Donald J. Trump has told the aides to think of each day of his administration as an episode on a television show.
It turns out that this production doesn’t take sick days.
The president’s diagnosis and treatment of Covid-19 has grown into a televised drama, some of which are breathtaking, others confusing – and some from Mr. Trump’s own producers in a surreal but characteristic attempt to take control of reality to force through images.
On Friday evening, viewers saw what is possibly the most noticeable helicopter take off from the White House lawn since Richard Nixons retired. Radio and cable cameras scrambled for an angle as Marine One picked up the president, suffering from the disease that has paralyzed the country under his leadership, and led him through the golden hour light to the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.
Within a few hours, the White House began counter-programming. At 6:31 p.m., Mr. Trump’s Twitter feed posted an 18-second video of the president in a suit and tie – eerily quiet since his early morning announcement – thanking the well-wishers.
The message of the video came not so much in the President’s words as in the fact that he was standing as he said it. Even when Mr. Trump was evacuated to Walter Reed, the images were in the foreground. One administration official said it was better for Mr Trump to get on that helicopter on Friday while he could walk alone than later when he might need help.
Treating the president for a potentially fatal illness would be a public relations challenge as well as a health crisis for any administration. However, this is exponentially more true of a reality TV celebrity who built his political image on the even more questionable claims of machismo, vitality, and power.
This is the president who contrasted Hillary Clinton in 2016 by constantly promoting his “perseverance”. in “The Dr. Oz Show “boasted about his testosterone levels; who told his staff to take off masks because they looked weak; Those who labeled their opponents with nicknames – “poor energy”, “liddle”, “sleepy” – wanted to brand them as weak and thus as a big, strong man.
Now in the final month of a re-election campaign, he was plagued by the pandemic, which he had notoriously downplayed. How bad the limp was wasn’t clearer after White House doctor Dr. Sean P. Conley, held a press conference on camera on Saturday.
Did Mr. Trump receive supplemental oxygen during treatment? Not this morning, said Dr. Conley with a tight grin. Has he ever had Not this morning. (He had on Friday, Dr. Conley admitted on Sunday, adding that he had tried to present an “optimistic attitude”.) How long has the President been sick? How severe were his symptoms?
Dr. Conley’s answers were like the subtraction stew in “The Phantom Tollbooth”: the more servings he served, the hungrier we were for answers. It didn’t help that the President’s Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, contradicted him in confidential remarks, initially asking to be kept confidential in front of live television cameras.
Instead of clarity, we have more images. On Saturday evening, Mr Trump posted a new video on Twitter, sitting at a table with neatly arranged folders and papers with an open collar and no mask.
He was paler than usual and appeared to be swallowing a cough or cramp at some point, but he spoke for four minutes, thanking his medical staff, and appeared to be defending his behavior – often mocking Covid’s precautions – before becoming infected.
Updated
Oct. 4, 2020, 8:39 am ET
For a president known to watch reruns of his television appearances with the sound off, the props were more important than the text. A table, not a bed; a collar, not a dress; Binders, not medical charts.
Later that night, the White House released more official pictures of Mr. Trump soberly looking at the same set of papers in two different rooms. “Nothing can stop him from working for the American people,” wrote his daughter Ivanka and posted a photo on Twitter. “Relentless!”
It’s not clear what Mr. Trump signed on a photo in the middle of the page, or whether the papers were actually official documents. But you couldn’t deny that he was at work because for this president it was always work creating pictures.
Mr. Trump’s greatest business success – he played the role of a businessman in “The Apprentice” – was produced with the knowledge that the signifiers of work (a boardroom on stage, stage-designed meetings) were visually more powerful than the actual work .
He carried that lesson with him of his choice, posed at a press conference with a stack of manila envelopes to display the papers associated with his business, posed at a concierge desk in Mar-a-Lago, Sharpie in hand and stared in the distance, “Writing my inaugural address.”
Late on Sunday afternoon, the president tweeted another video. In the optimistic style with which he once introduced “apprentice” challenges, he described his hospital stay as an investigative task: “This is the school proper; This is not the school where we can read the book ”- and promised a surprise.
Shortly thereafter, he was briefly driven past a crowd of cheering supporters outside the hospital, a demonstration of enthusiasm that benefited both the patient and the visitors. (And certainly not to the advantage of the protective detail in the President’s SUV with a Covid patient.)
Even in a serious health crisis, the president believes that looking good is better than feeling good. His career is proof that images are powerful. But they’re not antiviral. You could stave off the political consequences of a virus and its treatment. But they mean nothing to a pathogen without eyes or ears and cannot replace any information about them.
For the rest of us, reality still matters as we watch the fog and speculation of a troubling weekend. All the appearances and pictures only underscored how much we did not know about the actual health of the President. And of course, given the capricious course of this disease, we cannot yet know its prognosis.
But in the event of illness or health, the show must go on.
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