It’s Lies All the Way Down

Dr. Sean Conley displaying his “upbeat attitude” to the press on Sunday.Michael Reynolds/CNP via ZUMA

For indispensable reporting on the coronavirus crisis, the election, and more, subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily newsletter.Chris Evans caught this little bit of misdirection yesterday:

Trump coughed here after the word “therapeutics” and it was edited out using the morph cut feature in @AdobePremiereCC
👀 pic.twitter.com/1IXvXaCa8l
— chris evans (@notcapnamerica) October 3, 2020

And it turns out that President Trump was put on oxygen a couple of times over the past couple of days but his doctors didn’t tell us. Why not?
Trump’s doctors, speaking on the steps of the military hospital where he was being treated for a third consecutive day, again refused to answer key questions about his condition, including the timing of the president’s second dip in oxygen, which they neglected to mention in multiple statements the day before, or whether lung scans showed any damage.
Pressed about the conflicting information he and the White House released the previous day, Navy Cmdr. Dr. Sean Conley acknowledged that he had tried to present a rosy description of of the president’s condition. “I was trying to reflect the upbeat attitude of the team, that the president, that his course of illness has had. Didn’t want to give any information that might steer the course of illness in another direction,” Conley said.
In a broad sense, I suppose none of this probably matters much. It seems likely that Trump is in fact doing OK and will recover soon. But in another sense it’s the very triviality of this stuff that’s telling. They lie and lie and lie about everything, whether they need to or not. And then they wonder why no one believes them.