President Donald Trump, who has long been an ally of the right-wing Johnson, sent well wishes to his “very good friend” Monday, saying at his press briefing that he was “very saddened to hear that he was taken into intensive care.” “Americans are all praying for his recovery, he’s been a really good friend,” Trump said, adding that Johnson “doesn’t quit, doesn’t give up.” Trump also said that he had directed two leading drug companies to “contact London immediately” and help the Prime Minister’s treatment in conjunction with his doctors. (The president did not specify which companies, but referenced a meeting he had earlier that day with the CEOs of pharmaceutical and biotech companies Amgen, Genetech, Gilead, and Regeneron.) Trump said only that the treatment plan was “really complex” and had given “really incredible results,” remaining vague even when asked for more specifics on the intervention in Johnson’s medical care. “It’s a very complex treatment of things that they’ve recently developed, and they have a lot of experience having to do with something else, but recent for this, and … they’ve already had meetings with [Johnson’s] doctors, and we’ll see if they want to go that route,” Trump said. “They’re there, and they’re ready.” (It’s unclear whether the treatment Trump is now pushing on Johnson is related to the president’s obsession with anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine, which Trump has continued to push as a coronavirus panacea despite the objections of public health experts.)
Trump, whose administration, much like Johnson’s, was delayed in its response to COVID-19, didn’t condemn the P.M.’s initially hands-off approach to the pandemic in light of Johnson’s worsening condition. “Boris was looking at it differently. He was looking at it earlier. He was looking at it like: ride it out. There were many people thinking about riding it out,” Trump said Monday. “But then you see what starts to happen, then the numbers become monumental, and they decided not to do that.” The president, who has tested negative for the coronavirus multiple times, also said Monday that himself and other White House officials would likely take more tests in light of Johnson’s experience. But whether Johnson’s experience of initially shrugging off the coronavirus and then succumbing to it himself will affect the president’s own thinking on COVID-19, which he repeatedly downplayed while his administration failed to adequately confront the pandemic, remains to be seen. “I think to have the president’s friend, the one foreign leader he considers to be a friend, Boris Johnson, suddenly now in the ICU, a much more serious turn of events, has to be a wake-up call for him,” New York Times White House correspondent Peter Baker said Monday on Meet the Press.
More Great Stories From Vanity Fair
— Trump Awakens to the COVID-19 Danger
— Could Wall Street’s Coronavirus Tsunami Get Worse?
— Jared Kushner Told Trump the Coronavirus Was Fake News
— Tucker Carlson on How He Brought His Coronavirus Message to Mar-a-Lago
— The 12 Most Insane Moments From Trump’s National Emergency Presser
— How a QAnon Coronavirus Conspiracy About Oprah Went Viral
— From the Archive: Inside the Week of Hurricane Katrina, Revealing the Foolishness, Fear, and Politics That Turned a Natural Disaster Into a Man-Made Catastrophe
Looking for more? Sign up for our daily Hive newsletter and never miss a story.