Saturday, October 3, 2020

The (Spin) Doctor's In the (White) House

Today's revolving door of misleading health updates on demagogue and pathological liar Donald "COVID Donnie" Trump point to the need to shake up the system of health care for the White House under President Biden. The use of military medical personnel for Presidential care has a long history, and until recently, an honorable one. But beginning with the slippery opportunist Navy "Dr." Ronny "Candy Man" Jackson (who's now running as the uber-Trumpist Republican candidate for the House in Texas' 13th district), the position of White House physician has been turned into an arm of Trump's communications staff. Recall that a stammering and perspiring Jackson fantastically claimed back in 2017 that Trump could live "200 years" because of his all-cheeseburger diet "incredible genes", falsehoods that he was later rewarded for with a nomination to be the head of Veterans Affairs, later derailed by multiple accounts of his unethical and abusive behavior, including intoxication on duty.

Fast forward to Jackson's successor as White House physician Sean Conley, a Navy Commander. Conley has been unreliable in his description of the severity of Trump's illness, and the timelines for his contracting the virus. He's apparently being coached by White (Supremacist) House staff, who continue to want to "downplay" -- to use Trump's favorite word related to COVID-19 -- Trump's illness. At one point in his press conference earlier today, Conley was leaving and stopped and turned back, offering that Trump was working hard and eager to leave, an observation that seemed scripted and something that he was coached to say earlier.

This is to point out the danger of having people whose careers depend mostly on your liking what they say about you. As their "commander-in-chief", Trump wields significant power over them by promotion or demotion (see Jackson, Ronny). Having a small clinic in the White House staffed by nurses and nurses aides to handle shots and scrapes, etc., and reassigning these military doctors back to serve our active military and military families seems worth exploring. More robust medical services like physicals and serious injuries would be performed by assigned medical teams at any one of several world-class hospitals close by (George Washington University Hospital, Georgetown University Hospital, and Johns Hopkins for example). That would lessen the influence that a corrupt "commander-in-chief" like COVID Donnie would have on information from his medical subordinates that the public should know, and free those doctors from spinning and to attend to our men and women in uniform and their families.