Trump’s SUV Trip Outside Walter Reed: More Than Meets the Eye?
AP Images
Article audio sponsored by The John Birch Society

President Trump went for a quick Sunday drive and the liberal progressive media propagandists exploded with faux outrage.

The occasion for the outrage was the president, stricken with COVID, leaving the immediate confines of Walter Reed Hospital to make an SUV-encapsulated appearance to supporters who had rallied to the side of the president outside the hospital.

In a column in the Daily Mail, Piers Morgan exemplified the mainstream-media excoriation of the president over the situation.

Writing that he thought the president coming down with COVID “had at last made him confront the cold, hard truth about the lethally dangerous virus and its ability to infect and incapacitate even the most heavily protected man on Earth,” Morgan went on to conclude, in crude terms, that he was wrong.

After being informed that president Trump had broken “covid quarantine rules to leave his hospital suite,” the British “journalist” wrote: “What the F*CK was he thinking?”

Pandering use of profanity aside — Morgan purports to know exactly what the president was thinking.

“He was thinking, once again, only of himself,” Morgan imagined. “Trump knows he’s in desperate trouble with his election campaign,” he continued. And so he had to pull some kind of stunt.

Morgan has had TDS — Trump Derangement Syndrome — for years. As such, where the president is concerned, like the rest of the mainstream media, his nonsense delusions have replaced reason. No one should take anything he, or any other sufferer of TDS, says with any seriousness.

Instead, why not take the president at his word? On Sunday, the president told his followers on Twitter: “I really appreciate all of the fans and supporters outside of the hospital. The fact is, they really love our Country and are seeing how we are MAKING IT GREATER THAN EVER BEFORE!”

Of his surprise appearance via SUV on the same day, he said: “We’re going to pay a little surprise to some of the great patriots that we have,” the President said. “They’ve been out there for a long time and they’ve got Trump flags and they love our country so I’m not telling anybody but you but I’m about to make a little surprise visit.”

The left-wing media is constantly perplexed by the phenomenon of support for the president. They really just can’t understand it. It appears, in fact, to be an intellectual characteristic of the coastal elites, the Ivy Leaguers and others who are almost uniformly socialist in outlook and possessed of fat pocket books who think the credulous deplorables in flyover country are but one step removed from Neanderthals drooling over their guns and clinging to the “opium of the masses.” 

These “deplorables” understand that they are hated and disrespected by the liberal elite who make up and are represented by the Democrat Party and so they flock to, love, and respect a president who takes them seriously and returns their affection. 

Far from being a campaign ploy, the hypothesis that President Trump hopped into an SUV to see his supporters first-hand is consistent with the evidence that the president and his supporters share a genuine affection. 

This, of course, is yet another alien concept to the radical liberal progressives, who “manage” various special interest groups only as means to achieve positions of power. 

A potentially more substantive criticism of the President’s SUV trip was also made, not only by Piers Morgan, but also by some medical practitioners. In Morgan’s words: “The ludicrous joyride … put the lives at risk of the two other people in the car, both presumed to be Secret Service agents.”

This raises certain points: The President was wearing a mask during the episode, as were the others in the vehicle. Aren’t masks supposed to be all that is needed to stop the spread of the virus? 

In fact, White House spokesperson Judd Deere told Politico: “Appropriate precautions were taken in the execution of this movement to protect the President and all those supporting it, including PPE.” 

Another point: These probably were secret service agents. As such, they are, in fact, supposed to put their lives on the line for the president of the United States. No one should take this duty lightly, and the president shouldn’t either. But, two facts are true, regardless of coronavirus. First, every time the president — whoever the president is — steps out in public, his life is in danger and so, too, are the lives of the Secret Service agents around him. Presidents have been attacked and assassinated. Yet no one floats the idea that the president should always and everywhere stay locked up in a bunker to protect both him and the Secret Service. 

Additionally, with non-friendly nation-states watching the situation in Washington with the president’s COVID case, it is important for the most important political leader in the world to demonstrate that he is not incapacitated, something amply demonstrated by the video showing the president waving to supporters from the passing Chevrolet Suburban. Whether this was on President Trump’s mind is anyone’s guess. But it was necessary nonetheless.

In fact, Politico carried commentary on just this point on October 2. “America’s national security apparatus is keeping a close eye on how foreign adversaries will try to exploit President Donald Trump’s coronavirus diagnosis — a major potential vulnerability,” Politico said.

“There is always the possibility that adversaries will seek to exploit the information space and talk propaganda,” one anonymous “defense official” said, according to Politico. “We are definitely monitoring and keeping aware.”

Far from a meaningless and ill-advised joyride, as Piers Morgan termed it, the president’s short SUV trip outside Walter Reed was important, both as a testament to the president’s relationship with his supporters and as a notable bit of foreign-policy signaling.