‘It’s Worse Than We Know’: Michael Bender Says Trump Thought He Would Die From Covid

When then-president Donald Trump came down with Covid-19 in 2020, there was speculation and reporting at the time, and ever since, that his health was worse than his doctors and the administration were letting on.

In this week’s The Interview podcast, senior White House reporter for the Wall Street Journal Michael Bender says that not only was it worse than we knew, it’s worse than we know today.

Asked by Mediaite editor-in-chief Aidan McLaughlin whether he had reporting on how bad it got and whether Trump or people in the White House feared the president was going to die, Bender said “yes, yes, all of the above.”

“It was worse than we know … and I’m sure it’s worse than what even I have in this book,” said Bender. That book, Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost, has many startling and revealing looks behind the curtain, but the fact that the White House was worried the president would die is easily among the more historically intriguing.

Interestingly, it wasn’t really a high level scheme to keep the president’s condition under wraps, Bender says.

“The Trump White House was just not built in a way to … coordinate any kind of high level scheming to hide what happened,” he said. “It was Trump.”

“I mean, he he wasn’t really talking to even [Mark] Meadows, his chief of staff about what was happening or his chief of operations,” Bender said. “I’m not sure how much he consulted with the doctor on some of these things.”

“So what that means is it leaves us with are a bunch of competing versions of when he tested. When he tested positive. Yeah. I mean, I have a couple people, senior people, respectable people telling me that he tested positive before he went to Bedminster that day for effect for a fundraiser,” he said. There were many contemporaneous reports that this was what happened, that Trump had tested positive but carried on to the fundraiser anyway.

“It’s unfathomable that he would put at risk his own health, as a President of the United States, and those around him to go,” he continued. “To say nothing of the donors to go to Bedminster. And there are people that say that’s incorrect.”

Bender explained that “multiple people” he spoke to or interviewed said that not only that Trump had tested positive that day, ahead of the fundraiser, but that he “Thought it was a false positive because he because he had had false positives before.”

That is another fact that was not known or shared by the administration before Trump’s actual diagnosis, that the president had tested positive for Covid previously and more than once.

As for Trump’s condition, Bender repeated that “yes, he was he was incredibly sick. I mean, a lot of that did come up in real time.”

Bender notes that one of the compelling scenes in his book is when the president gets to Walter Reed, which he’d agreed to because they suggested he could go now, while he could walk, or later when he might need to be carried in. “An easy decision for Donald Trump and, really, probably, anyone.”

“So he’s he’s very, very sick, but he’s putting on airs as best as he can to seem normal, and he carries his own bag to the hospital. As soon as he gets into the hospital, he’s exhausted by the whole trip, drops the bag on the ground and everybody around him took a step back. He had Covid, right? And like, like everyone’s natural instinct was to take a step back. And Mark Meadows, as this sort of, you know, screw it moment, leans forward, grabs his bag and they walk into into Walter Reed. And and Trump told people later, he said to Meadows in front of other people, that’s that’s when I knew you were my guy.”

It’s a fascinating look into one of those rare, historically unique moments.