Politico | Trump goes after Drudge over rumours of ‘mini-strokes’
- The president’s campaign also called for CNN to fire Joe Lockhart, saying he had spread the story
This story is published in a content partnership with POLITICO. It was originally reported by Matthew Choi and Quint Forgey on politico.com on September 1, 2020.
US President Donald Trump and his campaign on Tuesday accused the political commentators Matt Drudge and Joe Lockhart of spreading rumours that Trump had gone to the Walter Reed National Military Medical Centre to treat a “series of mini-strokes”.
The targeted attacks come after Trump had vaguely tweeted that an ambiguous “they” were making the claim earlier in the day.
“It never ends! Now they are trying to say that your favourite President, me, went to Walter Reed Medical Centre, having suffered a series of mini-strokes,” Trump wrote on Twitter on Tuesday morning.
According to a forthcoming book by The New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt, however, West Wing staffers were told to put Vice-President Mike Pence on standby “to take over the powers of the presidency temporarily if Trump had to undergo a procedure that would have required him to be anaesthetised”.