We have all been living with the uncertainties of the coronavirus for nearly eight months. Now the twin COVID-19 diagnoses of President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump have propelled the United States—which was already suffering from political bewilderment—into a fraught new reality. This reality has two dimensions. In human terms, the United States has entered uncharted waters. Presidential couples have gotten sick before: In the early 1990s, for example, both President George H.W. Bush and Barbara Bush struggled with Graves’ disease, an autoimmune disorder, at the same time—though the disease was treatable and both went on to live very long lives. President Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan also both got sick, with cancer, during their White House years—but these health scares did not occur at the same time. Never before has a first couple been simultaneously threatened as seriously as today.
Despite White House chief of staff Mark Meadows’s statement Friday that Trump was experiencing mild COVID-19 symptoms, and the president’s transfer later in the day to the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, in all likelihood no one—not even Trump—will know the severity of his illness for some time. Besides the emotional toll this uncertainty will exact, Trump’s diagnosis raises a whole set of other, thorny questions about leadership and how to ensure the continuity of government. If that didn’t make the moment alarming enough, all this is also happening in the last month of a bitterly contested presidential election campaign.
