Donald Trump has been stunned into silence after potentially being exposed to coronavirus
Not counting the retweets and generic process tweets that are obviously the work of his handlers, Donald Trump hasn’t tweeted anything in twenty-six hours. And if you believe that his polite tweet announcing the departure of Mick Mulvaney was also done by his handlers, he hasn’t tweeted in more than thirty-six hours. Why does this matter?
This evening the Washington Post broke the news that Donald Trump shook hands with Matt Schlapp on the final day of CPAC, and that at some point during the event Schlapp interacted with someone who has since tested positive for coronavirus. This doesn’t mean Trump and Schlapp have coronavirus. But it sure is notable that Trump has suddenly gone silent.
Schlapp surely gave Trump a heads up about the situation once he learned of it, which would have been before the publication of the WaPo piece. So Trump has known for X number of hours that he was potentially exposed to the virus – and his response has been to go silent.
Yes, Donald Trump is holding an event at Mar-a-Lago tonight, so it’s clear that he’s not incapacitated in a hospital somewhere. But this merely means risking exposing other people. If Trump was exposed, it happened seven days ago. Experts say that it can take anywhere from five to fourteen days for symptoms to show up. It’s worth keeping in mind that he’s an elderly man in visibly poor health – precisely the demographic that’s expected to fare the worst with this virus. Update: four minutes after we posted this article, Trump finally tweeted something. Go figure.
