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Trump Tested Positive for COVID Days Before Biden Debate But Told No One, His Former Chief of Staff Says
On Sept. 26, 2020, three days before his first debate with Joe Biden, then-President Donald Trump tested positive for COVID-19 but told no one, according to his former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’ new book. Trump arrived “late” to the Sept. 29 debate and did not get tested before going on stage.
Trump, who was mildly symptomatic on Sept. 26 when he was first tested, did get tested again and obtained a negative test, but three days after the debate again tested positive and was quickly hospitalized – blaming Gold Star families who wanted to “hug” him for contracting the deadly disease.
“Meadows says Trump’s positive result on 26 September was a shock to a White House which had just staged a triumphant Rose Garden ceremony for supreme court nominee Amy Coney Barrett – an occasion now widely considered to have been a Covid super-spreader event‘” The Guardian reports.
As Marine One lifted off, heading for a rally on the 26th, the White House physician Sean Conley called.
“Stop the president from leaving,” Meadows says he told him. “He just tested positive for Covid.”
It wasn’t possible to stop Trump but when he called from Air Force One, his chief of staff gave him the news.
“Mr President,” Meadows said, “I’ve got some bad news. You’ve tested positive for Covid-19.”
Trump’s reply, the devout Christian writes, “rhyme[d] with ‘Oh spit, you’ve gotta be trucking lidding me’.”
The Guardian adds that “the stunning revelation of an unreported positive test follows a year of speculation about whether Trump, then 74 years old, had the potentially deadly virus when he faced Biden, 77, in Cleveland on 29 September – and what danger that might have presented.”
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