Nothing says ‘mild symptoms’ like rushed to Walter Reed. Noah Shachtman @NoahShachtman

Trump hates hospitals. He wouldn’t even go to a hospital when his older brother was dying in one. He was golfing when his younger brother died in one. This is much more serious than the WH is letting on. Mrs. Betty Bowers @BettyBowers

Is it normal to give high doses of experimental drugs to a person suffering from a very mild case of a disease? Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

I was talking to a friend about – what else – Trump, who, with his constant Tweeting and promoting, has become the center of the world for what? the last fourteen hundred days? About that, I guess. This time it was Trump and Covid and how he seemed to have a mild case. My first reaction was that Of course, they would say it was a mild case, they lie about everything. But the problem is that they don’t lie about everything but trying to figure out what is a lie and what isn’t, what is real and what is spin, is like trying to read tea leaves.

Or like trying to interpret what’s happening in the inner sanctum from the comings and goings of the Pope’s underlings, or a Pasha’s minions, or of the statements of any court swaddled in secrecy. At its core, the Presidency is a dictatorship, the Cabinet rarely, if ever, votes on what to do, the President decides. All presidencies have an inner sanctum and this one has an especially opaque one but it is possible to make a couple of semi-informed inferences. According to the WH press pool, originally they were told they couldn’t photo President Trump getting on Marine One for the trip to Walter Reed. According to Chris Wallace, President Trump and his entourage arrived too late to the Debate to be tested. According to Heather Cox Richardson, whose excellent daily Letters from an American was recommended by my sister Paula, Now it appears that White House officials deliberately withheld information about their condition, directly endangering other people who acted on the presumption that the Trump people weren’t infected. My inference is that the President is way sicker than we are being told and more than several high-level Republicans are also infected.

I know that powerful people often don’t want to admit they are sick, I’ve had personal experience with that once having a major investor who had a heart attack and told everybody he was on vacation. Hell, my dad did that. Still, it’s a little surprising in Trump’s case because, normally, when something traumatic happens to a national leader, their poll numbers go up. That’s what happened when President Reagan got shot and when both Boris Johnson and Jair Bolsonaro got Covid-19. But, even though he is a self-identified germaphobe, like almost everybody, President Trump must have started to believe his own bullshit. He must have started to believe Covid19 was pretty distant, pretty safe, after all, the Kung flue only became the plague after he got infected.

Nevertheless, the President has Covid19, it is probably much worse than we are being told by the White House PR staff, the Presidentail power has not formally been passed on to the VicePresident, and our country is probably leaderless right now.

Meadows [Trump’s Chief of Staff] has now changed his tone, tells Reuters: “The president is doing very well. He is up and about and asking for documents to review. The doctors are very pleased with his vital signs. I have met with him on multiple occasions today on a variety of issues”. Ryan Lizza @RyanLizza Chief Washington Correspondent @politico as reTweeted with comment Donald asking for documents to review? As often as these people lie, you’d think they’d be better at it. by Mrs. Betty Bowers @BettyBowers

In a new statement, the campaign says VP Pence “will begin a swing through key states following Wednesday’s debate in Salt Lake City, Utah. He will travel to Arizona, before voting early in Indiana and heading to other events yet to be announced.” Betsy Klein @betsy_klein