PRESIDENT RETURNS TO OVAL OFFICE
White House won’t give details such as when he last tested negative
The White House again refused on Wednesday to say when President Donald Trump last tested negative for the novel coronavirus, leaving open the possibility that he potentially exposed dozens of people to the virus before the announcement of his positive test early Friday.
Trump attended several events last week — including a presidential debate against Democratic nominee Joe Biden, a campaign rally and an in-person fundraiser — where he could have potentially exposed people to the coronavirus if he was infectious at that time. The disease has killed more than 210,000 Americans.
But White House aides and the president’s physician continue to say they will not release information key to determining whom Trump may have exposed.
“I don’t know when he last tested negative,” White House spokesman Brian Morgenstern told reporters Wednesday shortly before Trump returned to the Oval Office for the first time since being released from the hospital on Monday. “We’re not asking to go back through a bunch of records and look backwards.”
White House officials had previously claimed that Trump was tested daily for the coronavirus. On Wednesday, Morgenstern and other aides said Trump has been tested “regularly,” reverting to vague language in response to repeated and direct questions. Speaking on Fox News on Wednesday, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows declined to say when Trump last tested negative, citing privacy.
Two officials familiar with the situation said Trump has not been tested daily in recent months. Only rarely has Trump been tested on a machine other than the one produced by Ab
bott Laboratories, which provides rapid results, said the officials, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal protocols. The rapid tests are not always accurate.
The potentially dangerous move by a still-infectious and recovering COVID-19 patient was Trump’s latest attempt to send a message four weeks before the election that Americans should not be afraid of a disease that hospitalized him and infected much of the West Wing.
“Hi, perhaps you recognize me. It’s your favorite president, and I’m standing in front of the Oval Office at the White House,” Trump said in a recorded video released on Twitter late Wednesday.
The president was recorded while standing in the Rose Garden without a mask. He focused mostly on pitching therapeutics as a “cure” rather than emphasizing public health practices such as mask-wearing and social distancing.
“I want everybody to be given the same treatment as your president, because I feel great,” Trump said, pledging to make sure that all Americans receive the same experimental antibody cocktail that was used to treat him, free.
“I think this was a blessing from God that I caught it. This was a blessing in disguise,” he said.
Trump’s return capped a turbulent day in which he had been expected to recuperate from the highly contagious virus in isolation.
Instead, Trump spent much of the day posting allcaps tweets, criticizing investigations into his conduct and causing bipartisan confusion about where he stands on a stimulus package to help millions of Americans impacted by the pandemic. Aides say he was anxious to get back behind the Resolute Desk.
Even as White House officials sought to portray Trump as healthy and hard at work on Wednesday, they continued to avoid answering key questions about his condition and his conduct.
White House physician Dr. Sean P. Conley released a memo Wednesday describing Trump’s vital signs as “stable and in normal range” and announcing that lab work conducted Monday had detected antibodies for COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.
“The president this morning says ‘I feel great!’” read the memo, which provided only limited information about Trump’s condition.
The memo offered no details about the antibodies detected, and White House officials did not answer questions about whether they resulted from the experimental treatment Trump received or were developed naturally.
Still, doctors cleared Trump to return to the Oval Office, and White House staff spent much of Tuesday preparing for his arrival and ensuring that it would not expose others to the virus, according to an official.
The West Wing remains largely empty, with most aides working from home.
Some staff members recommended against Trump returning so soon to the West Wing, where there are normally hundreds of people working, according to someone familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private talks.
Trump was adamant on working from the Oval Office and has been pushing to make it happen for days, officials said. Trump told aides he thought the country needed to see its president working; Meadows and social media director Dan Scavino both spent time with the president in the West Wing on Wednesday, officials said.
The Oval Office will be sanitized daily after Trump leaves, following the standard practice in the rest of the West Wing.
The White House’s broader practices are being scrutinized after Trump and more than 25 other people tested positive for the virus in the past week after spending time at the White House. The list includes U.S. senators, Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien, first lady Melania Trump, several journalists and multiple West Wing officials.
Despite the White House outbreak, Trump has sought to downplay the virus in recent days, telling Americans not to allow the pandemic to “dominate your lives.”
The president’s decision to scuttle negotiations over a stimulus package continued to reverberate Wednesday, as lawmakers and investors tried to get a sense of what was going on.
Hours after abruptly announcing that he had called off negotiations with Congress for a massive economic relief bill, Trump took to Twitter again to call for a piecemeal approach to such a deal.
The late-night change of heart frustrated several Republicans and cast a cloud of uncertainty over whether Americans could expect an injection of stimulus in the form of $1,200 checks, smallbusiness assistance, aid for airlines and unemployment payments ahead of the election.
One administration official said the White House legislative affairs team was not involved in the discussions about ending the stimulus talks. Meadows has cut the office out of the talks and is keeping everything close to the vest, officials said.
Some moderate Republicans are livid at the White House, believing Trump’s tweet calling off talks handed a political victory to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, according to several Capitol Hill and administration officials.
Pelosi has already rejected calls for a piecemeal approach to stimulus legislation, and Meadows has told Trump he believes the Democrats in Congress are stringing him along rather than negotiating in good faith.
Before posting his video to Twitter on Wednesday, Trump had stayed largely out of sight for two days, instead communicating with the public through a torrent of social media posts.
He retweeted dozens of messages alleging without evidence that his predecessor and the FBI were involved in a spying and framing campaign to harm his electoral chances four years ago.
Trump argued that Biden should not be allowed to run for president because he led a “TREASONOUS PLOT” and “GOT CAUGHT!”
The accusations did not address the fact that the FBI did not publicly announce its investigation into Trump during the 2016 election, even as it took significant steps to publicly discuss its investigation into his rival, Hillary Clinton.