The Web of Lies
Just like everything else Trump, information about his case of COVID-19 is wholly and completely uninformative, not to mention unsettling. Sean Conley, his physician (not a MD, but an Osteopath), is obviously on a very short leash being controlled completely by Trump and his henchman. The timeline, true condition, vital signs, and prognosis for Trump are completely opaque. The information is so inconsistent and poor that the possibilities for his condition range from he’s not sick and faking the whole thing to he’s already dead.
To confuse matters even more, the WH has released photos of Trump “working” and even posted a video of Trump doing a “single take” video talking about how great he’s feeling. Yes, that’s all bullshit. The photos, taken in two different rooms showing him supposedly working throughout the day are staged, and taken 10 minutes apart using the same binder, folders, and Trump’s signature fat sharpie he uses for autographs. The Washington Post has just posted an expert analysis of the video, concluding that it is heavily edited with a tool called Fluid Morph which camouflages edits. They even found one part of the video where he was starting to cough, but then doesn’t. Also, you can see the background shifting through the various edits. This is the technique used in so-called “deep fakes” where videos are altered to show events that didn’t actually happen. Here’s the video:
It is key that Americans understand clearly the condition of their president, but that is simply not going to happen with Trump. Falsehoods are genetically encoded in him, and he will lie when telling the truth is easier. We will likely never know the true extent of Trump’s illness until after he leaves office.
Yes, very unreliable “information”. The docs who speak look nervous, choosing words carefully, that are vague or incomplete, such as he’s not on oxygen now.
As for DOs vs MDs, Dr Esther Choo of Oregon Health Science university tweeted her support of DOs:
1ATTENTION: D.O.’s, or doctors of osteopathic medicine, receive the same training as MDs, plus some training specific to osteo. I’m proud to work alongside and train many DOs. You can criticize Conley on many grounds, but please, not for the degree.
Here’s what Osteopathic medicine is all about!
https://osteopathic.org/what-is-osteopathic-medicine/
2Headline: Reactions: Experts alarmed by Trump treatment plan normally used only for the severely ill
October 04, 2020
Campaign med madness? Who are these guys? They are pouring unproven medicine cocktails down his throat with impunity. Steroid treatments are only for the worst case scenarios, counsel those in the know.
Will there be emergency procedures of neck bolts screwed in and code blue gurney rushes to the rooftop during passing electrical storms? ~ ‘ITS ALIVE!
Edit: Sanjay Gupta says doctors at Walter Reed are throwing “the kitchen sink” at Trump, feeding him 3 different “serious” medications, one of which is experimental in nature.
***********************************************
3https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/reactions-experts-alarmed-by-trump-treatment-plan-normally-used-only-for-the-severely-ill/
Two things stand out for me –
1) He gets the best medical care possible to knock this thing out and avoid the long-term health abyss experienced by the long-termers….which we all pay for but we wouldn’t get if we were ill.
2) Those are the first photos I’ve ever seen of him with folders or any sort of work product in front of him. Hmmmmm.
4Twitter lit up last night over the EXIF date on the “Saturday Working At The Hospital” photos. The White House didn’t bother to remove the data, and it showed the Saturday hospital photos were taken on Friday, most likely staged at the White House.
Ivanka posted those pictures of her hard working dad, supposedly in the hospital, with the comment RELENTLESS!
Relentless indeed. The lies keep a comin’.
https://mashable.com/article/donald-trump-working-walter-reed-photos/
5Megasoid @ 3,
They could try bleeding him with leeches. But I doubt you could get leeches to work Rump as a professional courtesy.
6We will probably never know the truth, but we will know the lies because almost anything said from Trumpf’s orbit will be a lie. As usual. Except it was interesting that Mark Meadows seemed to have a momentary lapse yesterday when he said things that sounded significantly worse than the docs.
7What we do know is he’s getting immediate strong treatment and care, something almost no one else gets. Certainly not unexpected for any president but many of the 210,000 dead would have survived with similar care.
And the Trumpf supporters learned nothing and will continue to help kill many more. Quarter of a million by Election Day.
@Rick RELENTLESS! is the term the women he assaulted would use in their description.
8The papers are blank. Trump has not worked a day in his life doing mundane paperwork. He only cares about signing executive orders. I would expect doctors to treat the POTUS with exceptional care and treatments. I don’t have a problem with Walter Reed doing that. I do have a problem with Trump paying no taxes to pay for the treatment.
9I’m wondering if the Mark Meadows’ “ slip” about his actual condition could be the set up to have him removed from office ….is it article 25? Hasn’t the cabinet discussed this before?
10Just daydreaming while I process pumpkins, maybe it’s the proximity to all that orange
Trump’s current doctor Sean Conley is in the U.S. Navy and so subject to orders from his commander-in-chief, Trump. I’m not sure about the medical ethics of this – Hippocrates did not seem to directly address the issue of lying to others about a patient’s condition. But his career could be turned into mud quickly if he did not do as ordered. Hell, in theory he could be tried for mutiny.
Ronny Jackson was also a Navy Doctor. But Dr. “He’ll live to be 200!” is so far away from ethics or reality, that Trump probably did not have to threaten his Naval career.
11Apparently Trumpf needed to get his fix of adulation from his proud boys around Walter Reed so he put his SS in peril to take a spin in his suburban then returned to his suite. Back to more Fox News while he practices doodling with his sharpie. What a waste.
12On Friday Trump flew on a helicopter for his hospital stay, and today he’s out temporarily for a Sunday drive? Curiouser and curiouser.
13Freshly from European press:
14https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8804699/This-insanity-Walter-Reed-doc-slams-Trump-putting-lives-risk-political-theater.html
Trumpf is on steroids treatment. If you google the use of steroids for Covid, researchers say it should only be used in severe cases. They can have negative side effects especially on elderly patients when the virus is mild.
15So, which is it- is he severely ill or not?
Look for Mark Meadows to be gone. Trumpf is pissed at him. Truth has consequences in the Trumpf administration as he is learning.
If Dr. James Phillips is the attending physician at Walter Reed who is doing the complaining that Trump endangered his Secret Service detail for his spin around the block, Dr. Phillips is going to catch hell for letting his dismay reach the public. He’s right, though.
16Rick @5 …
Time & date on the photos shows late Saturday afternoon, not Friday.
5:25 pm: One photo w/ white cabinets and flags is the same location as the video. The other, at 5:35 in a room with wood paneling, has his jacket off, but apparently the same folders, notebook and Sharpie. Jason Miller’s tweet, 20 minutes later (5:55), posting the video. Ivanka posting the video 20 minutes later.
I don’t know if there is a way to get embedded tech info from a video — but from what I can string together, one possible scenario
5:00-ish start the video session …
5:20 wrap of video, with several takes of the “same” message
5:23 invite the WH still photographer in — she dinks around, sets up the shot, and gets several frames.
5:30 *resident and photographer move into a room next door, Trump takes off the jacket and goes “back to work” for some additional shots. They shuffle the props, photographer gets her shots.
Trump clears the table, and they bring in his hamburger and two scoops.
Meanwhile, from the end of the videos, the team slaps together a quick edit of the video, cutting coughs and the worst of Trump’s speaking lapses.
WH Photographer gives stills to the AP for distribution.
17john in denver @17
I found a more recent post from a professional photographer on fstoppers this afternoon. He was unable to find any EXIF info on the photos except the time stamp. Not sure if he means only hours & minutes, or the date as well. He allowed the info might open on another program than he has.
Something isn’t kosher, but we might need some top notch X-Files level capability to get to the bottom of this.
https://fstoppers.com/originals/does-exif-data-prove-trump-lying-america-522345
18From the Toronto Star:
oronto Star Editorial
2020-10-03
A presidential election that scarcely seemed capable of growing more chaotic and bizarre did exactly that this week.
The news that President Donald Trump, his wife Melania and sundry other Republicans had tested positive for coronavirus – which the president had mockingly said was a trifle that would vanish as if by miracle — seemed to carry an almost cosmic portent. Or perhaps overtones of a rejected Hollywood screenplay. It’s hard to decide which.
If nothing else, it reminded all that pride does indeed goeth before a White House quarantine.
Trump’s bad news came just days after he all but took a wrecking ball to the first of three scheduled debates with his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden.
In that, there should have been less astonishment than there was.
Trump was as he has always been, exactly as he has shown himself since the moment, he rode down the golden escalator to announce his candidacy in 2015 and promptly began spouting bile about Mexicans.
No American really has much more to learn about Donald J. Trump, save the details of his lifelong corruption and what Russia holds over him.
His four-year run of destruction and dysfunction has been conducted with the president’s disorders and deceit worn proudly on his sleeve.
No American presidency in history has produced such a nearly moment-by-moment chronicling – through reporting, books, investigations and Trump’s own social media habit.
Through his Twitter feed, the world knows what’s on Trump’s mind and what mood he’s in at virtually all hours of day or night.
At his rallies, his belligerence, narcissism, puerility, world-class lying, blaming and shaming are on regular exhibit in Castro-length, stream-of-consciousness rants.
>From the many leakers inside the White House, there has come unceasing detail of his conduct – his bullying, vulgarity, misogyny, racism, slight work ethic, disdain for briefings, autocratic impulses and fever dreams.
And the books!
There have been books by journalists, books by former staffers, cabinet secretaries, the former head of the FBI. Books by disillusioned Republicans, by his niece, by the porn star he slept with, by his once-loyal-and-jailed-for-his-troubles lawyer and fixer.
Most astonishingly, though long since forgotten, there was a book before the president was a year in office – “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” — by 27 psychiatrists and mental-health experts assessing his various derangements.
How alarmed must they have been to say: “There are those who still hold out hope that this president can be prevailed upon to listen to reason and curb his erratic behaviour. Our professional experience would suggest otherwise. We collectively warn that anyone as mentally unstable as this man simply should not be entrusted with the life-and-death powers of the presidency.”
In short, voters know all they need to about Donald Trump.
He has not for one day, since being sworn in, sought to honour the office he holds or to be a leader to all his people.
In the debate, he again undermined the legitimacy of the election that’s only a month off. He urged supporters to become flying squadrons of intimidation at polling places. He alerted the thuggish militias and white supremacists who back him to “stand by” for action if results don’t go his way.
He is a danger to his country and all the democratic ideals it purportedly holds dear. He is as unfit for the presidency as Hannibal Lecter is a dinner guest.
Immediately after he debate came questions about whether the next two scheduled encounters should even be held.
We thought so (until, of course, COVID-19 intervened and put all that in doubt).
The debate made crystal clear what Trump is and has always been and made crystal clear the choice America faces.
It was almost a best-of reel, all of the president’s manifold psychoses and character defects. His abject inhumanity and callousness. His incoherence. His utter lack of empathy in claiming to have done a “phenomenal” job responding to a virus that has killed more than 200,000 Americans.
The debate also enabled Americans to appraise Joe Biden.
In no sense did Biden seen the ideal president for the 21st century. He sounded old and tired, his prime well behind him. He seemed at a loss how even to respond to Trump and was lured into mere name-calling.
Still, the test is not a comparison to the Almighty, but to the alternative. And in that, America was presented with a stark choice.
Biden was human, decent, restrained in the face of appalling personal provocation, and as humble as anyone seeking the most powerful office in the world can be.
If the former vice-president to Barack Obama is imperfect, he is not at all unfit – as Trump Nation has sought to portray him.
It is moot now as to whether the next two debates can be held. Whether or not they are, and godspeed to a quick recovery by Trump that makes that possible, this one did its job.
It showed the stakes could not be higher on Nov. 3. Not for America. Or the world.
Let us hope the psychiatrists who wrote the book on Trump were prescient when they quoted the American poet Theodore Roethke.
“In a dark time, the eye begins to see.”
19Although the doctors are lying I do not agree that we have not been given sufficient information.
For example, we know the oxygen concentration got down to 86, because Conley said it was below 93 but not in the low 80s. Below 90 puts you in ICU although the presidential suite will have the equivalent without the name on the door.
The steroids confirm this conclusion.
We know Trump has been given every non-quack treatment available. That tells us the doctors are desperate. (I heard a physician on CNN this morning say “. . . or they panicked.”)
He’s a sick puppy.
I would not myself be so quick to support osteopaths. The theory supporting it is as silly as chiropractic and the founder, A.T.Still, was one of the classic American nutcases. The training may use the same syllabus as real medical schools but is hardly as rigorous.
I think DOs are useful for minor stuff; one I know was director of a hospice, not a bad place with osteopathy’s emphasis on palliative cares. I would never use a DO for complicated,uncertain syndromes or turn to one for diagnosis.
(I did an internet search for osteopathy and Still and learned that the DOs have managed to scrub the ‘Net clean. Not even Wikipedia has anything about Still’s insanity, which I learned about while working at the Des Moines Register in the ’70s. Des Moines has an osteopathic school that goes back to Still himself and the stories about his insanity were still current 40 years ago.)
20Several of the Family Practitioners my family has used as we moved around have been Osteopaths. They have been great doctors and tend to listen better than MDs. Especially good if you have something like an autoimmune disease that doesn’t have a magic bullet cure. Dr. Sean Conley’s problem is that he woke up in the movie Goodfellas and has no clue how to handle it.
21I’m no stranger to dangerous health conditions. El Jefe is right on. Trump is simply killing himself all the while in reach of those who could prevent it. If they can’t – or won’t – then this is all on him. This virus is straight out of Hell and riding high on its own kind of steroids. It can play dead for awhile and then come back like you wouldn’t believe and really kill you very, very dead. I know this has been explained the the Toddler in Chief but it goes nowhere with him. And he has sickened a whole bunch of people who have recently been around him. My bet is more such people will be popping up as the next two weeks go by. It will be just one unending list of people on the Injured Reserve List.
My new campaign slogan for all Democrats: Make America healthy again! And keep it that way!
22Steroids ease symptoms but cure nothing. They also cause the brain to think they’re better than they are. I know because I had to use some for RA for a couple months. Of course that’s normal for DUH Trumpf. Thinking he’s better than he is.
23Maggie, I don’t know how clearly Trump works this out in his mind but he really has no choice. Staying put under professional care is equivalent to psychic death for him. As he said of hydroxychloroquine, what has he got to lose?
24