Hi, this is Josh Marshall, and this is the Josh Marshall podcast.

This is the first full podcast we have done since the news early Friday morning, like very early Friday morning, like

one o'clock in the morning, that President Trump and his wife Malania had tested positive

for COVID.

And as we know, subsequent to that, he was taken to Alta Reed Hospital.

He was there for, what, three days, something like that, three, four days, and then he went back to the White House and it is just you know

It's been a very Trumpian getting COVID I guess is the way to put it, you know, with a lot of

antics and weirdness and a lot of lies and a lot of unclarity about what is going on and we are going to talk about that because that has obviously been the news for the last week or so.

And it's still in the nature of a Trump story like this,

we really still don't know what is happening.

It certainly seems clear that the president is at least not

incapacitated. I mean we see him walking around. We've seen him in these videos

where he talks. It does seem like he has some

struggle to modulate his breathing. That's not surprising. He has COVID. But it does put some bounds to at least his current status.

But as we know, the sort of the textbook presentation of a serious case of COVID-19, which older people are liable to get,

is that you get sick, you're kind of, you know, cold, fluish sick for about a week or so and you know but it seems like you're basically

doing okay and a week or so in maybe nine ten days after infection you crash you get

you suddenly get worse and we have learned over the last six months that the

clinical reality behind that is that the COVID is kind of drilling down into your lungs basically and it is causing these still not totally understood issues with

clotting and organ damage and organ stress and you crash. President Trump, as near as I can tell, is he's right about the time where one

might expect that to happen. and that means that the second half of this week is going to be critical.

I think and again obviously I'm not a clinician this is just you know going on a lot of

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