Opinion: The bombshell about Trump testing positive also implicates the Trump family
The Trump family has long treated rules and laws as nuisances that are only for the little people. And the news that Donald Trump tested positive for covid-19 before the first 2020 presidential debate shows that this tendency may be even more depraved and malevolent than you thought.
It turns out that this revelation, which comes in a new book by former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, also implicates members of Trump’s family, including Melania Trump and Donald Trump Jr.
Multiple news organizations, including The Post, have now confirmed from former Trump aides that he tested positive for coronavirus on Sept. 26, 2020, three days before his Sept. 29 debate with Joe Biden. So he had reason to believe he might have been infected heading into the debate.
Trump was informed of the positive test on Air Force One on Sept. 26, en route to a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, the book says. But the White House concealed this from the public and from debate organizers, even though he was “tired” and had a “slight cold."
Instead, Trump took a second test that came back negative, and Meadows called Trump to inform him of it. The Guardian reports that the book then relays the following:
Meadows says Trump took that call as “full permission to press on as if nothing had happened.” His chief of staff, however, “instructed everyone in his immediate circle to treat him as if he was positive” throughout the Pennsylvania trip.
In other words, everyone around Trump was apparently told he was potentially contagious, and he even appeared potentially symptomatic, even as Trump roared into the debate as if the opposite were true. If this is right, then what happened at the debate is even worse than you thought
That’s because multiple people around Trump, including his wife, Melania Trump, and his kids Donald Jr. and Eric, all sat maskless at the Sept. 29 debate, according to contemporaneous reports, despite the fact that debate attendees were required to wear masks.
As numerous reporters personally witnessed at the time, Trump’s family members did this after rebuffing a direct request to mask up from a doctor with the Cleveland Clinic, which helped organize the debate. That doctor even offered them masks, and they declined:
Confirming this, debate moderator Chris Wallace reiterated at the time that the Cleveland Clinic had required everybody in the hall — except him and the two candidates — to wear masks. Yet Wallace, too, confirmed that the Trump family wasn’t wearing masks in the audience.
Physician Leana Wen, a public health professor at George Washington University and a Post contributing columnist, points out that going maskless among other people — while knowing you might have been exposed — could put those people at risk.
“People who have close contact with individuals who test positive for covid should be in quarantine,” Wen told me. “If they had known that they were in close contact with someone who tested positive and were symptomatic, they shouldn’t have gone to the event at all."
Wen added that their refusal to wear masks may have meant “that they knowingly exposed others and flouted public health guidelines.”