Weekly Review

President Donald Trump announced that he had tested positive for COVID-19, two days after throwing two Make America Great Again hats into the crowd at a rally in Duluth, Minnesota, one day after attending a fund-raiser at his New Jersey golf club, and just hours after declaring that “the end of the pandemic is in sight”; according to the president’s doctor, Trump knew he had tested positive on Wednesday.^{1 2 3 4} “My mom coughing all around the house after trump tested positive,” wrote Kellyanne Conway’s 15-year-old daughter in a TikTok post. “Update my mom has covid,” she posted later.⁵ The president was admitted to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, in Bethesda, Maryland, after the stock market had closed for the week, and he received supplemental oxygen, steroids, and an antibody “cocktail” that is unavailable to the public.⁶ On Sunday, Secret Service agents drove Trump around outside the hospital—against the wishes of his family—so that he could wave to his fans; the president was also photographed signing a blank sheet of paper with an extra-large Sharpie.^{7 8 9} After a slew of Monday-morning tweets that included the appeals “SPACE FORCE. VOTE!” and “PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH (BRING OUR SOLDIERS HOME). VOTE!,” the president was discharged from the hospital at six-thirty in the evening.^{10 11 12 13 14} “Now I’m better. Maybe I’m immune? I don’t know,” the maskless president said in a video message shot at the White House. “But don’t let it dominate your lives.”¹⁵ Many others connected with the White House or the Trump campaign have tested positive for the virus, including Melania Trump, the first lady; Ronna McDaniel, the chair of the Republican National Committee; Trump’s campaign manager; at least one White House staffer; three White House journalists; three Republican senators; and Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, who described Trump as coming in “too hot” in the first presidential debate.^{16 17} “I’m just sad with the way last night turned out,” said Chris Wallace, who moderated the debate, during which he neglected to fact-check Trump’s claims about election fraud, poll watching, and the price of insulin.^{18 19} About two thirds of likely voters who had tuned in to the broadcast said that it left them feeling annoyed.²⁰ TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter said that they would remove posts wishing for Trump’s death from their platforms.²¹

At least 28 states reported rising cases of COVID-19.²² An entire middle school in Mississippi was forced to quarantine after more than 35 percent of the student body was exposed to or tested positive for the coronavirus, and lecturers at Northumbria University, in England, threatened to strike after 770 students tested positive.^{23 24} New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who sent a care package to Trump, threatened to fine New York City’s government as COVID-19 cases began to rise in certain neighborhoods; Mayor Bill de Blasio said that he would require everyone who works in his office to take a five-day unpaid furlough, including himself.^{25 26} Ireland’s Supreme Court ruled that the bread served at Subway restaurants contains too much sugar to be called bread.²⁷ For the first time since 2016, Major League Baseball completed its regular season without any players involved in on-field antigay controversies.²⁸ A man captured a video of an F-35B fighter jet crashing into the ground after it collided with a military aerial refueling tanker; the Associated Press obtained an audio recording in which a Louisiana state trooper involved in the death of a black man said, “I beat the ever-living fuck out of him”; and CNN released a secretly recorded audiotape in which Melania Trump complained about, among other things, the lack of press coverage of her work as first lady.^{29 30 31} “Who gives a fuck about Christmas stuff and decorations?” she asked.

A 9-1-1 outage occurred in Arizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Washington State.³² A man armed with a machete painted with his own blood what police have described as “satanic messages” on an Alpha Delta Pi sorority house in North Carolina.³³ Officials said that an Illinois-based white-supremacist group who call themselves “pork-eating crusaders” stockpiled guns and explosives to wage an insurrection against the federal government.³⁴ An English ambulance company tested a jet pack for flying paramedics to mountainous areas, and a cargo rocket carrying a $23 million toilet—the Universal Waste Management System—departed for the International Space Station.^{35 36} The astronaut Kate Rubins announced that she plans to vote from space.³⁷—Adam Iscoe