Trump Has COVID megathread (update 10/24: 2 Pence staffers test positive)

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

I think even if he tests positive he will lie and say he is negative.

He's COVID-19 al-Adeen.

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

Biden is negative

PTL, but I will sleep a lot better if he gets tested again in a couple of days and is still negative.

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

I doubt anything serious is going to happen to Trump. He's just going to be self-quarantining for a couple of weeks.

And if there's anything that makes Trump act presidential, it's being cooped up at home all day with nothing to do but tweet and watch TV!

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

https://twitter.com/schwartzbCNBC/status/1312044438429073408?s=20

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

https://twitter.com/maggieNYT/status/1312138498523033602

Does anyone know what kind of medical equipment/capabilities are at the White House itself?

I ask because he's probably getting a chest X-ray and an MRI.

If he's going to Walter Reed for that stuff, it's hardly anything to freak out about. But if the White House has equipment to do that stuff onsite, then I'm not sure why he'd be going to the hospital unless something was wrong.

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

https://twitter.com/JoshNBCNews/status/1312139747750367232?s=19

This is what has never made sense about Trump's PR strategies.

He comes from real estate, where the norm is to overpromise and underdeliver because by the time it's clear you've underdelivered, the building's already sold/leased and you've already deposited the check.

He doesn't get that expectations matter in politics. If they keep saying he's not that sick and these ominous updates keep trickling out, it's just going to set the entire country (and much of the world) into even more anxiety.

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

https://twitter.com/jmartNYT/status/1312146075113807872

What a class act.

Biden's an Irish Catholic who has buried a wife, a daughter and a son. Grief is a second language to him and he would never hit someone when they're down.

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

I wonder if they’re discussing the 25th. I’d bet Pence cancels the debate ASAP just to be safe.

When you're as far behind in the polls as that ticket, canceling debates isn't something you do.

They're basically out of chances to "reset" or get a favorable news cycle. Debates are the only avenues left for that to happen.

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

https://twitter.com/RebeccaBuck/status/1312152049740464128

I think the benefit of not dealing with the inherent instability and disruption of the leader of a major world power dying (regardless of that leader's performance in office) cannot be overstated.

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

This is one of the most dishonest administrations in American history, and this time their cover-ups are going to make people seriously ill and possibly dead.

https://twitter.com/AaronMesh/status/1312176841222889473?s=20

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

https://twitter.com/Acosta/status/1312172504148893698

A live look at said White House officials:

So Mike Pence is Malenkov, I'm guessing?

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

Not related to Trump. But...


https://twitter.com/benyc/status/1312183526201069568

Why only 10 days instead of 15? Because McConnell cares more about getting judges confirmed than not killing a building full of geriatrics including himself?

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

The bulk of my sympathy is directed at Barron right now, because losing a parent when you're a teenager would be devastating. Even a seriously ill parent can be stressful.

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

They wanted to get him out of the White House before they'd be forced to wheel him out in a wheelchair:

https://twitter.com/AshleyRParker/status/1312204066622066688

This is basically a Veep episode playing out in real life.

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

No, Trump will not learn his lesson.

Go away, Susan Collins. Stop posting on here when you're on the verge of losing your Senate seat.

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

Delta should ban them from flying.

(And it's very difficult to get anywhere out of MSP if you're not going on Delta.)

https://twitter.com/nielslesniewski/status/1312209537181478912?s=20

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

Kellyanne has it:

https://twitter.com/KellyannePolls/status/1312214949658152960

This year has been surreal.

Those early reports, from back in February and March, that the virus could potentially infect up to 70% of the American population seem to be bearing themselves out. It seems like half of Washington D.C. has contracted coronavirus at this point.

The stubborn refusal of the White House and Congress to move to a work-from-home model is a reminder of how much of politics is based on physical proximity to power and influence.

Instead, a bunch of 70 year olds who probably shouldn't even be going to the grocery store are puttering around cramped 19th century buildings, shaking hands, eating together, talking in meetings where they're sitting right next to each other.

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

I'm starting to think Pence will test positive within the next couple of days.

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

‘God-tier genetics’: A stunned MAGA world offers blame, adulation after Trump’s diagnosis

“You’ve never seen him sick. You’ve never seen him without energy,” Brenden Dilley, a self-described “MAGA life coach,” told his viewers on his radio show Friday. “[He’s] not walking around with weak-ass, p---- f------ genetics. He ain’t got those liberal genes. These are, like, god-tier genetics; top 1-percentile genetics.”

Wishful thinking abounded, as well: Dr. David Samadi, a urologist and commentator for Fox News and the conservative Newsmax outlet, set the goal posts by pointing out that while Covid-19 patients over the age of 70 had a 94.6 percent recovery rate, patients ages 24 to 49 had a 99.8 percent recovery rate. “I would put POTUS in the 20-49 category due to his strength and stamina,” he tweeted.

“Does anyone else find it odd that no prominent Democrats have had the virus but the list of Republicans goes on and on?” tweeted DeAnna Lorraine, a former congressional candidate who has backed baseless theories from the QAnon conspiracy movement, going on to blast masks as a Democrat-backed lie and questioning whether China had technically made an “assassination attempt” on the first family.

...according to various QAnon theorists, Trump had left a secret message to his followers in his announcement on Twitter that he had tested positive for Covid-19. Some suggested that his use of the word “together” was, in fact, code for “to get her,” a reference to attacks on his 2016 rival, Hillary Clinton. Others thought Trump’s quarantining was part of a broader plan to isolate the president from potential violence associated with the upcoming election.

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

I am calling for a complete and total shutdown of the Republican Party until we can figure out what the hell is going on.

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

Send thoughts and prayers Christie's way.

Dude's an Oh-Lawd-He-Comin'-sized ball of butter and his heart and lungs absolutely do not need this.

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1312233807991496704?s=21

Why is the second "L" in "well" a capital i?

No clue but I'm sure the QAnoners have a perfectly rational explanation for this.

Brad Parscale picked a bad time to have a breakdown. He will now feature in their theories as someone with advance knowledge of Trump's positive test.

I pity the future historians who try to write the story of this time period in an APUSH book and not make it sound completely faked. Maybe there'll be a conspiracy theory that other historians fabricated the events this week as a cover story to hide something else, because this could never have actually happened, right?

I'm looking forward to spending my old age being invited to speak at high schools about what life was like in the Late American Republic-Early Trumpian Era.

"Now time was back in the year dickety-dickety. The president was an orange game show host and one day he gave everyone the MAGA Flu, as it is now called. Extremely Online people used these things called dank memes, which I will get to later. You all know the Supreme Court as a popular assembly of which every voting age American is a member, but did you know that it used to only have nine people on it?"

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

I think what floors me the most is the sheer arrogance of these people.

I haven't seen my grandparents in person in months and there they were all huddled indoors hugging and laughing and clinking glasses and shaking hands and clearing their throats to celebrate the theft of a Supreme Court seat.

I know hardcore MAGA people who are largely making good faith efforts to minimize risks to their own or others health. They wear masks when they go out, even if somewhat grudgingly. If they want to see their neighbors, they talk to each other in the front yard, several feet apart.

But the Trumps and their retainers felt that was beneath them. They thought only the little people got sick (especially the black and brown ones). They thought all their money and power and privilege made them invincible. They may have even thought they were somehow genetically or biologically superior and their social standing was just evidence of that.

Now they're reaping what they sow in abundance.

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

I’m glad to see y’all care about correcting my spelling more than human lives.  Always been a classy bunch here.

Your and you’re are commonly mixed up. Just trying to help.  

Haha thanks.  I’m on my phone typing very fast so I’m not exactly focused on my grammar/spelling.

Notice how you haven’t responded to the points that it’s their fault the virus got so bad?

I don’t need to.  I’m came in here to condemn people celebrating/cheering on others who now have life threatening illness. Two wrongs don’t make a right.

No one is celebrating or cheering anything.

They're simply pointing out that actions have consequences.

You're a Republican—shouldn't you believe in personal responsibility and being accountable for the consequences of your decisions?

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

There's something incredibly poetic about a bunch of people who've spent years trying to kill the ACA voluntarily giving themselves a virus that will make them uninsurable in a deregulated insurance market with no protections for preexisting conditions.

https://twitter.com/Phil_Mattingly/status/1312239628225740800?s=20