The “president of the United States has tested positive for covid-19,” he said in a grave tone. “This puts us in all new territory.”
Trump, 74, tweeted early Friday that he and the first lady have contracted the novel coronavirus, just 32 days before the election. The confirmation came hours after news broke that Hope Hicks, a top Trump aide who traveled with the president this week, had tested positive Thursday morning.
In a pandemic that has killed more than 205,000 people in the United States and sickened millions more, news of the president and first lady testing positive left journalists scrambling as much of the nation was going to bed.
As reporters flooded Twitter, daily newspapers stopped their presses to swap in front pages with the breaking news in bold headlines — “INFECTED,” shouted the New York Daily News. The San Francisco Chronicle chose a more sedate, “Trump says he has virus.”
At the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Greg Mees, the paper’s design director, was in bed when a colleague in the sports department called with the news. Mees, 29, leaped up and called the paper’s printing facility, which was already running off thousands of copies of the next day’s edition.
He didn’t quite yell, “Stop the presses!” — but close.
“I said, ‘Just slow it down as much as you possibly can,’” Mees told The Washington Post.
Within 30 minutes, Mees and his team shipped over a fresh lead headline: “TRUMP HAS VIRUS,” in a jumbo font. The presses were able to print the new edition for more than half of the paper’s subscribers. “We have an amazing crew to make this happen,” Mees said. “This is definitely the latest major change I can ever remember to a front page.”
Cable news outlets, meanwhile, went into overdrive to bring on panels of experts raising questions without immediate answers: Are the Trumps showing coronavirus symptoms? Who else at the White House has been exposed? Did Trump expose former vice president Joe Biden at Tuesday’s presidential debate?
On CNN, anchor Don Lemon was still processing the news he had just read on-air when White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins spelled out the severity of the situation for the Trump administration.
“This is a nightmare scenario for the West Wing,” Collins said. “We had a suspicion this was in the making because they had been so quiet about what his diagnosis was, and it had taken so long to get these results that something seemed to be up.”
Sam Vinograd, a national security analyst for the network, had earlier described the prospect of a positive test for the president as “a Code Red moment for the U.S. government.”
“At this point, knowing that the president is sick and that the pandemic is affecting personnel in the White House, this may be the most dangerous moment the U.S. government has ever faced,” she said. “The president is suffering from a deadly virus. This feels like something we should be watching on an episode of ‘Homeland.’ ”
The sentiment was echoed by Williams on MSNBC. “Don’t think for a second that this is not a national security matter,” he said.
As Williams called for the two remaining presidential debates to be canceled, Vin Gupta, a public health physician at the University of Washington, emphasized Trump’s positive test meant “the presidential race has been fundamentally altered.”
“There should be no more in-person gatherings for the remainder of this season,” said Gupta, an MSNBC medical contributor. “And my biggest concern here is if the president remains asymptomatic that he may use it to tamp down the seriousness of the infection.” He added: “Let’s hope everyone stays well and healthy, but this was preventable.”
On Fox News, Ronny L. Jackson, Trump’s former White House physician, claimed without evidence that the president was asymptomatic.
“I will bet you that he does not develop symptoms, that he moves on and this does not become a big deal,” Jackson said to overnight anchor Ashley Strohmier, adding he believed the president would “weather this storm.”
Also calling into the network to express support for the Trumps was host Sean Hannity. Hours earlier, Hannity had interviewed the president, with Trump remarking how he and the first lady had gotten tested “because we spend a lot of time with Hope.”
“I know there will probably be those who want to politicize something like this as quickly as possible, which is sad but predictable,” Hannity said after news broke of the president’s positive test.
Others at the network, like Washington correspondent Griff Jenkins, noted the gravity of the moment.
“This will be a day remembered in Washington for a very long time,” Jenkins said.
