President Donald Trump yesterday doubled down on the macho image his fans adore, declaring himself cured of Covid-19 and scoffing at disastrous opinion polls only four weeks before election day against Democrat Joe Biden.
“Feeling great!” he tweeted on his first day back in the White House following three nights in hospital.
He also insisted that he is “looking forward” to holding a second scheduled debate against Biden in Miami on October 15.
In a medical bulletin, the presidential doctor said Trump “reports no symptoms” and “continues to do extremely well.”
However, indicating the breadth of the coronavirus crisis overshadowing Trump, a viral outbreak continued to sweep through his inner circle.
In the latest incident, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and Trump’s top military advisor - General Mark Milley - went into quarantine following contact with an infected Coast Guard officer, a Pentagon source said.
There had been speculation, even among some Republicans, that Trump might emerge from hospital chastened or at least with a new tone of empathy for the roughly 210,000 Americans who have died from the virus.
Instead the Republican has returned to the White House boasting he vanquished the disease that upended the country this year — and, by extension, that he is still capable of vanquishing his grim odds on election day November 3.
“Maybe I’m immune,” he mused on the grand South Portico balcony after demonstratively taking off the mask which he’d worn back from hospital.
He is still being administered an aggressive cocktail of therapeutic drugs, as well being under constant monitoring in case of relapse.
Doctors say they won’t give the all clear until the start of next week. Yet the way Trump, 74, tells it, Covid-19 was simply no match for him.
“Don’t let it dominate you. Don’t be afraid of it,” he urged Americans in his homecoming speech.
He returned to Twitter yesterday with one of his oldest lines of argument used to downplay the seriousness of the pandemic, saying it was comparable to the ordinary flu and “we have learned to live with it.”
Twitter hid the tweet, saying that it broke the platform’s rules on “spreading misleading and potentially harmful information.”
 For a president whose brand centres on self-confidence, the entire hospital discharge has clearly been stage managed to convince voters that he has the near superhuman strength to overcome not only Covid-19 but Biden’s steadily solidifying lead in the polls.
The latest CNN poll published yesterday gave Biden a national advantage of 57% to 41% among likely voters.
Fifty-two percent of those polled said they have a positive impression of Biden while only 39% said they have a positive view of Trump, a historically unpopular leader.
Among women, the numbers were cataclysmic for the Republican: 32% support to Biden’s 66%.
His running mate Kamala Harris, meanwhile, was set to debate Vice President Mike Pence in Utah today, with a plexiglass barrier for coronavirus prevention between the two.