October 2, 2020

Watch Trump Emerge from the White House and Fly to Hospital After Testing Positive

Sarah Silbiger/CNP via ZUMA Wire

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President Donald Trump was airlifted to Washington D.C.’s Walter Reed Military Medical Center Friday evening on Marine One after announcing he was sick with COVID-19 just hours earlier. The president’s hospitalization marked an escalation in his medical care, at the end of a day in which White House officials downplayed the severity of his illness by projecting the image of a man still at work and in control. The White House said that his stay at Walter Reed will last several days. Earlier, the president’s doctor announced that he had received an experimental antibody drug.

Trump emerged from the White House around 6:15pm, on foot. He waved at reporters and gave a thumbs up, before boarding the helicopter for the short twilight flight, a historic visual moment for a presidency that has staked out a denialist position on the virus since the start of the pandemic. He didn’t take questions, and he was wearing a mask. The entire trip was broadcast live by news cameras, making for a dramatic scene as Marine One flew across the D.C. sunset.

Watch the video below:

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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