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A rare moment of unity in the US election, as Donald Trump marked his return to the White House by gasping along with his detractors. On Monday night, the president puffed up the front staircase of his residence, his face coated in several more gallons of paint than the front elevation of the building. Dont let it dominate your lives, he panted of the virus, a bad case of which tends to dominate your death.

Yet there he was, this hideous kink in the arc of history, giving the most dangerous balcony performance since Michael Jackson had his baby crowdsurf off one. The American people are all Blanket now.

As for the optics, deranged balcony address is certainly a look but not one that tends to end well. How might this version turn out? Unfortunately, its not a question Trumps attention span equips him to answer. His reference points for the form are the occasional three minutes of historical documentaries hes forced to watch while searching his stomach-folds for the TV remote. It feels like he switches over to Fox News before discovering how a whole series of 20th-century balcony stories ended.

Still: dont call him Wussolini. He beat this illness which he still very much has like a man. One of the really manly ones, who takes all the best drugs and leaves everyone else exposed and misled and unprotected. Even so, early reactions to the gasping spectacle suggest the move could only have backfired more if Trump had ascended the front steps via a hastily installed stairlift carrying a pack of adult diapers.

Once hed wheezed through the unpleasantries, all that remained was to remove his mask and set about infecting any remaining staff yet to be exposed to his droplets. Think of Trump as the 83rd Airborne, parachuting his deadly particles deep into butlers respiratory systems. He wont give you a Purple Heart, but he might give you purple lungs.

Alas, its disappointing to find potential victims failing to feel grateful for the opportunity. One current secret service agent assigned to the first familys detail expressed frustration, telling CNN: Were not disposable. Two housekeeping staff have already tested positive for the virus. As the events of the past week show, the presidents respect for human life is so low that he is willing to send an entire army of servants into 14-day isolation or worse in order to keep up a steady stream of trans-fats being fed to him. Dying in the line of duty used to mean taking a bullet for the president; it could now involve taking him a Diet Coke. Thank you for your drinks service.

As for how Trump spent the rest of his evening, I assume it was straight on to the monstrous leaders WhatsApp to josh with the other bros about how they kill their underlings. RocketmanKim loves a firing squad, Vlad69s a huge chemicals guy, but Trump just clears his throat while being brought his fourth burger of the day. Boom! I cough on them like a bitch! When youre famous you can do that.

Face it, hes absolutely bossing the likes of Kim and Xi and MBS in the fantasy evildoer leagues. Its not that the other guys dont have lethal motorcades and abysmal interiors taste and balcony addresses and death cults and doctors who mislead the world. But doing them in a democracy well, that makes it triple points.

Speaking of physicians who really need to heal themselves, what a striking misinformation campaign its been from presidential medic Sean Conley, who has been continually obfuscating about Trumps condition since calling his symptoms mild, only for even the White House to contradict him. For me, thats the new low. Of course, we now expect the president of the United States to lie as default to tell us black is white, or up is down, or to claim he never said something hes on camera saying. But for a professional and senior doctor to mislead apparently without remorse shows how necrotic the body politic has become, from the very top down. The lying, the reality-denying is not a one-off case its the other epidemic.

In fact, its kind of amazing that conspiracy theorists have lined up so supportively behind Trump, when hes really the most convincing proof yet of all their worst fears. The Man really is lying to them, he really is wicked, and he really does want to kill them. The damning evidence is right there in front of everyone. Only, instead of begging Oliver Stone to make a film about it, they want to give Trump a second term.

Like me, you probably hate to see a conspiracist wimp out of their beliefs just when its coming up roses for them. Its as if the moon landing hoaxers were signing over their life savings to Nasa, or the flat Earthers booking a round-the-world ticket. So come on, guys back yourselves! After all, if not now, then when?

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

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After Donald Trump's deranged balcony address, we're all gasping together - The Guardian

Theres no love lost between CNN host Chris Cuomo and Donald Trump. That was crystal clear as Cuomo went on camera shortly after Trump returned from Walter Reed Medical Center.

After landing in Marine One, a COVID infected Trump walked up the stairs of the South Portico, removed his mask and looked out from the balcony defiantly for several minutes as official photographers snapped his photo and news cameras captured the scene.

Staffers could be seen behind him inside the building as Trump walked into the White House. He did not put his mask back on. But then Trump walked back out, stood for a few seconds and returued to his staffers, still without his mask.

CNNs White House reporter Kaitlyn Collins says the exit and re-entry was a reshoot, possibly for a campaign video, as photographers and videographers captured Trumps arrival before staffers.

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Over video of Trump standing on a White House balcony on Monday night Cuomo said sarcastically, There he is, hair blown majestically. Reshooting the scene for his own ad.

I hold rallies, Cuomo imagined Trump saying, and I tell you to ignore masks. Im going to rip mine off as I vanquish the virus because I am a leader!

Cuomo then retuned to reality and said plainly to the camera, What a bunch of bullsh*t.

He didnt just walk in the White House one time with no mask tonight, said Cuomo. He had his video crew capture that stupid scene again so he could put out propaganda.

Cuomo railed against the fact that Trump, who has seemingly already infected over a dozen White House staffers, was taking off his mask for the camera and then entering an enclosed space with other people who could become infected.

You want a metaphor, said Cuomo, Youve got a president who is a drunk driver who is pushing others to drive drunk. Thats what he is.

Do I want to see a drunk driver get hurt? Hell no. But I worry more about the people he hits, said the CNN host.

Trump later tweeted a video seemingly made made in the White House doorway saying of the virus, Dont let it dominate youYoure going to beat it!

Others pointed out that during his time on the balcony the president, who needed supplemental oxygen at least twice during his stay in the hospital, seemed to be gasping for air as he posed for photos.

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CNNs Chris Cuomo Rips Donald Trumps Choreographed Return To White House: What A Bunch Of Bullsh*t - Deadline

U.S. President Donald Trump held a large political campaign rally at the White House Saturday, his first public event since he tested positive for the coronavirus that has, according to Johns Hopkins University, claimed over 214,000 lives in the United States.

Hours later, the presidents physician, Dr. Sean Conley, released a statement saying the president is no longer a risk of transmitting the virus to others, according to the results of a COVID test taken Saturday morning. By U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention standards, Conleys statement said, the president could safely stop isolating from others.

The rally marked the resumption of public campaign activities for Trump, who was hospitalized for three nights for treatment of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

As questions lingered about his health, Trump spoke from a balcony without wearing a mask, telling a crowd largely made up of Black and Latino people, who have been disproportionately affected by the coronavirus, there are a lot of flareups, but its going to disappear.

He said, without evidence, a vaccine is coming very, very quickly in record time.

All attendees were required to wear masks to what was billed as a peaceful protest for law and order White House event. They were urged to practice social distancing and were given temperature checks and asked to complete a brief questionnaire. The Associated Press reported that most in the crowd that gathered for his speech wore masks, but there was little social distancing.

The presidents last public event, the announcement of his Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, took place Sept. 26 in the Rose Garden and was attended by more than 200 people, most of whom didnt wear a face mask. It has since been described as a coronavirus super spreader an event that is linked to a large number of new infections. After the Rose Garden event, more than two dozen people were reported to have contracted COVID-19, including Trump, first lady Melania Trump and several aides.

The law and order event was announced as Dr. Anthony Fauci, the U.S. governments top infectious-disease expert, warned the White House to avoid large gatherings of people without masks.

Trumps doctors said the president began experiencing symptoms of COVID-19 on Oct. 1. Trumps White House physician, Conley a commander in the U.S. Navy, said in a statement Thursday that Trumps condition remained stable and devoid of any indication to suggest progression of the illness, and that Trump could safely resume holding events Saturday.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that people who have recovered from the infection continue to wear masks and take social distancing precautions. Trump, who received experimental treatments for the coronavirus while hospitalized at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, has been inconsistent in wearing masks during the pandemic.

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden will take his campaign to Erie, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, the first presidential candidate to visit the city since Trump in 2016.

The Erie County Democratic Party said Biden will meet with business owners, members of organized labor and other community members. The party said Bidens visit will not be a major public event due to the ongoing coronavirus crisis in the U.S.

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Trump Cleared to End Isolation Hours After Large White House Event - Voice of America

So does that mean? I would say the president is a superspreader, Scarpino says. Im happy to say that.

Things didnt have to be this way. Have tight lockdowns, keep everybody from coming into contact with anybody, and R0 goes down. Even the people who are better at transmitting (theyre carrying more virus, theyre at the peak time in their infection, theyre loud talkers, whatever) dont have anybody to transmit to. No more infections.

Or, you know, do the opposite of that. Foster social conditions in which the virus spreads (cold, dry, noisy, crowded, no ventilation). Dont wear masks and make fun of people who do. Result: lots of infections. A virus has biology, and so does its host, but it spreads in an environment, in a context. This is where biology meets policy. You can decompose the transmission of a pathogen into the biological features of the individual pathogens themselves, the biological features of the host, the sociological aspects of the hostand when were talking about humans, we think about policies, the sociotechnical systems embedded in the defective behaviors. All of those things have to interact for transmission, Scarpino says. What we see in the United States time and again is this confluence of reckless policy, poor guidance from federal public health agencies around what people need to do to keep themselves safe, and then the biology of the pathogen and the humans.

Scarpino is part of a team of researchers that has been working on a slightly different characterization of how the virus moves through populations. Their construction looks at a particular form of crowdedness, of how closely packed together people are at different spatial scalesin a building, in a neighborhood, in a city. The specific mathematical term theyre interested in is called Lloyds mean crowding, basically the number of contacts you might expect from random chance transmissions in a given area divided by the population of that area. What theyve found is that more densely packed places are more bursty when it comes to Covid-19. When the virus gets there, it burns through the susceptible population hotter and faster, a sudden, sharp peak of sick people all in one place at one time.

The burstier places might seem isolated at first, and that can make it look like theyre protected. Until they arent. Thats what happens in meat-packing plants and elder-care facilities. It happened in Manaus, a city in the heart of the Amazon rainforest where officials didnt detect any Covid-19 cases until March. Over the next four months, the virus went on to infect up to two-thirds of the population and killed one out of every 500 people. To Scarpino, the White House looks bursty, too. Its really tightly connected, nobodys really wearing masks, lots of social connections. It was really a matter of when. When the virus shows up, its going to sweep through. Youre going to have superspreading. Its just going to take a while, Scarpino says. Really it was just inevitable, because its really a microcosm of what we see playing out over the US: a combination of risky behavior, crappy policy, low testing, and in the White Houses case the exact rightor wrong, depending on how you think about itconnectivity and social network structure.

And not to sound like a Twitter reply-guy here, butthat surprises you because why, exactly? This is the same White House that couldnt institute widespread testing for the disease, or nationwide contact tracing. Its the same White House that promoted untested treatments, and spread informational smog like saying disinfectants and ultraviolet light might work inside peoples bodies. Its the White House that mostly failed to establish reliable clinical trials. Its the same White House that tried to bend the data in the unimpeachable Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Its the same White House with a president who mocked mask-wearing right up until his own hospitalization, and in fact blocked the distribution of 650 million masks to Americans. Its the same White House that rushed the reopening of restaurants and other businesses. Its the same White House that attempted to block more stringent requirements for new vaccines. Its the same White House that had staff and a president show up to a debate after exposure to a deadly pandemic disease and didnt tell anyone. Its the same White House that derided wearing masks as a way to reduce the spread of virus from people without symptomsboth in the world generally and in the White House itself, as a matter of personal choice, even with multiple staffers ill. Its the White Housethe presidentthat told people not to let the virus dominate their lives, who went home from the hospital when he was still sick and almost certainly still infectious. These are all, in their way, superspreading behaviors, as sure as doing a bar crawl when youre sick.

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The Superspreading Presidency of Donald Trump - WIRED

Its hard to process the news of the presidents positive COVID-19 diagnosis without having recourse to some kind of mythological system, some larger frame of reference.

Karma, wrote one journalist, and then reproached himself for the ungenerous thought. Or perhaps it was simple irony on display when, Washington Post reporters wrote, President Trump contracted the novel coronavirus after months in which he and people around himavoided taking basic steps to prevent the viruss spread.

All these reactions make sense. If theres one thing we know about a virus thats still mysterious in many ways, its that this coronavirus is expert at going around.

And as a classics scholar, I can assure you: What goes around comes around. Greek mythology provides insight to help us understand todays chaos.

Many years ago, my high school English teachers put a lot of stress on terms like foreshadowing, climax and denouement. All these words marked points along a steep curve of the development of a story: rising action, turning point, falling action.

There was also a lot of emphasis, as we discussed plots, on a term I then found harder to understand: pride. Pride: arrogance; an exaggerated sense of self-worth. Pride tended to be followed by catastrophe that falling action again.

As a high school student, I tended to confuse pride with vanity, with narcissistic preening; the tragic penalty of vanity seemed exaggeratedly severe.

What does pride really mean? The Greek word it translates is hubris, and pride doesnt quite cover the range of the meaning of hubris. Vanity may well be part of hubris, but a more crucial sense of the word is terrible judgment, gross overconfidence, blindness, obtuseness, a failure to see what is staring you in the face a failure to see it until its too late.

I dont recall my teachers mentioning nemesis or at, forces or principles that are closely associated with hubris in Greek mythology.

Nemesis is more often personified, and hence capitalized, than at. Shes a goddess of retribution, and she can follow acts of hubris with the certainty of a law of gravity except that there may be a considerable time lag, as if one dropped a plate and it took a generation for it to break. That concept likewise appears in the Bibles book of Ezekiel, which says The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the teeth of the children shall be set on edge.

At is a more unpredictable figure, not necessarily personified classics scholar E.R. Dodds in The Greeks and the Irrational tentatively defines at as a sort of guilty rashness.

On the other hand, at can be unforgettably personified, as when Mark Antony addresses the body of Caesar and predicts civil war in Shakespeares Julius Caesar:

And Caesars spirit ranging for revenge,With At by his side, come hot from hell,Shall in these confines, with a monarchs voice,Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war

Goddess or not, at, like nemesis, can be thought of as a kind of mechanism whereby one evil is succeeded by another. Theres a chain reaction, a cause and result. Nemesis seems cooler, more targeted and precise; at lets all hell break loose, and also is the hell that breaks loose. Categories blur in the chaos.

When I studied and taught Sophocles tragedy Oedipus the King, the stress was on hubris, irony, blindness. What wasnt emphasized is that the play was written during and is set in the midst of a plague.

The citizens of Thebes, in the tragedys opening scene, implore their wise and resourceful ruler Oedipus to save them from this disastrous illness. Oedipus, moved by their plight and confident in his own capability, promises to do exactly that. His effort to hunt down the criminal whose unpunished sin is polluting the city and causing the plague leads to Oedipuss own exposure as the source of that pollution.

But he persists in his hunt for the truth even though the truth, as every student learns, turns out to be that he himself is the polluter whom he seeks. Trump, like Oedipus, is the source of the pollution - or at the very least, a vector, a spreader, an enabler. Unlike Oedipus, the president has actively discouraged the hunt for the truth.

The final words of the tragedy are addressed by the chorus to the citizens of Thebes. Presumably the plague will be routed; the city has indeed been cleansed. In contrast, the citizens of our country keep on dying. The president removes his mask and proclaims his triumph.

Aristotle recommends in his Poetics that in the best tragedies, the pivot or reversal called peripeteia from the height of success to disaster is accompanied by some kind of knowledge anagnorisis, or recognition. Pathei mathos, sings the chorus in Aeschyluss tragedy Agamemnon: wisdom comes through suffering.

The simultaneity of Oedipuss enlightenment and his catastrophe is one of the factors that made Aristotle so admire this elegantly plotted play.

The untranslatable, chaotic force of at plays out in the cycle of reversal followed by recognition; arrogance followed by retribution. What are we supposed to think?

Whether we rejoice or mourn, whether were elated or fearful, and whatever happens in the weeks and months to come, this news that the president has COVID-19 arrives with a freight of predictability: This particular infection seems, in retrospect, if not inevitable then at least overwhelmingly likely.

Hubris: not seeing whats in front of your nose. Even as lawsuits and tell-all books have piled up, Trump has always seemed triumphantly immune. Not any more.

What happens next? Unlike Oedipus, Trump has denied that there was ever a dangerous illness in the city although Bob Woodwards book, Rage makes clear that he knew there was. Unlike Oedipus, he has refused his peoples pleas for help.

What does Oedipus learn in the course of the drama? Quite a lot. He may blame the gods or fate for his plight, but he also takes responsibility for what has happened.

[The Conversations newsletter explains whats going on with the coronavirus pandemic. Subscribe now.]

What will Covid his own personal, irrefutable experience of COVID-19 teach Trump? Humility? Compassion? Respect for expert advice? The existence of Nemesis? His own diagnosis of hubris, with a measure of at thrown in?

The answer is all too clear. Released from the hospital, Trump tweeted: Dont be afraid of Covid. Dont let it dominate your life! He also said Maybe Im immune and took off his mask when returning to the White House.

Tragedy, I tell my students, doesnt teach a lesson or preach a moral. It offers a vision. Not: dont be arrogant, prideful, hubristic. Rather: Men of Thebes, look upon Oedipus.

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'What goes around comes around,' or what Greek mythology says about Donald Trump - The Conversation US