The Patriot Post® · Trump Returns to the White House

“I just left Walter Reed Medical Center, and it’s really something very special — the doctors, the nurses, the first responders. And I learned so much about coronavirus, and one thing that’s for certain: Don’t let it dominate you. Don’t be afraid of it. You’re going to beat it. We have the best medical equipment, we have the best medicines, all developed recently. And you’re going to beat it.”

So said President Donald Trump early yesterday evening upon his — let’s call it what it is — remarkable return to the White House, just three days after being taken to the hospital. Trump, 74, is, according to a bulleted list of wishfully grim statistics posted by CNN, five times more likely to be hospitalized due to COVID-19 and 90 times more likely to die than a young person.

One gets the impression, though, that the president isn’t paying attention to those particular stats.

Still, on an evening when normal folks were heartened to see the president step off Marine One, walk across the White House lawn, and head up the stairs and back to work, 40% of Democrats, according to a Morning Consult poll, had been “happy” about his COVID diagnosis. That’s a lot of sick people — some of whom are sicker than others. Take MSNBC’s Joy Reid, for example, who suggests that the president is faking it to get out of the debates. Or take hard-left documentarian Michael Moore, who thinks Trump might be lying about his diagnosis just to gain sympathy. “Democrats, liberals, the media and others,” said Moore, “have always been wrong to simply treat him as a buffoon and a dummy and a jackass. Yes, he is all those things. But he’s also canny. He’s clever.”

There are plenty of sick people at The New York Times, too, where the best they could do with their headline and subhead was to kvetch that the president’s message of strength and encouragement is “undermining public health messages” and gratuitously remind us that the Wuhan coronavirus “has killed more than 210,000 people in the United States.” (Who knew?)

The Trump-hating Times went on to quote various experts who are “struggling for words” to describe the president’s irresponsibility and who raged that his behavior “will lead to more transmission of the virus, which will lead to more illness, and more illness will lead to more deaths.”

Perhaps even worse, though, was the Times’s focus on issues that divide us as Americans rather than bring us together. What Times story would be complete, for example, without a sneeringly nasty appeal to the issue of race or class — or both?

“Experts pointed out that Covid-19 has ‘dominated’ the lives of millions of Americans, particularly Black and Latino people who have been hit with devastating force by the virus. The death rate for Black Americans diagnosed with Covid-19 is more than twice the rate for white Americans. … [And] the president has had access to a suite of treatments that few others have, including an antibody cocktail that is still in clinical trials and has not yet been authorized by the Food and Drug Administration.”

Well, yes, the president got an experimental drug. But he also got supplemental oxygen and the drug remdesivir, which are generally available for COVID patients. And which candidate supports fewer regulations on such treatments for all Americans? Not Joe Biden.

But let’s stipulate that the president of the United States — regardless of his party — is afforded better healthcare than the average Joe. We suspect most Americans outside the Times building don’t have a problem with that. And besides, what’s the Left’s alternative? Socialized medicine for the commander-in-chief?

And why should leftists even care? Aren’t they too busy investigating the president’s “joy ride”?