Donald Trump is pushing hard to be allowed to do campaign events again despite the fact that, on a phone interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity Thursday night, he twice had to pause and mute his microphone to cough—even as, in the same interview, he insisted he was well enough to hold rallies. Trump is still getting a suspicious level of cooperation from his doctor, and his behavior is full of screaming red flags.
White House physician Dr. Sean Conley released a memo Thursday evening claiming that “Saturday will be day 10 since Thursday’s diagnosis, and based on the trajectory of advanced diagnostics the team has been conducting, I fully anticipate the President’s safe return to public engagements at that time.” Except it takes some creative counting to make Saturday be 10 days since a late Thursday, almost Friday diagnosis—unless you’ve been lying about the date of diagnosis. Which, since the White House has continued to refuse to answer questions about when Trump last tested negative for coronavirus, is entirely possible.
On Monday, Conley gave a different target than Saturday. “We’re looking to this weekend,” he said at the time. “If we can get through to Monday, with him remaining the same—or improving, better yet—then we will all take that final deep sigh of relief.” Instead, he’s giving Trump the go-ahead to go out in public and exert himself within that time frame.
Notably, Conley’s memo gave Trump’s heart rate and blood pressure but lacked details other doctors say they would want to assess, and gave no indication of whether he had tested negative for the virus at this point. Translation: He hasn’t.
Trump’s behavior raises questions about whether the dexamethasone he has been taking is affecting his personality. “Donald Trump sounds unhinged” is not exactly something that could come only because of medication, but his statements Thursday raised concern even by Trumpian standards.
On phone interviews with Hannity and with Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business, Trump attacked his own top officials for not having charged his political opponents with crimes and attacked Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer on the same day it was made public she had been the target of a kidnapping plot.
Referring to the investigations into his own 2016 campaign’s ties with Russia, Trump said, “Unless Bill Barr indicts these people for crimes, the greatest political crime in the history of our country, then we’re going to get little satisfaction unless I win and we’ll just have to go, because I won’t forget it.” To be clear, Trump is looking to have former President Barack Obama indicted.
Barr has ”all the information he needs” for criminal charges, Trump claimed, before indicating that he has directly pressured Barr to indict. “They want to get more, more, more, they keep getting more. I said, ‘You don’t need any more.’”
The Trump campaign also spent Thursday going back and forth on its position regarding presidential debates. Trump refused a virtual debate for October 15; after the Biden campaign called for the October 22 debate to take the town hall format planned for October 15, the Trump campaign agreed to that but called for a third debate on October 29. Then the Trump campaign resumed pushing for an in-person debate on October 15, based on Conley’s claims about Trump’s fitness for public engagements—which, again, included no claim that Trump has tested negative at this point. The Commission on Presidential Debates did not seem inclined to buy the claim that an in-person October 15 debate would be safe.
The Trump campaign’s urgency around debates comes down to numbers. “Some aides have struggled to get Trump to understand that a debate, which is likely to draw more than 60 million viewers, is far more impactful than a rally that airs exclusively to a Fox News audience of less than 4 million, according to a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to speak publicly,” The Washington Post reports. While the first presidential debate did not help Trump, some of his advisers are hoping they can turn things around, with Kellyanne Conway and Chris Christie reportedly advising Trump to interrupt less.
Trump and his campaign are in the desperation stage, trailing badly in the polls and with everything seeming to go wrong. Trump’s already unstable personality may be being affected by a steroid, and he’s attacking his own officials if they don’t try to criminally prosecute his political opponents. It’s not clear how sick he is and no one knows if he has another difficult phase in the course of his COVID-19 ahead of him. Things in the United States are not getting better any time real soon, in other words, because Trump is going to try to drag everything down with him.