Presidents are people and they get sick like everyone else. But unlike everyone else, modern presidents have the ability to launch nuclear weapons, so you'd like them to be of sound mind and body.
Conley has already admitted to essentially misleading the public about Trump's condition over the weekend by arguing he wanted to keep the President's spirits up.
On Monday, he was equally contradictory as he explained why Trump would leave the hospital at the same time he was making clear that the President was not "out of the woods" as he fights off the coronavirus.
It might be hard to be Trump's doctor and survive with your medical reputation intact.
Dr. Ronny Jackson, the most recent former White House physician, gave an over-the-top assessment of Trump's health in the early days of his presidency, got into trouble over allegations about his past work and is now running for Congress as a Republican in Texas.
Dr. Harold Bornstein told CNN in 2018 that Trump had dictated an over-the-top letter claiming his extreme and unbelievable health and Bornstein signed it.
But the situation today is much more serious. Trump, who is in charge of the most powerful government on Earth, is sick with Covid, a disease that's killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.
Conley invoked HIPAA -- the Clinton-era Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act -- which, among other things, is meant to protect a patient's medical privacy in part from employers.
That Trump is now engaged in misleading his employers -- the voters -- about his health is an odd twist.
It's certainly true that there's nothing in law or the Constitution requiring a president to divulge health issues or to pass any physical or mental test, although Trump has bragged this year about his ability to pass mental exams. Questions about a president's health are for voters to decide.
In fact, US presidents have been misleading the public about their health ever since James Madison gave George Washington the flu and it almost killed him.
More on that in a moment.
But in reading about presidential ailments of the past and the history of the White House physician position, created in 1928, I learned something very interesting about Conley's role: that he has a responsibility to the country as well as to Trump.
Dual role. A duty to the president and a duty to the nation. "They (White House physicians) are not only responsible for providing medical care to the president as an individual patient, they must also ensure that the best interests of the nation are served through the care which they provide," wrote Lawrence Mohr, who was White House physician to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, in a scholarly article about the position.
And that's not just a philosophical distinction.
Constitutional duty. There is a detailed but classified system by which the government would determine whether the president was incapacitated under the 25th Amendment, according to Mohr.
And the White House physician plays an important role in that process, which was developed during the George H.W. Bush administration and signed as a presidential directive during the Clinton administration, Mohr wrote.
"In addition to being thoroughly knowledgeable about the 25th Amendment and plans for its implementation, all White House physicians must be mentally prepared to determine if an illness or injury prevents the president from effectively discharging the duties of his office and to communicate that determination clearly and decisively," Mohr wrote.
That does not mean the physician should be telling the public what the president's health is, he argued. Instead, Mohr thought the president himself should release his health information to the public. The White House physician, on the other hand, has the responsibility to officially inform only the vice president and the Cabinet if the president is incapacitated, Mohr said.
There's absolutely no reason to think Trump is anywhere near being incapacitated.
But it's also impossible to say what the current state of Trump's health is since Conley and White House chief of staff Mark Meadows have been contradictory, opaque and all over the place in describing it.
The key, wrote Mohr, is that the White House physician respect his or her dual role: his or her responsibility to the patient -- the president -- but also to the country.
"White House physicians must be totally objective and never allow personal feelings or political pressure to interfere with a medical disability determination," he wrote.
I asked Arthur Caplan, who is a professor of bioethics at New York University's Langone medical center, how we should view the public's right to know about their leader vs. the president's own right to privacy.
"Duty to patient is central to all codes of ethics," he said in an email. "So is duty to be honest and not spin information."
He said laws and medical codes of ethics should be updated to make sure the public has access to correct information about its leaders.
"We need to know full information about the president and vice president to both permit the nation to function and to know what is going on when an election is imminent," Caplan said.
Most don't trust the White House on Trump's health. CNN's Jennifer Agiesta writes about a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS: "Two-thirds of Americans say President Donald Trump handled the risk of coronavirus infection to others around him irresponsibly. ... With Trump hospitalized at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, 69% of Americans said they trusted little of what they heard from the White House about the President's health, with only 12% saying they trusted almost all of it."
The kitchen sink approach. Trump's treatment has been the subject of much conjecture. Nobody but he and Conley's team knows exactly what's going on, but what we do know is he's gotten access to drugs, like remdesivir, not yet widely available to other Americans, steroid shots and more.
Trying to project strength. Rather than change his mind about downplaying the disease, his own brush with the deadly virus has Trump claiming on Twitter that he feels 20 years younger.
More than 2,000 Americans have died since his diagnosis, and none were given the care he's been given, which makes his tweet objectively insensitive.
He was also trying to project strength when he drove around in an SUV outside Walter Reed on Sunday, likely exposing Secret Service agents. That's also a concern as he heads back to the White House.
Kayleigh McEnany positive -- The White House press secretary is the latest top Republican to contract Covid. Here's a look at who has tested positive and who has tested negative. There are at least 13 positive tests in his inner circle. It certainly seems like the announcement of Amy Coney Barrett's nomination to the Supreme Court was the event that kicked off the outbreak.
Ripple effect from Covid outbreak to Supreme Court. With multiple members of the Senate Judiciary Committee now infected, there's a possibility the event could delay her nomination.
And there's no evidence the White House is doing contact tracing to figure out how the disease got into that event or where it's going next, according to a New York Times reporter who was infected.
Misleading the public for 230 years
No President wants to appear weak or infirm. So it's not at all surprising that they want to hide infirmities. There are a lot of interesting stories about presidents who got sick and hid it from the American people.
Woodrow Wilson suffered a debilitating stroke. In that time before the 25th Amendment, his wife essentially took over many of his duties while he recuperated.
Wilson also, like Trump, downplayed a pandemic: the 1918 flu. And, like Trump, he also got infected: Wilson contracted the flu in France and was apparently taken by hallucinations.
FDR, we now know, was very ill when he ran for his fourth term in 1944. One doctor who examined him wrote confidentially at the time that he wouldn't live another four years. He didn't. He collapsed and died after a cerebral hemorrhage not long after that final election. And he'd installed Harry Truman, perhaps knowing Truman would have to take over.
Dwight Eisenhower had a major heart attack. Information about his health was carefully managed, however, and he still went on to win reelection.
JFK hid chronic back pain, Addison's disease and the amphetamines and steroids he used to treat them.
George Washington nearly died from flu he may have gotten from James Madison.
Ronald Reagan's son wrote that his father, while in office, had exhibited signs of the Alzheimer's that would kill him years later, although that allegation has been denied by others.
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