US history’s fittest President Donald down, but not trumped

Down with covid-19 after playing all his populist jokers that endanger 7.44 million Americans, Trump is unravelling, like many of his predecessors, as he flexes his ego to come back up in a hurry

By Elijah Olusegun

Down with covid-19 after playing all his populist jokers that , Trump is fighting to come back up in a hurry because a lot is at stake.

US President Donald Trump has yet to stop projecting strength even as his health is failing, and a team of medical doctors, now under his command, are pumping him full of steroids to do  videos, and continue his showboating, like his drive-by arm-waving he did before his MAGA supporters at Walter Reeds Military Hospital, Maryland, on Sunday.

While White House and his doctor Sean Conley have been somersaulting on the dateline and severity of Trump’s covid-19 infection since he tweeted about the positive result on Wednesday midnight, the doctors attending to him are compounding the confusion for Americans.

According to the New York Times, the doctors said Trump’s blood oxygen level dropped twice in the two days after he was diagnosed with the coronavirus, requiring medical intervention. “… and that he had been put on steroids, suggesting his condition might be more serious than initially described,” the report stated.

But they insisted his situation had improved enough since then, and that he could be released from the hospital as early as Monday.

He and his infected wife Melania checked into the military hospital on Friday. And just about the third day, in spite of the complication, he made his doctors drug him up. Along with the state service agents and a medical team, Trumped hopped into his armored Chevrolet Suburban to ride past supporters holding Trump flags.

“Wearing a suit jacket and face mask but no tie, Mr. Trump waved at the crowd through a closed window as his motorcade slowly cruised by before returning him to the hospital,” the newspaper reported.

All of that precaution, now, appears a volt face.

After months-long propaganda and denial of the virulence of covid-19 that has killed more than 200,000 Americans, Trump himself came down with the viral disease on Wednesday at a public rally in Minnesota. (He and majority of his supporters don’t care much about face masks or social distancing.)

Getting infected must have had some impact on him, especially on his conspiracy theories-fuelled approach to managing the pandemic. He actually fessed up.

“It’s been a very interesting journey,” Trump said in a one-minute video posted on Twitter.

“I learned a lot about Covid. I learned it by really going to school. This is the real school. This isn’t the let’s-read-the-books school. And I get it. And I understand it. And it’s a very interesting thing and I’m going to be letting you know about it.”

How Trump is going to apply the knowledge in a way that it won’t be just about him and his November re-election effort is, however, in doubt. Many believe his derring-do on Sunday was selfish and dangerous.

“Every single person in the vehicle during that completely unnecessary Presidential ‘drive-by’ just now has to be quarantined for 14 days,” Dr. James P. Phillips, an attending physician at Walter Reed, wrote on Twitter.

“They might get sick. They may die. For political theater. Commanded by Trump to put their lives at risk for theater. This is insanity.”

And this madness, in American annals of presidential election, is a feature.

America’s first President George Washington lost all his white pearls by the mid-age. He was using falsies while in office. And a syndrome of downers, including diphtheria, malaria, pneumonia, dysentery, buffeted him all through. It was epiglottitis that eventually killed him

US ninth President William Harrison was 68 when he came into office in 1841. His old age was going to ruin his campaign. He then decided to work hard before and after he won the election—to impress America that age was a number, and to cover for his weak bones. So did he—with his back-breaking campaign, and 8145-word inaugural speech that lasted two hours on a cold day. He came down with pneumonia later, and died after a month in White House.

America’s 22nd President Grover Cleveland also lied about his mouth cancer in 1893. He said it was a bad toothache, which was “extracted”—by a team of six surgeons and four dentists —during a four-day “fishing trip” on a yacht. Five teeth, a cancerous mound, and a well hidden scar were the outcomes of the extraction.

John F. Kennedy, 35th, was as hard as a nail, apparently, at 43, when he became US president in 1960. But in reality, he had been sustained by doses of steroids and vitamins—against Addison’s disease or autoimmune polyendocrine syndrome type 2. His opponent knew and made an issue of it during their campaigns. His doctors, however, insisted Kennedy did not have Addison’s disease. And that settled it. Except that the American No. 1 citizen collapsed twice during a congressional visit to Britain. Addison’s causes dizziness, tiredness, sweating, and mood swings.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was No 32 on the list of past American presidents. He was 38 when he lost his limbs to polio in 1921. Eleven years later, he became U.S president, and served until 1944. But all along, he had been battling high blood pressure, atherosclerosis, coronary heart disease with its syndrome of angina pectoris and congestive heart failure—all hidden from the public.

Roosevelt’s personal physician Ross McIntire would say, “The president’s health is perfectly OK. There are absolutely no organic difficulties at all.” But Roosey died after a cerebral haemorrhage.

Trump, the 45th American president, too, has made his physician declare he is the fittest of all American leaders in history. “I told the president if he’d had better diet over the last 20 years he could have lived to 200 years old,” Dr Ronny Jackson said in 2018.

“The answer is he has incredibly good genes, it’s just the way God made him.”

Trump was 71 then.

His bill of health now, at 74, has heightened the fear of comorbidities as he battles covid-19. The latest report described him has technically obese, with a BMI index of 30, part of the underlying conditions in fatal cases of the infection.

The US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) says eight out of 10 Covid deaths in the country have been victims above 65 years. And people in Trump’s age group are five times more likely to need hospital care, and 90 times more likely to die than somebody in their 20s.

His chances of pulling through are not clear-cut. And the only treatment available for now is to slow down the viral multiplication.

Unfortunately, there has not been any approved drug for this despite the fake proclamation of the so-called Zelenko Protocol, by right-wing doctors and controversial experts like Dr Stella Emmanuel and French virologist Didier Raoult.

Against US Food and Drug Administration regulations, Trump himself indulged in the cocktail of chloroquine, zinc, and azithromycine early on in the pandemic.

Now, since Friday, he’s been receiving remdesivir, another experimental vaccine most Trumpians and his Qanon fans reject.

He will be on a five-day course of the IV drug, his physician Conley said at a briefing Saturday.