Virus hysteria & Trump: Who’s sicker? Him or the US media?

By J. Michael Springmann

This business of Trump and the coronavirus is news for a variety of reasons. The President's health in the United States is a major issue, going back to Woodrow Wilson at the beginning of the last century He'd had a stroke and his physical condition was kept from the American people for fear of setting off crashes on Wall Street, and general panic.

Another, more recent instance came when Dwight Eisenhower was president in the 1950s. He had had a couple of heart attacks but this had been kept from the press for fear of, again, crashes in the financial markets and worrying the American people about the strength of their leadership. And the President somehow is seen as a Superman, a god on earth, someone whose health reflects that of the country.

And in Donald Trump's case, he's been very, very critical of the hysterical nature of the reaction to the virus. And I think that the news media are zeroing in on that and playing up any changes, however slight, in his condition. They worry that his blood oxygen level has sunk below 95% or 96%, on one or two occasions, not deeply crashing, but just a couple of percentage points below normal.  When he reached the bottom limit of about 95%, the doctors ordered supplemental  oxygen be given him in the hospital.

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Well, I've been in the hospital and I've been given supplemental oxygen; that is a matter of course, it's pure protection on the part of the doctors. They can't see their patient having problems, especially the President of the United States. The man has to be seen as getting the best of care. And the information that keeps coming out about his health goes up and down wildly. The medicos are talking about releasing him Monday while the media worry about his taking a variety of steroids and experimental drugs like Remdesivir. And government spokesmen are not really clear on what's happening. I think that it's probably politics and is partly the natural caution of the doctors, particularly given the fact that their patient is the President of the United States.

But I do think that there are physical things working against Trump. He's somewhat overweight, and his age, I think he's 74, is a difficulty. People who are older and in not perfect physical condition like Trump is, would be seen as very much at risk for the very difficult consequences of the virus. Yet, you see people who were children, who were young adults, getting the virus as well, and then, despite their youth and vigor, being hammered by it.

I've seen social media reports from a Russian journalist who's somewhere around 30. She said she was really much knocked down by the disease, even though she's young and fit.

So with Trump, who is somewhat older and somewhat fatter than the average member of the American populace, you've got to worry about this. The issue of course is that he has been critical, as I mentioned before, of the virus and the virus control people want to keep the hysteria going, raving about the hundreds of thousands of deaths so far. This helps promote their power.

And in my view, I think they're playing with numbers. I've seen news reports of a fellow who was killed in a motorcycle crash, and the man was deemed to have died of the coronavirus. I knew the former CIA officer, Ralph McGehee. He was listed as dying at the age of 92 from the virus. He had been in a nursing home in Maine for years. And he once told me over the telephone a couple of years ago that he really didn't want to talk international politics with me because he was feeling so poorly. He was well along in years, and his health was not good to begin with. So I marveled at the fact that someone who was old and sick, can be still be tagged as dying solely from the virus. 

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In Trump's case, he is reasonably fit. And you've got the news media which hates him and is looking for ways to influence the election, claiming this man is too weak to be reelected president. We have to have Joe Biden, who is, in fact, older and is believed to have mental problems.

So I think that the problem is really one of politics, one of virus politics in particular. Because as I noted, Trump was critical of the hysteria about the virus. And while I think it's a significant issue, I think that the death rate from the virus isn't that much different from the annual death rate from a really bad flu season, which we've had a couple of times in the last few years.

So, we have to wait and see. We have to discount a lot of these comments that are coming out in the press. They're very sketchy. They change from day to day and hour to hour. And if they're willing to release him tomorrow and send him home to the White House apparently he's not that bad off, as some of the news media seems to claim.

J. Michael Springmann is an American political commentator, author and former US diplomat in Saudi Arabia. He is based in Washington. He recorded this article for Press TV website.

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