Trump's discharge is meant for the stock market, but he doesn't want you to know just how sick he is.

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Behind the big headline that Donald Trump has been discharged from Walter Reed is the real reason for Trump's insistence on this discharge, and the apprehension of his own doctors to level with the American people.

The announcement from Trump's own Twitter account as well as his treating physicians has alarm bells ringing throughout the medical community. At Monday's press conference outside of Walter Reed, Trump's treatment team and the White House physician Sean Conley refused to disclose key information, hiding behind HIPAA, the federal that protect the medial privacy of Americans.

It's true that under HIPAA regulations, patients control their own private medical information, and only information they authorize to be released can be released and used for the purpose which they authorize it. It's a good law. It protects our employers from finding out what medications we're on or what we're being treated for, for example.

But then again, you do not get a daily press conference held by 10 whitecoats for every hospitalized patient. There is an obvious public interest in fully learning the condition of a sick, hospitalized head of state. Still, even in these press conferences, only medical information authorized by the patient - in this case, Donald Trump - to be publicly released can be discussed.

Given the incredible amount of secrecy surrounding Trump's treatment and Conley's repeated appeals to HIPAA regulations on Monday, there can only be one conclusion: Donald Trump has not given his doctors permission to fully and openly discuss his medical condition or COVID treatment progress. Per sources at CNN, Trump is indeed instructing his doctors to keep information about his health status from the press and the public.

That indicates he has plenty to hide, likely because he is being pumped up by drugs to put up a false picture of strength.

In fact, Trump himself has made clear why he took the joyride endangering the lives of secret service agents yesterday, and why he insisted on leaving Walter Reed on Monday night: the stock market.

Trump also hopes to create an aura of invincibility and hero status, but that already seems to be falling apart as zoomed in camera lenses found a dithering, pressed for breath, gasping for air, maskless Trump struggling to hold himself together at the photo op on a White House balcony immediately upon his return to his temporary residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Trump's desperate attempts to appear a strongman is falling apart, precisely because of how opaque the White House and Trump's doctors have been, reportedly at Trump's direction. Americans simply do not believe Trump and the White House on his own condition. According to a poll released by CNN, almost 7 in 10 Americans do not trust the White House on Trump's health, compared to just 12% who do.

Over 210,000 Americans have already died from COVID, with almost 7.5 million families who have been affected by the infection, and the vast majority of those families will resent being told that their suffering is because their loved ones just aren't strong enough, rather than a large scale public policy failure to respond with effective public health measures due, almost entirely, to Donald Trump's insistence that Americans not be protected.

Even if he physically fully recovers, Americans will be rightly resentful at Trump's implication that the kind of care he has received as president -- with the White House medical staff, Walter Reed staff, doctors from other institutions, at least 10 attending physicians at any given time (given the press conferences), and a plethora of experimental treatments and steroids - -- could be obtained by the average Joe. On top of it, there seems to be a good number of Americans who believe that Trump never had COVID in the first place and this was all a publicity stunt, if any sampling of social media is to be believed.

The truth is that all of Trump's disclosed therapies are associated with treatment of aggressive and rapidly advancing disease in an immune-compromised patient. Dexamethasone, for example, is a corticosteroid used to aggressively reduce inflammation, and as I discussed previously, the first experimental regimen Trump is known to have taken is generally only useful if one's immune system is not already properly responding to a viral infection.

Just like his coronavirus infection itself, Trump is also responsible for the thick environment of mistrust that has built up around Trump's White House when it comes to updates about his own infection. Truth is just not something the American people expect from this White House, given their hourly lies about things as trivial as Donald Trump's weight to things as grave as how early Trump knew about the dangers of COVID-19. The lies so deeply line the grounds of this White House and the truths are so few and far between that no one will believe them even if what they say about Trump's health is true (and as we have seen, in all likelihood it is not).

One of the miracles of modern medicine is that it can make a nearly dead man walk, if only temporarily. Given the Trump White House's - and Trump's - propensity to lie and put up a reality show of pretend-strength, no one can be certain how Donald Trump is really doing. But let's keep in mind that with COVID-19, cases often get better before they get worse.



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