By late September 2020, the coronavirus was no longer a mystery. We knew what it did, we knew how it spread, we knew how it could be detected, and we knew better ways to treat the disease it caused. Americans had stopped binge-buying Purell and moved on to comparing masks. Vaccines were still a few months out, as were at-home testing kits, but those who chose to protect themselves against the virus had a useful sense of how to do so.
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That group did not include the sitting president.
On Wednesday morning came an amazing though eminently believable story from the Guardian: In his new book, then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows reports that President Donald Trump had a positive coronavirus test on Sept. 26 of last year, days earlier than his covid-19 infection was reported. This was the same day as the infamous White House event at which Trump announced the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to sit on the Supreme Court — an event after which a number of attendees tested positive for the virus. While much of the event was held outside, there was an unmasked portion inside the White House, where Trump and some of those who tested positive were in attendance.
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Even at the time, that aspect of the event was baffling. An indoor event without masks during a pandemic centered around an airborne virus? Obviously we understood even by then that Trump saw mask-wearing as some sort of mark of weakness and that his reelection strategy hinged on pretending that the pandemic wasn’t happening. So, again, not surprising that coronavirus cases should emerge.
Since President Trump tested positive for the coronavirus, White House officials have at times given incomplete or contradictory statements about his diagnosis. (JM Rieger/The Washington Post)
The Washington Post does not yet have a copy of the Meadows book, but the Guardian’s description of that first positive test conveys something different than political posturing. It depicts a frankly amazing lack of understanding of the virus. From the Guardian’s report:
“Meadows writes of his surprise that such a ‘massive germaphobe’ could have contracted Covid, given precautions including ‘buckets of hand sanitiser” and “hardly [seeing] anyone who ha[d]n’t been rigorously tested’.”
“Meadows says the positive test had been done with an old model kit. He told Trump the test would be repeated with ‘the Binax system, and that we were hoping the first test was a false positive’.”
“After ‘a brief but tense wait’, Meadows called back with news of the negative test.”
Hand sanitizer? Look, Trump is indeed a known germaphobe, his tenure was described as the “Purell presidency” well before the pandemic began. But for his chief of staff at that juncture to think that Trump’s insistence on sanitizer was a sufficient prophylactic against covid-19 is amazing.
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Not to mention the obvious ridiculousness of the claim about rigorous testing. The White House had already seen a number of individuals test positive over the course of the year and should certainly have been aware of questions about the rapid-testing regimen it used. In July 2020, CNN reported that the ID NOW test from Abbott Labs being used by the White House was being questioned — including by the Food and Drug Administration. It’s not clear if this was the test that provided Trump’s first positive result. The second test used Abbott’s Binax system, the one that was approved for home use by the FDA in December last year. Why the White House wasn’t using a more accurate rapid molecular test at that point is not clear.
But consider the argument here: Trump was protected because he was surrounded by constant testing — that had just been shown to return false results. Either the first test or the second was obviously wrong; Trump wasn’t both infected with the virus and not infected with it. And if one test was wrong, that means that other tests were also wrong and, therefore, that the testing regimen alone wasn’t enough. I mean, again, we knew this then! But it’s still bizarre that the White House chief of staff should find it somehow puzzling.
What’s not clear at this point is which test was wrong. Trump reported his positive test several days later, after engaging in a number of public events and participating in the first presidential debate against Joe Biden. Given that he ended up in the hospital one day after that announced positive test, it seems likely that the positive test was the accurate one. The progression of covid-19 is not that fast.
The White House probably knew this. Meadows reportedly writes that “nothing was going to stop” Trump from participating in the debate. As I noted in October last year, the White House also took at least one unusual precautionary measure two days after Trump’s positive test: At an outdoor event involving medical experts, Trump spoke at a separate lectern.
The subject of the event was coronavirus testing.
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In a statement released on Wednesday, Trump denied that he was infected at the Sept. 29 debate. There is of course no reason to assume that Trump is being honest about this.
He did say in the statement that “a test revealed that I did not have COVID prior to the debate.” After his diagnosis last year, Trump’s team repeatedly declined to say when his last negative test had been taken. The last we know of was that one on Sept. 26, right after the positive one. But the White House went ahead with the president’s schedule anyway. After he tested positive, he even at one point suggested that he might have contracted the virus at an event held indoors at the White House on Sept. 27, celebrating military Gold Star families.
For months, Trump tried to convince Americans that the pandemic was under control and that they didn’t need to take exceptional precautions against infection. What’s remarkable is that he embraced this same approach himself. Even at the time, it was noteworthy that masks weren’t required in the White House; there were even reports that Trump had mocked those who wore them around him.
It’s not surprising that Trump hid a positive result. It’s not surprising that he and his team tried to ignore that result, deciding against changing his schedule out of an abundance of caution. The only thing that’s really surprising about the Meadows report is that Trump — disregarding nearly everything experts recommended about prevention — didn’t contract the virus until that September.