White House Communications Director Alyssa Farah faced some unexpectedly tough questions about President Donald Trump’s medical condition during an interview on Fox News Sunday afternoon. And in the process, she admitted that the president’s physician Dr. Sean Conley deliberately misled the American people to make his patient feel better.
Fox anchor Trace Gallagher highlighted the “confusion” and “mixed messaging coming from the White House and coming from the doctors,” asking Farah, “Why hasn’t the White House come out and just cleared the deck, cleared up all this stuff and said, you know, this is the way it is, here’s what happened and kind of given everybody a tick-tock of what happened from the beginning when he was confirmed with coronavirus until today?”
Farah said the administration was “striving to be as transparent” as they can and claimed Dr. Conley’s comments have been “accurate” throughout. But as Gallagher pointed out, the confusion has more to do with the information Conley has “omitted” from his briefings.
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“And even today, he kind of came out and he acknowledged, well, he was doing that because he was trying to put on a brave face,” the anchor said.
In his latest comments to the press, the doctor said, “I was trying to reflect the upbeat attitude that the team, the president over the course of his illness, has had,” adding, “I didn’t want to give any information that might steer the course of illness in another direction, and in doing so, you know, it came off that we were trying to hide something, which wasn’t necessarily true.”
“It’s a very common medical practice that you want to convey confidence,” Farah claimed. “And you want to raise the spirits of the person you are treating. I know this president. I don’t know that he needs his spirits raised but I think it’s actually a very common medical practice to do that.”
“But is it also a common medical practice to put the proper information out there, put all the information out there, and to let people make up their own minds?” Gallagher shot back.
After brushing that question aside, Farah pivoted to boast about how hard the president is supposedly working through his illness from Walter Reed hospital.
