second pandemic of her lifetime beatrice lumkin cast her vote. she heard roosevelt's message in realtime back then. now you've heard it, too, and may you be free of restrictions when you cast your vote in this consequential election. that is our broadcast for this back to work monday night. thank you for spending time with us. on behalf of all my colleagues at the networks of nbc news, good night. good evening. happy to have you here with us tonight. it was a beautiful fall day in 1955. president dwight david eisenhower was on vacation. he was enjoying a game of golf in denver, actually near downtown denver. and the day reportedly started out more than fine. the president's doctor would later say that the president had been in a, quote, exuberant mood

that day. it was fantastic. but things would eventually take a dark turn that exuberant day in 1955. president eisenhower's golf game that day ended up getting interrupted over and over and over again by phone calls, specifically phone calls from the secretary of state, john foster dulles. every couple of holes, the president was dragged off the course to go take another call from dulles. now, even on a good day, president eisenhower was known to have a bit of a temper. but those interruptions of his golf game that day, which apparently the president considered quite unnecessary, they really just set him off, like over the top set him off. according to one bystander, the president became so angry at one point that the veins, quote, stood out on his forehead like whipcords. in addition to being visibly spitting mad and upset, the president also started complaining about what he described as indigestion. his stomach was upset, but at least that the president just

chalked up to the fact he had scarfed down a hamburger with bermuda onions at lunch. perhaps he'd eaten too fast and that's why he had the indigestion. eisenhower's medical team would later agree that actually what happened that afternoon on that golf course in denver was probably president eisenhower suffered a heart attack out there. but he didn't seek help. nobody sought help for him. instead the president went to bed that night without having had any medical attention at all, only to wake up at 2:00 in the morning complaining of chest pains. president eisenhower's wife, mamie, called the president's personal physician, major general howard snyder. general snyder was a doctor. he was a surgeon, but he had no real experience in cardiovascular medicine. despite that, even though he was the physician to the president and even though the president was suffering from chest pains, general snyder just decided that he would attend to the president that night himself. he went to the president's bedside.

he didn't call for any other doctor or specialist to come help. with no cardiologist in sight or even on the phone, general snyder came in, this surgeon, and he just decided that he would treat president eisenhower then and there by himself. what he did was he gave president eisenhower a whole bunch of different medicines, including a healthy dose of morphine, which eventually put the president to sleep. even though that doctor, that white house physician, general snyder, later said he was disturbed and alarmed and shaken by eisenhower's condition that night, he made no attempt to summon outside assistance or to get advice from any other doctors. by 8:00 a.m. the next morning, president eisenhower's team was publicly passing off the whole episode as no big deal. the white house press secretary told reporters, quote, the president suffered a digestive upset during the night. if he does come into his office today, it will not be until considerably later.

just a little digestive upset. president eisenhower didn't wake up that day until around noon, and it wasn't until then that general snyder actually called the nearby army hospital and asked for a cardiac specialist to come immediately to take an electrocardiogram. and what do you know? that electrocardiogram confirmed that president eisenhower had, in fact, suffered a massive heart attack. it was lucky he survived. nobody had sought help the previous day on the golf course. no evaluation of him at all until the president woke up in the middle of the night complaining of chest pains, and then it wasn't until more than ten hours after that, after the white house press secretary had assured everybody that it was fine, just a little tummy ache. it wasn't until ten hours after the chest pain episode that his own doctor even thought to call for help. presidents don't always get great health care. i mean they often do, but not always. and when the president's care is

inflected by an attempt to minimize the situation, to tell people it's nothing, to not arouse too much worry, to keep things seeming normal even when they're not, i mean that's bad in a whole bunch of different ways. not being clear-eyed and honest and blunt about the president's condition, especially if that's because they're trying to create a false reassurance to the public that everything's fine, that's just -- it's bad, right? it's bad practice for a democracy. we, the people, are supposed to be the ultimate authority of who's in control of our government in this country, right? we should therefore know as a democracy with confidence whether the president is well enough to continue discharging the duties of being president. if they're trying to create a false impression that he is but really somebody else is discharging the duties of president, that's very serious in terms of our democracy. similarly, if senior white house staff are all put out of commission by an infection sweeping through the west wing, the people of this democracy should know whether the top echelons of the government are in place to continue discharging the duties of governance, or are we creating a charade in which

we are trying to pretend like everybody's in place, things are running as normal, but really there are other people and other entities that we are not discussing who are really in charge since all the people who are purportedly in charge are actually home sick. it is bad practice to have no clarity on what's really happening in terms of our democracy, also in terms of national security. if our adversaries around the world are trying to assess if this might be a moment to hit us, if our adversaries around the world are trying to assess if this might be a moment to take advantage of us, if our adversaries around the world are trying to assess whether or not the u.s. is at full strength and full focus in terms of leadership, and if they, our adversaries, like the american public, cease to believe the public assurances about the president's health because they are plainly bunk, i mean that's bad on a whole bunch of different levels in terms of what our adversaries might do to take advantage of this moment. but also, i mean just at a basic human level, trying to maintain some kind of false front to the public that everything's fine

with the president when you either don't know it or it's not true, that can also be bad for the president's health itself. eisenhower's heart can tell you that from experience. president trump returned to the white house tonight after three nights spent in the hospital at walter reed. he staged a kind of performative return that may have tried to be a sort of triumphant "i beat the virus" thing with marine one landing right next to the white house and the president then tromping up the stairs into the white house. this may have tried to be a sort of triumphant return impression, but the real impression it created was something almost opposite to that. i mean the president walking up the stairs to the south portico, but then turning out to face the cameras while he was- could be plainly seen really gasping for air, huffing and puffing, mouth breathing, and trying to pull in

air while his chest sort of rose and fell with difficulty, looking out at the cameras. if the idea was to show that he's all better, you know, he's got his hair done again, he's got his makeup on again, he's himself, that was undercut seriously by the sort of unnerving spectacle of the president really visibly appearing to struggle for breath. but spare a thought for the white house staff as well, you know, for the military aides and the cooks and the gardeners and the security guards and the cleaners and the ushers and the butlers and the valets and everybody in that complex. i mean after the president did his thing walking up those stairs, he ripped off his mask right before he walked into the white house complex not wearing it, right? he gets there wearing the mask, takes it off, and then that's how he goes into the white house. this is a man who tested positive for covid-19 on thursday, who has had symptoms serious enough to require multiple days in the hospital and supplemental oxygen and all

sorts of experimental therapies, who even tonight appears to be struggling to breathe, and he's insisting on being not just out of the hospital but being back home in a house that is also a workplace for hundreds of people. and he is apparently not going to wear a mask there. he took off his mask before walking without it on into the white house. the president also appears to have worn just a cloth mask, not an n95 or anything, inside the hermetically sealed confines of the presidential limousine this weekend, right? in which he was accompanied by at least two secret service personnel, who he had drive him around outside his hospital room this weekend so he could wave at people holding trump signs. secret service agents sign up because, in part, they are willing to take a bullet for the president. they are willing to give up their lives to save his life if somebody tries to assassinate the president. they're willing to get in the way of a bullet. but taking a bullet for him from an assassin is something quite different than taking a viral bullet from him because he expects you to drive him around

in the big car with the windows that don't roll down so he can go wave at people while he has a super contagious potentially lethal infectious disease. i mean god bless the secret service and all the people who work anywhere near this president at this insane time given what risk he's apparently willing to take with their lives for not much reason at all. but we are also now in this fact-free or at least gray zone in terms of what's really happening right now at the top of the u.s. government. after a third round of bizarre and elliptical and not credible briefing from the president's physician, dr. sean conley, it is hard to have confidence that dr. conley is telling the truth, let alone the whole truth about the president's condition. i mean a lot of what he has told us is odd. the president, for example, may be the only human being on earth

who is taking this particular combination of therapies for covid if we believe what dr. conley tells us about the president's treatment regime. "the washington post" spoke with the chief of infectious diseases at mass general. "the post" reports that trump may be the first patient -- he's certainly among the first to receive an unusual combination of three strong treatments with a handful of supplements and over-the-counter drugs sprinkled in. the head of the largest health care provider in new york state tells "the new york times," quote, suddenly they're throwing the kitchen sink at him. it raises the question, is he sicker than we're hearing, or are they being overly aggressive because he's the president, in a way that could be potentially harmful? "the post" spoke with several doctors who, quote, expressed worry there's no data indicating how these treatments might react with each other, especially in an overweight 74-year-old man with a mild heart condition who is in the high risk group for severe coronavirus disease. the president took a dose of an experimental monoclonal antibody therapy that is not approved as a covid therapy and for which the president had to make a

compassionate use application to the company. compassionate use is a type of access that's usually granted for people at the end of their lives, people who have no other treatment options to try to save them. why did he go straight to that experimental therapy for which he required compassionate use authorization? while we're talking about it, why did they give him the high dose of that drug instead of the low dose of that drug? again, it's only been tested in small-scale clinical trials. why give that to him right off the bat? the president is also taking remdesivir. they say he's taking a five-day intravenous course of that drug. he's not done with that five-day course yet. a hospital typically doesn't discharge a patient in the military of a course of iv medication, but he went back to the white house tonight anyway. the president is also taking a steroid called dexamethasone which can have serious cognitive and mood-related side effects. the president is also reportedly taking zinc and vitamin d and the drug that's the basis for pepcid and whoever knows what else. that combination of drugs is a

serious thing and an unusual one. so we are in uncharted territory here in terms of how these drugs might interact or whether they might be contraindicated in combination for any reason, including side effects. this was the headline in that "washington post" article speaking with specialists about how confused they were by the president's purported treatment regime. quote, trump's early hospital discharge mystifies doctors. subhead says, they say he's in a particularly vulnerable window for covid-19 patients and should be watched closely while taking an unusual combination of drugs. robert wachter, chairman of the university of california at san francisco's department of medicine said any patient of his with trump's symptoms and treatment who wanted to be discharged from the hospital after three days would need to sign out against doctor's orders because it would be so ill-advised. wachter says, quote, for someone sick enough to have required remdesivir and dexamethasone, i

can't think of a situation in which a patient would be okay to leave on day three, even with the white house's medical capacity. william schaffner, professor of infectious diseases at vanderbilt university's medical school concurring, saying the idea of sending trump back to the white house today, that idea, quote, absolutely not. but there he is and taking off the mask right before he walks inside the white house, gasping for air. why is the president getting this treatment that dr. conley has described? do we believe that this is the treatment the president is getting? i ask because dr. conley's pronouncements have been hard to believe at times, often inconsistent, and they've required repeated correction. why is the president's treatment being overseen and explained to the american people by dr. sean conley in the first place? he's an osteopath. nothing against osteopaths, but you would expect this team to be led by an infectious disease doctor, no? at least an internist? somebody who does something other than osteopathy.

for that matter, why is dr. conley still the one briefing the public on the president's condition after multiple misstatements, including on the timeline of when the president was first diagnosed and first started receiving treatment and when even dr. conley's written statement trying to clean up those mistakes was full of errors, including misspelling at least one of the drugs that the president is taking. is someone who's an experienced covid clinician making top-level decisions on the president's care? is it dr. conley? is it possible this is a case of what they call vip syndrome, in which the patient insists on what he wants to be treated with even though that combination of treatments makes no sense from a clinical perspective but everybody goes along with it anyway because the patient is a vip? why won't the white house release basic information on things like the president's vital signs and whether there were abnormalities in his lung scans, his blood oxygen levels,

how much oxygen he received, how many times he received it, at what saturation and for what length of time? why is the white house specifically and repeatedly insisting that we, the public, are not allowed to know when the last time was that the president tested negative? they really don't want us to know. they really insist on us not knowing about the window of time potentially infected. the window of time between his last negative test and his first positive test. now, you don't always turn up positive immediately upon becoming infected. it may take a few days for the test to be able to register enough virus in your system to give you a positive result. but knowing the difference between the last negative test and the first positive test, knowing what that window was, knowing about the progression of the virus and how long it takes to actually potentially turn up a positive test result after infection, this would be helpful. this would be helpful maybe not to the president's care, but it would be helpful to a lot of people who have had contact with

the president or contact with his close contacts in the time around his infection. i mean what the white house says is that the president got his positive test result late on thursday night. in the 48 hours before getting that positive test result, we know the president had his debate with vice president biden. the one where not only did the candidates not wear masks standing onstage socially distanced, but there was a rule in the hall where everybody attending the debate had to wear a mask. the trump family members decided to break that rule. they took off their masks and refused to wear them throughout the whole debate. in that same 48-hour period before the president's test result, the president held a rally in minnesota with thousands of people where no one, including him -- basically no one including him wore masks. in that same 48-hour window, the president met with supporters at his golf club in bedminster. he traveled to bedminster, new jersey, right? he travels to cleveland, goes to the debate, travels to minnesota, does the rally, travels to bedminster to do his fund-raiser, takes photos with

everybody for the campaign fund-raiser that he holds there. i mean he met and traveled over this -- just that 48-hour window with dozens of white house staffers, and he didn't wear a mask for any of it. was he infected all that time? when's the earliest time at which he could be infected? asking for a friend. asking for the dozens, if not hundreds, if not thousands of people who may have been in proximity to the president over the time when he was first infected. we know he had symptoms by the time he first tested positive. when was the last time he got a negative test before then? knowing the window is not necessarily helpful for understanding the president's health. it is -- would be very helpful, it is important for figuring out who else the president potentially infected because it could be legions. if they won't tell us when he got infected, if they will not clarify when his testing revealed his exposure and infection for the first time, we are left to wonder, like, how many things the president did

where he potentially infected everyone near him, but also how many things the president did while he might have known he had covid. were there multiple tests? did he do a rapid test before he did a confirming pcr? what was the timeline of his testing? let us know as a matter of public health. "the new york times" is first to report tonight that the white house has decided not to do contact tracing for the saturday event before the president's formal diagnosis at which a lot of now infected people were present, all together with no masks on. the white house has decided -- this is from "the new york times" tonight. quote, the white house has decided not to trace the contacts of guests and staff members at the rose garden celebration ten days ago for judge amy coney barrett, where at least eight people including the president may have become infected according to a white house official familiar with the plans. they've just decided not to trace those contacts. the white house has also cut the cdc out of the contact tracing process.

the cdc has the government's most extensive knowledge and resources for contact tracing, but the white house has elected not to use them for this. they're just not tracing those infections. to the extent that tracing efforts are being done for the 48 hours before the president got his positive test result on thursday night, those efforts are being run by the white house medical unit headed by dr. sean conley, the white house physician, the osteopath, who has been the public spokesman for mr. trump's doctors since he got sick. dr. conley today explicitly denied to reporters that he had anything to do with contact tracing around this burgeoning cluster of infections surrounding the president. he said today, i have nothing to do with the contact tracing. but according to the white house, dr. conley is in fact the person who is in charge of that contact tracing. when hope hicks first tested positive early on thursday, from that point forward, it's very simple.

everybody in the white house who had any contact with her in previous days should have gone into quarantine for at least two weeks. instead, they just carried on, including the president. and now they're just not bothering to track what appear to be myriad infections that they have caused by this neglect. not that they've caused in some at a remove sense of mishandling the pandemic and undercutting public health authorities and mocking protections recommended by public health authorities to keep people from getting it, right? not just spreading misinformation, not providing ppe, not providing clear guidance, politicizing the science around these things. i don't mean -- i mean all of that. but i mean here, a lot of people may have literally been infected with covid by the president personally. like his breath, other people infected, could have been lots of them. they should tell us that so

those people who are in contact with the president, however many days are relevant here, can themselves not only get tested but themselves start doing their own contact tracing in terms of who else they might have infected. the president himself appears to be the source of a significant covid cluster. he's home now, though. at least 30 states have rising case numbers right now. they said this would happen in the colder weather. it's not much colder yet. we're already heading back up. we're already back up to 50,000 new cases a day. the ellipse outside the white house this weekend was filled with 20,000 black chairs. look at that. that's 20,000, not 200,000. each of those chairs represents ten americans dead from this thing already. the president today said, nobody should be afraid of covid. yeah, everything's fine. he's infected. he's on multiple experimental therapies nobody has ever tried

in this combination before. he's been in the hospital three days and now apparently still sick, still receiving intravenous medication among other things, there he is out of the hospital, ripping off his mask so he can go inside the white house without it on, gasping for breath. this is such a mess, and nobody knows what's happening even tonight, even to him. n to him your journey requires liberty mutual. they customize your car insurance so you only pay for what you need. wow. that will save me lots of money.

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why remdesivir on top of the

antibodies? >> so remdesivir works a little bit differently than the antibodies. we're maximizing all aspects of his care, attacking this virus, you know, a multi-pronged approach. as the president, i didn't want to hold anything back. >> when did he begin dexamethasone treatment? >> the potential risks and side effects we all discussed. we looked at the data and decided that we'd rather, you know, push ahead on it than hold and risk, you know, the opposite. i'm not going to go into all of our debates about specific medicines and therapies. he's on a routine regimen of, you know, covid therapy. i'm not going to go into specifics as to what he is and is not on. >> i'm not going to go into specifics. not going to go into specifics. why would i? you figure it out yourselves. does this seem normal? trust me, this is routine. joining us now is dr. vin gupta from the university of

washington school of medicine. dr. gupta, i really appreciate you making time to be here with me tonight. thanks. >> thanks, rachel. >> when dr. conley there described what the president -- the way the president has been treated as a routine regimen of covid therapy, is that true? >> you know, rachel, it's a really important question, and it's very true if we just admit to what's going on here, that the president ruled in, based on