What President Donald Trump’s positive COVID-19 test means for the US election
Americans already wary and weary of the national response to coronavirus now face their own President falling victim. Here’s how Trump’s diagnosis will change the lead up to November.
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ANALYSIS: The 2020 US election was already a pressure cooker and President Donald Trump contracting COVID-19 has turned it red-hot.
Any diagnosis of the deadly disease leads to contact tracing and the list of those exposed is potentially horrifying.
Vice President Mike Pence, the man who would step in should Mr Trump be unable to do his job, spent Tuesday in the White House before meeting incoming Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
An unmasked Mr Trump, 74, spent 90 minutes on Tuesday on stage debating his opponent, Joe Biden, who at 77 would potentially become America’s oldest president should he win in November.
Despite its significance, the White House is a small building which holds hundreds of staffers, visitors and media working in close quarters.
Everything is now in question.
Given his potential exposure, Mr Pence is now unlikely to travel to Salt Lake City, Utah, for next week’s VP debate with Democrat Kamala Harris.
The second presidential debate, scheduled in Miami on October 15, also seems unlikely to go ahead.
There is precedent for suspending presidential campaigns in extraordinary circumstances.
When a barman in Milwaukee shot Theodore Roosevelt in October 1912 his opponent Woodrow Wilson suspended his campaign until Mr Roosevelt was back on the road two weeks later.
But America is today in the middle of the most rancorous presidential campaign in recent history, as displayed so starkly on the debate stage this week.
There are many unknowns about how the unpredictable disease will impact individuals and how this plays out for Mr Trump will have a solid impact on the election campaign.
After British Prime Minister Boris Johnson nearly died from his bout, his lax early attitude turned into one of significant caution that locked the country down.
For Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, a close Trump-ally, his public recovery from mild COVID helped slam home his message that the pandemic was “no worse than the flu”.
This would be the best possible outcome for Mr Trump and would even possibly help restore him to the White House given how much he has played down the threat of the virus.
But that seems a long way from now, as the election race that had been changing from hour to hour is now being defined from minute to minute, changing and mutating just like the virus itself.
Americans have spent months fearing that nobody was in charge of the national response to the pandemic. Now they will wake to the news that their leader has been struck down, it is going to ratchet up their anxiety levels even more.
Originally published as What President Donald Trump’s positive COVID-19 test means for the US election
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