago,” which would have been midday Thursday — before the confirmation test Dr. Conley said had come back positive that evening and a full day before the White House disclosed the treatment on Friday.

 

Just two hours later, the White House issued a written statement by Dr. Conley trying to clarify. “This morning while summarizing the president’s health, I incorrectly used the term ’72 hours’ instead of ‘Day 3’ and ’48 hours’ instead of ‘Day 2’ with regards to his diagnosis and the administration of the polyclonal antibody therapy,” Dr. Conley said. Mr. Trump, he said, was “first diagnosed” with the virus on Thursday evening and given the antibody cocktail on Friday.

 

The confusion came from a briefing where Dr. Conley and his team offered a relentlessly positive assessment of Mr. Trump’s condition. The doctors said Mr. Trump had been free of fever for 24 hours and had blood pressure and heart rates that were normal for him. “This morning the president is doing very well,” Dr. Conley said. “At this time, the team and I are extremely happy with the progress the president has made.”

Dr. Sean N. Dooley, another physician on the team, said Mr. Trump was feeling optimistic. “He’s in exceptionally good spirits,” Dr. Dooley said. He added that the president told his doctors, “I feel like I could walk out of here today.”

 

Mr. Trump, bored at the hospital and talking to a number of relatives and advisers by phone, was said by three administration officials and people close to him to indeed be in better shape, which added to the frustration among advisers that Dr. Conley and Mr. Meadows had created such confusion.

 

Dr. Conley was put out to speak primarily because White House officials had recognized that there were few in the president’s circle who were seen as credible. But Mr. Meadows was unhappy with how Dr. Conley had handled his own appearance, one person close to the president said, and he tried to correct it himself. That in turn only heightened anxiety and angered Mr. Trump.

 

While Mr. Meadows gave a more candid description of the president’s condition, the chief of staff has been heavily criticized by people working inside the administration for being too controlling of information that affects a large group of people working in the White House — and too eager to put himself at the center of the public discussion.

 

Mr. Meadows later tried to walk back his earlier comments. “The president is doing very well,” he told Reuters. “He is up and about and asking for documents to review. The doctors are very pleased with his vital signs. I have met with him on multiple occasions today on a variety of issues.”

 

At Walter Reed, doctors put Mr. Trump on remdesivir, an antiviral drug that has hastened the recovery of some coronavirus patients. While still at the White House before being transferred on Friday, Mr. Trump received a single eight-gram dose of polyclonal antibody cocktail, an experimental treatment that the White House obtained special permission to try, as well as zinc, vitamin D, an anti-heartburn medicine called famotidine, melatonin and aspirin.

Lindsay Graham is getting dogwalked right now during this debate.