Trump is putting White House staff at risk
On any given morning, the White House is a blur of activity. A chef may be whipping up breakfast for the first couple in the second-floor kitchen. A valet might be shining the president’s shoes, while the head butler lingers in the West Sitting Hall, awaiting any urgent presidential requests. Housekeepers, maybe a dozen of them, could be deployed throughout the building, vacuuming, polishing, and dusting. The White House florist might be arranging a vase full of lilies and hydrangeas, as painters touch up scuffs along the baseboards.
When Donald Trump returns to the White House today from his brief stay at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, these are the people he’ll be coming home to. Trump and the first lady interact with dozens of White House employees every day, many of them nonpolitical and largely invisible to the American public. Because of his months-long failure to take COVID-19 seriously even inside his own home, Trump continues to place these staff members and their families at considerable risk. Which is to say that, since the president and first lady became sick themselves, the blast radius from their illness could be a lot larger than many Americans realize.
“There are people behind the people,” Deesha Dyer, the White House social secretary under Barack Obama, told us. And “they don’t have the privilege of being Marine One-ed to Walter Reed” if they get sick.
Asked to describe the mood inside the White House, one staffer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he fears for his job, called the fallout from the Trumps’ diagnosis “a huge mess.” He found out about the president’s and first lady’s illness through news reports. “That happens all the time in this administration,” he said. Other White House officials have also recently tested positive, including White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany and two of her deputies. For now, the staffer said he’s “just waiting and worried for my friends and their families.” [Continue reading…]