Donald Trump won the presidency four years ago by beating the mainstream media at its own game.
This weekend, he proved he could do it even from a hospital room.
After Friday’s announcement that the president and first lady Melania Trump had tested positive for COVID-19, the anti-Trump media went into overdrive with claims about how allegedly precarious the health of the 74-year-old Trump actually is.
And conspiracy theories abounded.
On CNN on Sunday, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, the liberal network’s in-house critic for all things related to Trump and COVID-19, told “State of the Union” host Jake Tapper in an interview that he was certain that physicians on Trump’s medical team “are hiding things.”
“Well you know I’d have to say that they are hiding things, Jake. I mean, I hate to say it,” Gupta said, according to Breitbart.
Gabriel Sherman, a Vanity Fair correspondent, might have pushed the bounds of barking madness the furthest in the Trump health story with an article Saturday that cited an “outside White House adviser” who allegedly said a “high-level government official from a G-7 country asked him if Trump would try to appoint Ivanka president instead of Mike Pence.”
Assuming that story is true (a big assumption), the fact that the United States has a Constitution that contains contingency plans for an absent chief executive that don’t include appointing first daughters to fill the office doesn’t seem to have occurred to the “outside White House adviser,” or the G-7 “official” (and possibly not even Sherman.)
With that kind of mindset, Sherman published a tweet the same day:
“Just watched Trump hospital video a second time. His breathing is clearly labored. He seems to be leaning on table for support,” Sherman wrote. “And there’s so much fear in his eyes.”
Well, it’s easy to stipulate that no one is going to look their best during the first days of a hospital stay for COVID-19, but it’s doubtful most Americans saw the president Sherman was describing. (“Fear in his eyes” is not what most people think of when they think of Donald Trump.)
The fact that Trump made a video at all under the circumstances should have been a reassuring statement that the president’s health wasn’t anywhere near the point where he might, say, pass out on the street and need to be thrown into a van like a sack of potatoes by a Secret Service agent (as Hillary Clinton so famously was).
But that Saturday video was ancient history by Sunday, when Trump not only posted another video, but also went on a joyride outside Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to greet the supporters who had stood vigil for him.
As a challenge to the conspiracy theorists and liberal fantasists — who were already spinning dreams of a shattered Trump presidency — the video and the jaunt outside the hospital were priceless.
Liberals like Sherman might see fear in Trump’s eyes in this video.
But normal Americans will see a man apparently speaking candidly about his own health issues, appreciatively of the medical professionals who helped him, and gratefully of the supporters he knew were outside his hospital wishing him the best.
“It’s been a very interesting journey, I learned a lot about COVID,” a clearly upbeat Trump said, after thanking the medical pros who were caring for him and hinting at his upcoming visit to supporters outside.
His signoff: “We love the USA and we love what’s happening” should have been game, set and match.
But naturally, Trump had plenty of carping critics on social media — pretending outrage at his spin outside Walter Reed because it allegedly endangered others, like his Secret Service detail. Yet he had plenty of support, too.
This one summed it up perfectly, though.
Faced with the coronavirus pandemic, Democrats have chosen to lock down the economy in states unfortunate enough to be under their control. Their candidate for president spends more time cowering in his basement than in making his case to the American public.
And the mainstream media have used the disease to replace the hoax of “Russian collusion” and the ludicrous sham of presidential impeachment to provide the storyline to launch a never-ending series of attacks against the president — all aimed at preventing his re-election.
The latest plot twist — Donald and Melania Trump testing positive for COVID-19 — gave the president’s critics a seemingly can’t-miss chance to hit him again (and as “Saturday Night Live” showed over the weekend, they weren’t hesitant to take it.)
But on Sunday, Trump flipped the script.
It didn’t take much — a video posted to Twitter that exuded optimism, a car ride around the hospital to greet his supporters – and Trump had turned the media’s biggest weapons back on the liberals who hate him.
The president who has built his re-election campaign on bringing the country back from the coronavirus crisis, rather than cowering before it as Democrats demand, was using his own physical actions to prove his point — and it electrified his supporters, as the showman in Trump no doubt knew it would.
Trump is in the White House because he defeated the mainstream media in 2016 when it did everything it could to elect Hillary Clinton instead.
On Sunday, even from a hospital bed, he proved he could do it still.
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