Donald Trump’s health has once again become the center of speculation after a book from New York Times correspondent Michael Schmidt shed a bit more light on his impromptu visit to Walter Reed last year, reporting “in the hours leading up to Trump’s trip to the hospital, word went out in the West Wing for the vice president to be on standby to take over the powers of the presidency temporarily if Trump had to undergo a procedure that would have required him to be anesthetized.”
That bit of reporting ultimately swirled into several theories, most of which guessed that Trump had suffered a stroke or a series of mini-strokes that prompted his strange and still unexplained visit to Walter Reed.
So far, nothing of the sort has actually been confirmed but that hasn’t stopped people from asking questions.
CNN political analyst and former White House deputy press secretary for President Bill Clinton took to his Twitter account yesterday with the same question that millions of others have found themselves wondering: “Did @realDonaldTrump have a stroke which he is hiding from the American public?”
Did @realDonaldTrump have a stroke which he is hiding from the American public?
— Joe Lockhart (@joelockhart) August 31, 2020
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It didn’t take long for Lockhart to find himself on the receiving end of some backlash, prompting him to point out that he was in no way reporting a stroke to be fact, just posing the question.
@RonnyJackson4TX if you read the tweet you’ll see I asked a question based on an unannounced trip to the hospital and the VP bring out on notice. No reporting just a question. Your reaction suggests a lot of defensiveness on your part
— Joe Lockhart (@joelockhart) September 1, 2020
However, semantics means nothing to the Trump campaign, who quickly picked up their pitchforks and torches and called for Lockhart’s firing from CNN.
“CNN should fire Joe Lockhart, a lifetime failure who thought it was a great idea for fellow loser Michael Dukakis to put on that stupid helmet, for knowingly pushing a conspiracy theory about President Trump’s health,” the Trump campaign said in a statement.
“Great political expert that he is, Lockhart single-handedly sank the John Kerry campaign and now he’s doing the same to Joe Biden from a distance. If another CNN employee said similar things about Barack Obama they’d be fired immediately, so the same standard should be applied here. That is, of course, unless CNN is complicit in the smear campaign in order to level the playing field against Joe Biden, somebody who truly has lost a step.”
Trump has spent a good portion of his day vehemently denying the claims, and even going so far as to ask his White House physician to do the same.
It never ends! Now they are trying to say that your favorite President, me, went to Walter Reed Medical Center, having suffered a series of mini-strokes. Never happened to THIS candidate – FAKE NEWS. Perhaps they are referring to another candidate from another Party!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 1, 2020
The truth of the matter is, we have absolutely no idea what prompted that strange trip to Walter Reed last year and we likely never will. But there’s simply no denying the strangeness of the lengths to which Trump and his people will go to paint a picture of a perfectly healthy man — even if it’s at the expense of someone’s livelihood.
Featured image via Political Tribune gallery
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