New Republic: “The president is a sick man. On its face, Trump’s appalling handling of his coronavirus diagnosis doesn’t seem to tell us much more than we already knew about him. His inability to admit to any fault or vulnerability, his reckless disregard for others, and his brazen dishonesty are all too familiar to us now. But our weariness shouldn’t obscure the fact that Trump’s departure from Walter Reed and premature return to the White House and campaign trail—a potentially life-threatening course of action—is, by a wide margin, the bravest thing he’s ever done, a feat of personal daring that, of course, can’t really be construed as an act of personal sacrifice.”

“What is it all for? He isn’t the first president to downplay or obscure an illness, and he probably won’t be the last. But he may be the first to have risked worsening his condition without an obvious substantive rationale in mind. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy hid and worked to overcome their illnesses because they had things to do; Trump plainly does not. If he is reelected, a cadre of conservative advisers and strategists will reassemble to foist their policy objectives on him again, but at this point for Trump, who has yet to offer the public a real sense of what his own second-term priorities might be, victory is apparently its own end. For reasons that are possibly obscure even to him, Trump would like to remain the widely loathed and beleaguered leader of a country whose mounting crises he has only deepened.”