In the 20th century, when Soviet and Russian leaders got sick,.......

 

CNN

 

 

Stephen Collinson and Caitlin Hu

'This is a general in the field'

We’re back in the USSR.

 officials rolled out elaborate propaganda operations to disguise the true extent of their illness from the public: Videos of the leader to scotch the idea anything was wrong; medical briefings from white-coated doctors that hailed his progress; photos showing him slogging through papers, still at work for the people. But efforts to preserve the all-powerful image of the patient rarely forestalled speculation over his true condition. 

Decades later, it is not Konstantin Chernenko or Boris Yeltsin whose fragile health is being covered up. The misinformation operation is happening in front of our eyes in Washington, where President Donald Trump is spending another night in the hospital with Covid-19.

 

Briefings by his doctors have been rife with evasions, and White House physician Dr. Sean Conley has copped to omitting the fact that Trump needed supplemental oxygen, because he wanted to “reflect the upbeat” official attitude. A White House spokeswoman later justified the cover-up attempt on the grounds that it was important to “lift the spirits” of the patient-in-chief. 

Trump is being treated with a therapy typically prescribed to only the sickest Covid-19 patients, as well as an experimental drug. Nevertheless, his enablers are vigorously sharing details of phone calls in which the hospitalized leader is barking out orders. Trump’s daughter Ivanka retweeted a Yeltsin-style White House photo of Trump apparently signing papers in a hospital conference room. “Nothing can stop him working for the American people. RELENTLESS,” she wrote. And Trump himself on Sunday briefly left his hospital suite to drive past supporters in his armored SUV, in a show of strength.

Why not just level with the American people about his condition? Perhaps because politically speaking, the last thing Trump needs now is to look weak. He is stuck in the hospital just 29 days before an election that he is in real danger of losing, suffering from a disease that has killed more than 209,000 Americans that he never took seriously. 

Doctors now say he might be well enough to go home on Monday. But after the obfuscation and propagandizing of the last few days, there’s little reason to trust what the White House or Trump’s doctors say. 

A photo released by the White House appears to show Trump working from the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, on October 3. (Joyce N. Boghosian/White House)

 

In July 1995, Russian state media distributed this photo of then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin apparently reading documents at a desk after being hospitalized for heart trouble in Moscow’s Central Clinical Hospital. The New York Times reported at the time, however, that the image “appeared identical” to footage filmed months earlier.