Daniel DePetris

Covid-19 is Trump’s hardest fight yet

Donald Trump leaves the White House for National Reed Military Medical Centre (Photo: Getty)

Donald Trump has confronted a long list of adversaries and weathered an even longer list of scandals in his nearly four years as President of the United States. 

In 2017, there was FBI director James Comey, special counsel Robert Mueller, and the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville. In 2018, there was the felony convictions of Paul Manafort, his former campaign chairman, and his long-time fixer Michael Cohen — the latter for arranging hush money payments to a porn star on behalf of Trump. In 2019 and the beginning of 2020, impeachment dominated Trump’s state of mind. He would go on to survive all of them.

This year’s Covid-19 crisis, however, has proven to be his strongest opponent yet. As of now, Trump has yet to find an antidote for it. And now the enemy has struck close to home, with the President himself stricken by a virus that has already claimed the lives of over 208,000 Americans.

Will the President will be able to withstand a virus he once mocked as ‘the sniffles’

As of late Friday, Trump was at the Walter Reed medical center outside Washington DC being monitored by his physicians. The President, normally combative, energetic and unsympathetic, was experiencing a cough and a minor fever. His age (74 years old) and weight mean he is especially vulnerable to the disease. His wife, Melania Trump, has also contracted Covid-19, as have a number of younger White House aides such as Trump favourite Hope Hicks. One White House official described the atmosphere in the West Wing as ‘hair on fire’. 

While the entire White House complex is not exactly in lockdown, the men and women on the grounds are either petrified that the virus has spread uncontrollably or angry that the administration can’t even take care of their own people.

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Written by
Daniel DePetris

Daniel DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities, a syndicated foreign affairs columnist at the Chicago Tribune and a foreign affairs writer for Newsweek.

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