After the White House was forced to disclose last week that Hope Hicks had tested positive for COVID-19 and, several hours later, that Donald Trump and the first lady had as well, the close aide to the president was said to be upset that the news coverage suggested that she had given her boss the virus. “It’s so unfair she’s sort of being blamed,” a friend of Hicks’s told my colleague Gabriel Sherman. At the time, it was unclear when or how the president had contracted the disease, and now, five days later, it still is—largely because the White House has refused to say when Trump last tested negative for COVID-19 and rejected the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s assistance in using an investigative measure proven to help identify the source of an outbreak and all those affected. Which could be because they don’t want to admit that the president wasn’t tested nearly as often as the administration suggested, or: that he tested positive earlier than it was revealed to the public and is potentially patient zero of the outbreak that has infected at least 27 people in his inner circle.
Speaking to Don Lemon on Tuesday night, Jonathan Reiner, M.D., a professor of medicine and surgery at George Washington University School of Medicine, said, “I think we’ve really started to put together the timeline here and this is what I think it is. First of all there’s no chance the president was tested before the debate, I think that’s pretty clear. He was symptomatic on Thursday night and it takes about a week after infection to get sick enough to be admitted to the hospital. So I think the president was infected with the coronavirus for at least a week before he was admitted to the hospital. That takes him to the end of the prior week, before the super-spreader event. The rules of the debate required both sides to list all of their attendees and to document that they’d been tested within 72 hours. There’s no chance that that happened with the president. I think he is the super-spreader. And I think the reason the White House will not have the CDC do a formal check and review every single case is that they’re concerned that the patient zero might be the president of the United States.”
Of course, Reiner is merely speculating, but as Jake Tapper noted in a Twitter thread on Wednesday, the White House‘s refusal to say when the president last tested negative really isn’t acceptable at this point, given the fact that it’s “a public health issue” because the president is contagious, and the only justification appears to be the president’s lackeys repeating the talking point that they don’t “want to go backwards.” Meanwhile, according to the Wall Street Journal, Trump has a history of trying to keep COVID-positive test results a secret:
In other words, it’s not hard to imagine a scenario in which Trump tested positive for COVID-19 well before he was forced to disclose it to the public, and it’s possible we wouldn’t have known about it at all had Hicks’s case not been reported, forcing his hand. (As the New York Times reported last week, “White House officials had hoped to keep the news about Ms. Hicks from becoming public, to no avail.”)
Of course, there’s a way to kill the speculation that Trump not only knowingly had the virus when he debated Joe Biden, but also during all the subsequent events after that, including a Minnesota rally and a meeting with donors in Bedminster, New Jersey, which would be to release proof of his negative tests during that time period. But, for some strange reason, the White House doesn’t want to do that. On Wednesday, White House Deputy Communications Director Brian Morgensterntold reporters that the purpose of contact tracing isn’t to “go back and identify patient zero,” which isn’t true at all, as identifying patient zero would help trace who that person came in contact with to prevent the further spread of the virus.
Anyway, here’s a letter from the president’s super-trustworthy doctor, which starts by taking Trump’s own word for it that he’s in perfect health:
And, in related news, the White House staff apparently remains undeterred in its quest to raise the West Wing infection rate to 100%:
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