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Cuomo Prime Time

Trump Hospitalized; More COVID-19 Cases in White House and Campaign. Aired 1-2a ET

Aired October 03, 2020 - 01:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[01:00:00]

CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: I am Chris Cuomo, welcome back to our special live continuing coverage, President Trump is battling COVID-19 right now at Walter Reed Medical Center. He'll be hospitalized the next few days. We'll see how his virus and infection progresses.

We heard from him a short while ago, how else?

Twitter.

He posted "Going well, I think. Thank you to all. Love."

Look, this got to be a scary time for him and his wife and family. I really do wish them well. This is not about politics. I have had this virus. I do not wish it on anybody.

You can believe two things at the same time. It is sad that he has it and shameful as well. It did not need to happen. He was on board Marine One hours ago in a suit and a mask and heard from him in a brief video but we don't really know how sick he is.

This is not a guy that's just going to check into the hospital. He knows he looks terrible. So, if he didn't have to go, he would not go. It's not like they're going to convince him to go. Nobody convinces him to do anything.

He took an experimental drug. He took remdesivir, which is something they are using on a case by case basis. And he's in the hospital. Now we heard from the White House doctor, who says the president is not requiring additional oxygen. That's good.

No word of hydroxychloroquine, why?

Because the proof is not there and now you know. When the time came for the president and the physicians to make a choice for him, he did not take it.

The first lady is also battling this, along now with a whole host of people around them, which is giving us our best understanding of why we are here, looking much less likely this is about Hope Hicks and much more like a week ago.

Bill Stepien, the campaign manager; Kellyanne Conway tested positive as well. She put out word tonight. Long time former White House adviser, former campaign manager, she tweeted her symptoms are mild and she's feeling basically fine.

But this is early in the process. Governor Chris Christie was there and said he's waiting on his test. And Rudy Giuliani was doing the debate prep, Jason Miller, Stephen Miller, all the people around this president were with him on Saturday or the days thereafter. He was in five different states.

What about all the wait staff? What about the people who aren't the big names who aren't going to get remdesivir or flown to the hospital?

All of this did not have to happen. A super spreader event at the White House and the brag about a controversial judicial nomination and no masks?

Law and order. The law is the CDC guideline. Wear a mask, socially distance. Order is doing things that have a preference toward safety, not this. We should not be here right now. Too many have suffered for too long and too many are now lost. Guidance matters, especially from the top.

The irony is, this president may now be the strongest counter message to his own rhetoric about the pandemic. if you have any question about whether to social distance or wear a mask, my brothers and sisters, you must not be paying attention.

The man who told you we would be fine and it was no big deal is now sick and in the hospital. We need our president more than ever. We have not rounded the corner, let's pray his diagnosis may be a wakeup call not just for him but for all of us. This will not magically disappear, OK?

For the latest on Trump's health, let's go to Jeremy Diamond outside Walter Reed.

Thank you for being out there, especially at this hour, Jeremy, what do we know?

JEREMY DIAMOND, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: It has been a whirlwind of the last 24 hours. You think about how far we have come and the number of people, the president and the first lady and all around them who have since tested positive.

[01:05:00]

DIAMOND: Around 8 pm on Thursday evening we learned Hope Hicks had tested positive; around 1 am we heard the president and the first lady tested positive and since then we heard Ronna McDaniel, Bill Stepien, two Republican senators tested positive, Thom Tillis and Mike Lee and again the White House chief of staff Mark Meadows saying he expects other White House officials will also test positive.

As far as the timeline, is to watch the evolution of the description of the president's condition and the measures that have been taken to address his coronavirus symptoms. Around 1:00 am they announced the president tested positive for coronavirus. The White House's doctor says President Trump was doing well and expected him to remain at the White House.

Fast forward 18 hours later, the president is landing here at Walter Reed, not just to come here for a few hours but admitted as a patient to the hospital and remain here for several days.

We learned that the president earlier today at the White House received this antibody cocktail. Since then he's being administered doses of remdesivir that has shown some success in addressing coronavirus.

Obviously there has been an evolution in how he's feeling. First he was doing well, then he had mild symptoms and then we heard he had a fever throughout the day. The White House's physician, Dr. Sean Conley, reassures the country that he is doing well and he has not needed supplemental oxygen, which would be a concerning sign if the president did begin to need oxygen as well to support his breathing.

CUOMO: Yes, look. All the indications are they are doing everything they can. This is going to be a battle in all likelihood. If you have symptoms, usually it is not a day or two and done, especially at his age, but overwhelmingly he should make it.

Quickly, I was under the impression that the president was getting tested every day, is that not true?

DIAMOND: That's what the White House has told us. Not only he's tested everyday but sometimes he's tested more than once a day. But this is a huge question.

Why did the COVID-19 test on Wednesday and Thursday did not pick up this virus particularly because these tests are supposed to pick it up when you are asymptomatic as well or pre-symptomatic before you start to experience symptoms?

Obviously the protocols at the White House did not go as they were supposed to but also it's a sign that you can't take one part of the safety measures and disregard the rest. The White House has used testing almost as a panacea for the coronavirus when it is anything but.

It is one component of all these other things you are supposed to do, in addition to social distancing and wearing a mask. Those are the parts of the safety protocol that this White House and this president completely disregard.

CUOMO: Testing is about control and masks and social distancing, hygiene, that's about prevention. Jeremy Diamond, thank you very much.

Let's bring in Dr. Sanjay Gupta.

In terms of why the president is in the protocol that he's in, I think a good way to look at it is to look at the fact that the first lady is not.

If he were having such mild symptoms, symptoms that he was basically fine, you probably don't take him to the hospital and not give him an experiment cocktail and remdesivir, right?

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: That is a really good point. You have an example here of obviously a level of concern, providing that experimental non-authorized monoclonal antibody therapy. That was given at the White House. That was a compassionate use application.

There must have been a level of concern that was high enough. It was given to the president and not to the first lady and now at Walter Reed getting this other medication, remdesivir, which is an antiviral medicine.

CUOMO: Remdesivir, where does it stand in terms of science and application to COVID-19?

[01:10:00]

GUPTA: Yes, this was sort of the first, I believe, therapeutic to get emergency authorization use, that was back in May 1st where it got this EUA. There was a lot of excitement. It was the first medication that really showed any effectiveness against this virus.

We looked at the data and what they found was it did decrease the duration that people did have symptoms from 15 days to 11 days. It is not a knock-out punch, but it was the first time you had anything working against this.

It was unclear if it decreases mortality. Typically, this medication is given for five days. So we'll see if that's what the president gets. Today is day one. But it is a more effective medication if given earlier. If he gets so much virus in the system, slowing down the replication at that point is not as beneficial.

To give it earlier, it could be more beneficial. It was interesting in that note you mentioned, they said he's not receiving supplemental oxygen. This is a medication given to people either receiving supplemental oxygen or pulse oximetry, measuring your oxygenation, is below 94 percent. That's when it seems to work best.

CUOMO: I got jammed up today and there was all this traffic and I had to make a detour and wound up taking the helicopter to get here on time. They tested my blood oxygen. I had not had that done since I was sick. When they put that clip on my finger and, you know, I was waiting for the number to come up, it brought back some really bad memories.

(CROSSTALK)

GUPTA: Was it OK?

CUOMO: Yes, if it was not, I would not be here.

But rest is such a big deal and you and I talked about this a lot. I said before, don't tweet right now. The country is better served by you resting. I got a text from one of his guys saying, this is not late for him. So this will be a change for him. They're going to be telling him he has got to sleep.

At this point, what does the next week -- is it the critical period?

What kind of watch period is there?

GUPTA: Well, you know, first of all, we are not sure what the calendar is here for the president. We heard he got the positive test yesterday and started developing -- it has been really a crazy 24 hours, as Jeremy was lining up there. You have the positive results came back at 24 hours exactly ago.

(CROSSTALK)

CUOMO: He's getting symptoms that fast?

He would test positive that fast after exposure, if it was Hope Hicks, he would get symptoms that fast?

GUPTA: It does not fit, right?

Let's see we can put up the timeline. You asked about this last hour. You get the exposure to the virus. A lot of people never know where they got the exposure.

Do we have the graphic?

(CROSSTALK)

GUPTA: The exposure and, look at that, that's the incubation period.

CUOMO: Incubation that means it is building up on you.

GUPTA: The virus is in you and it is replicating. It is going to replicate to the point eventually, where a couple or three things could happen. You may start to develop symptoms. On average it is around five days, where the virus is more detectable as well and that's when you are going to be most infectious.

Keep in mind, as we talked about it, look at the orange line at the bottom. That's before the person actually had any symptoms and they're already starting to become infectious.

If he started having symptoms today, yesterday or whatever day it was, he probably got exposed, on average, five days earlier. If he's getting tested every day, you would think he would have a positive test sometime before yesterday. But we don't know that.

Now that he's symptomatic, you got to keep in mind, the two to three days earlier, he was quite contagious. That's what the contact tracers are going to look at. He was in five states over a few days. He was with a lot of people. So that's going to be a challenge to go back and contact trace.

CUOMO: Do we know if they're doing that?

GUPTA: -- people need to be quarantined. We heard they're trying to do that. We know they're trying to do it, based on the Rose Garden ceremony on Saturday. I don't know how much they are doing it.

[01:15:00]

GUPTA: We know the people in New Jersey got a letter, were told to go to the CDC website and figure it out. They were told they stayed far enough from the president. But it's a level of concern and anxiety.

As you point out, a lot of people will go out and get tested. That does not mean necessarily anything, if it comes back negative, because it can take several days to come back positive. So you know you are looking at a lot of different viral dynamics and how this all works through this one example here.

CUOMO: Dr. Sanjay Gupta, you are amazing, 24 hours a day and always right on time. Thank you very much.

GUPTA: Thank you.

CUOMO: Look, this is a complete mess. It is horrible for the president and his wife and family. Shameful that it happened. But it did not just happen to them. It happened to us, too. He's the president of the United States and it raises all kinds of governmental concerns, national security.

Is it more at risk now, given how he and these guys are falling like dominoes all over him?

Is this something we have to take into account in terms of how we view potential adversaries right now and who has advantage?

We have a great mind on this next.

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[01:20:00]

CUOMO: If you get coronavirus it's your choice how much you want to tell the world. But Donald Trump is President of the United States and our commander in chief, his case brings questions of national security. Juliette Kayyem is a former assistant secretary for the Department of Homeland Security.

Good to see you my friend.

JULIETTE KAYYEM, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: Nice to see you, Chris.

CUOMO: I don't understand how, even if it were true that they had no indication of any kind of contagion around the president until Wednesday night with Hope Hicks and it does not make sense.

But they wait 24 hours to test the president?

Why?

KAYYEM: Yes. There may be a variety of reasons, none of them are good. The president spent 3.5 years breaking institutions that were built to protect the office of the presidency, whether it was intelligence agencies or legal agencies.

This is a president who's essentially succeeded in that regard. Whatever the president wants, he can demand. We don't know if he said, I am going to wait a day and go to this fundraiser.

And what happens is the system recoils because of his demand. In the process, he has not only harmed himself but harmed the office of presidency. Donald Trump has never quite gotten those are two separate things.

In the process, our enemies and allies look at us on our knees because of our pandemic response and look at the president now sick. Great, unforced error. Our enemies love that and that's exactly what this is.

CUOMO: I was under the impression they test him every day.

KAYYEM: Yes.

CUOMO: How can that be?

KAYYEM: There is only three explanations I tried to think through. First is that's a lie. It is possible, that they are not testing every day.

Second, the timing of the testing was off in terms of when it could pick up whether he was infected.

And the third is, as we know, the Abbott tests have a lot of false negatives so he could have taken it at the right time, was exhibiting symptoms and the test still showed a false negative.

That's why people like me have spent the last six months with people like you, saying it is not about a single solution. The White House believed the testing was going to keep the virus away as if it weren't contagious. The reason why we talk about layered defense is because you don't want a single point of failure. You don't want a single test to sort of bring down an entire White House and a national security establishment and a Senate.

So masking and social distancing, work from home, all the things we have laid out in 2020 that we have to continue into 2021, that Donald Trump is always looking for a quick fix as a solution to this.

And the errors of that philosophy, among many when it comes to COVID- 19 response, have come straight home to him and now he's quite sick.

CUOMO: No small irony now, the best counter argument to what he's been telling people.

(CROSSTALK) CUOMO: If you think it is a hoax, look at him. We hope he gets better so he can reinforce that message and maybe people will get together in this country. Transparency versus secrecy.

At what point do you not want to say how he's doing or what's happening or how it is spreading through his side of the political party because of this Rose Garden ceremony and because it is a national security risk?

KAYYEM: I mean, at this stage, I don't think there is anything we can hide. The virus is contagious. It is it should not be a shock to anyone. If you see a picture of a lot of people and half of them are sick, the question you have to ask is, is the president's health sufficiently questionable at this stage?

Because we don't know what's going on at the hospital, it is safe to say that he's not able to perform his duties sufficiently. In that case, the American public deserves to know what's the extent of his sickness.

[01:25:00]

KAYYEM: And if appropriate, the president himself invokes the 25th Amendment and cedes power to the vice president until he's healthy enough. That should be transparent.

The thing with this administration is they make everything -- they're like drama queens. They make everything so dramatic. The Constitution envisioned a scenario just like this. But between the lies and the drama, everything becomes a crisis with this White House. It is up to people like us and the American citizens to not only demand transparency but not to lose our heads with them.

We are under no obligation to lose our heads with this administration. We have succession plans. The system seems to be adapting to even a sick president. And you know, we'll get through this.

CUOMO: You think those rallies should be deemed a national security risk?

KAYYEM: Yes, absolutely. Beyond that, I don't mind the people going there. I mind them leaving. You guys can all stay there. It is them leaving that drives -- because they're going everywhere else.

I think absolutely. Anything that would be a super spreader event should be off limits. It should not happen and let alone a president would sort of demand them. There is no reason for them at the stage. This is the sad thing of where we are right now.

If there was one person in this country who could convince skeptics to wear a mask and to be responsible and work from home and be six feet away from colleagues and friends, it would have been Donald Trump. His capacity to lead pockets of this country, that may have been more skeptical about a response to a pandemic, is on him because he did not do it.

He could have led them and saved a couple hundred thousand lives. That's on him at this stage.

CUOMO: Well, that's what the election is about. It will be interesting to see how this plays with his followers and the rest of the country. Thank you very much for the national security piece on this.

KAYYEM: Thanks, Chris.

CUOMO: 25th Amendment, February 10th, 1967, that's when the succession amendment was done.

One by one, we are hearing names being diagnosed with this virus. Six of them share one thing in common, they were all at the White House and unmasked last weekend. You got to look at the science. The scientists have been warning us what we must do. We got two here.

And what is the lesson for everybody in this?

Next.

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[01:30:00]

CUOMO: Along with the president, six people now confirmed positive, most of whom who were at the Rose Garden ceremony for his Supreme Court nominee a week ago. So more and more this is not looking like a Hope Hicks' thing but more like she's the canary in the coal mine.

She was evidence of a place where they all were and now the virus starting to build up in their systems to the point where it would be measurable. The seating chart put them all close by. Not a mask to be seen among them. We also have a list of other people who were there, who we are waiting on.

Do we have that?

At some point it will appear. That's important because that's contact tracing. You have to find out when these other people, that were waiting on testing -- there we go. Whether or not Kellyanne Conway is on there. But we know her answer. Mark Meadows came out without a mask today. We don't know about him.

Judge Amy Coney Barrett either had symptoms that were COVID-like or had COVID earlier this summer.

Melania, obviously the first lady, we know about. Chris Christie on there; we are waiting to hear from him. And Rudy Giuliani was at the debate prep. So this keeps going. Bill Stepien, he has it.

And even if you heard, oh, yes, so-and-so was tested, they were negative, we have to wait a couple more days to see them tested again. The idea is that the president needs to get better so he can get back to those rallies. Let's talk to Dr. Erin Bromage and Dr. Leana Wen.

Leana said this is one week ago after the ceremony.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. LEANA WEN, CNN MEDICAL ANALYST: Well, I am very concerned because, if I were to custom design a super spreader event, this is what it would look like.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CUOMO: Leana Wen, we will have to change her name to Dr. Cassandra Wen. Cassandra is the Greek mythological creature who knew how to predict the future but it was always bad.

So Dr. Leana Wen, you were right; of course, we believe.

What does this tell us about what we can still expect from that population?

WEN: Chris, we'll be expecting a lot more infections.

[01:35:00]

WEN: We maybe just barely scratched the surface. We have to look at individuals and events. It was just a large study done out of India that found that 70 percent of people with COVID don't spread it to anyone. But 60 percent of all infections are spread by 8 percent of people.

So there may be people who are up and about a lot more. And then if they happen to be in a setting like maybe what we are seeing on Saturday, where they are around a lot of people and there is not mask wearing and individuals are hugging, shaking hands and greeting each other in a way that they should not be during a pandemic, maybe it spreads very rapidly that way.

So I really hope contact tracing is done aggressively. I am actually rather worried it is not done the way it should be. People who are testing negative right now should not say, that's done. They should say this is one test and I need to finish my quarantine period for 14 days.

CUOMO: The difference between the president and the first lady, the idea that, no, he's doing fine and this is an abundance of caution.

Well, why didn't she get the remdesivir drug?

Of course he's the commander in chief but is this is what you do for somebody who's not having any really significant symptoms?

WEN: No. He would not be going to Walter Reed out of an abundance of caution if he did not have significant change over the course of the day. And I am suspicious of the timeline. It does not make sense that suddenly in less than a day that he would have gone from testing positive and having basically very mild symptoms to no symptoms to suddenly progressing the point where he needs to be in the hospital on a bunch of experimental treatments.

So I really want to hear more about what happened and also when is it the White House really knew that he tested positive?

CUOMO: Professor, thank you for being with us.

What do you think of the idea that Hope Hicks gave it to him on Wednesday night and they tested him 24 hours, which you have to ask why did you even wait that long and that's how he got it, does it make sense to you?

DR. ERIN BROMAGE, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: It doesn't. You are completely right. I think she was the canary in the coal mine. She was the one that came symptomatic first. It looks like it was something that happened during the weekend, probably the Rose Garden or one of the events before or after that.

What I get worried about now is there is going to be a cluster at that Rose Garden. Then you know Hope Hicks and President Trump were both symptomatic . They spent a few days leading up to there, where they had a lot of contacts.

If they are one of those people that can move this infection forward, of the number of contacts they had, this is not over. We'll still be contact tracing and quarantining people for really weeks after this event.

CUOMO: The decision, Professor, to let him go to New Jersey, the White House says yes, we were given clearance by the operations people that was OK.

What does that determination look like and what would they have had to believe or ignore to make that determination?

BROMAGE: They would have to ignore literally decades of public health data that says when you have been around somebody that's infectious, you need to quarantine.

We know with this pathogen it's 14 days. My family have been in quarantine because my son got sick at school. We tested and waited; everyone was negative, and we could go out. We did the responsible thing.

What the president did was not responsible, knowing he had close contact with a person who was diagnosed infected. That's the pinnacle of irresponsibility.

CUOMO: So, what do you have to do now?

We know New Jersey got a letter but a lot of these people -- of course, you have the wait staff and all the people working at the White House. They're not the boldface names but they're not going to get access to the kind of care and testing. You have to think about them.

But how broad of a circle do you have to draw?

[01:40:00] BROMAGE: We know from a study that came out earlier this year, on average, one single person has 36 contacts in two days. They'll share some of the same contacts but there could be 36 or more people for every person that's testing positive.

We know a lot of these people are highly mobile. They have a lot of contacts in different places. We may find that this circle or web that gets cast from this contact tracing easily going to be in the hundreds. It could be 500 or 600, depending on how big this cluster was and how many people these people had around on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, as it started to emerge that these people were infected and infectious.

It is going to have a tidal wave of an effect.

CUOMO: Assuming they have that level of curiosity, assuming they want to find out and dig that much. I have been talking to people tonight who were in and around the event, they had not heard from the White House until late tonight.

Now you have the medical side of what we can start thinking about with the president. They say he's still conducting business. I had a decent case. I was able to do the show. I didn't feel good, but I was still compos mentis.

What's the chance, Doctor, when he's out of the hospital and ready to go in a week?

WEN: It is hard to say because we have so little information about the president's condition. We, as physicians, want to know what are his vital signs and his blood pressure and his heart rate and his respiratory rate and his pulse oximetry to find out oxygen saturation.

The White House is saying he's not requiring supplemental oxygen but is he struggling to breathe or getting any support to breathe?

The other thing about this illness is that it is tricky. There are patients who may seem to be doing well and they don't seem that sick for seven days or 10 days. And suddenly their condition worsens and they deteriorate.

That's important for us as Americans to keep in mind. We should be monitoring and sending him our thoughts and prayers and well wishes. But we can't breathe a sigh of relief even if he seems to do well because his condition can still worsen. So I would not count on him returning within a week.

And even if he's feeling better, I'd still be concerned his clinical course could worsen.

CUOMO: Even if he's feeling better and it doesn't worsen, which hopefully is the case, he could still be contagious for a while. Hopefully, that's something that starts to matter a little bit more.

Professor, what's the lesson in this? BROMAGE: It does not matter if you got all the testing in the world if you don't put a layer of defense together to protect you and the people around you from the virus. It is going to get in. We need testing and masks, distance, ventilation. You need to be putting all these things together and not just rest on your laurels that one of them will do.

It does not care who you are. It is going to find a way to find a new host. And it got into the White House and it has moved through the White House very, very quickly and we can see what it can do.

We just need to be smarter about the decisions we make. Lower the amount of contacts you have, keep your distance, wear your mask. We don't have the luxury of testing for the vast majority of us. So you can't let your guard down. Otherwise, it gets in and just blow up, like we have seen the past few days.

CUOMO: If you needed a metaphor for the federal government's response to the pandemic, we now have a cluster in the White House.

BROMAGE: Yes.

CUOMO: I think that about says it all.

Professor, Doctor, thank you so much for joining us, especially at the house. I hope your families are well and I hope you stay well also.

BROMAGE: You take care, Chris.

CUOMO: Let's get some perspective. This is unusual, full stop. But Trump is not the first sitting president to fall ill. Again, this is unusual, battling a dangerous virus. It has not been part of presidential history, kind of.

[01:45:00]

CUOMO: But let's turn now to someone who has followed the lives of our past presidents to learn where this one stands in context.

Good to see you, Tim.

Are you wearing the same thing as me tonight?

TIM NAFTALI, CNN PRESIDENTIAL HISTORIAN: I can assure you, whatever you are wearing looks really good on you.

(CROSSTALK)

CUOMO: Let's do this chronologically.

NAFTALI: Who'd you like to start with?

CUOMO: President Wilson is where we would start in 1918. They were talking to me. They were saying, take a break and we'll talk to him after it. You know Tim is here, I want him to put it in context.

Tim, we'll be right back.

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(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

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[01:50:00]

CUOMO: Now look, I know it is 1:50 in the morning and wherever it is everywhere else in the country. But at any time, you got to keep things in perspective. I am not an alarmist type of person. I don't buy that the president is just fine and dandy, 24 hours after getting a test, after taking two experimental drugs.

You know, it doesn't sound like everything's going really well. And that's OK because this virus is, often, a battle that takes days or even a couple of weeks, before somebody's really getting over it. So that's OK. I don't -- there's no reason to be alarmist about it and dramatic.

And by the way, this isn't the first time we've faced a serious presidential health crisis. OK?

But we haven't dealt with anything like this in a while. Reagan, shot in 1981. That was worse, true. For more on the historical context, we have CNN presidential historian Tim Naftali, as I told you before the break.

Now looking at it chronologically, pandemic of 1918, OK.

Who was the president and what was the deal there?

NAFTALI: It's dramatic. The parallels are very interesting. Woodrow Wilson was president during the pandemic of 1918-1919. He caught the flu. He was in Paris for the Paris peace negotiations to end World War I. He got very sick, fever of 103.

The fever lasted only a few days but it left him quite weakened. By the end of that month, April 1919, he had a minor stroke. And then, six months later, he had a massive stroke, which left his left side paralyzed.

So the pandemic of 1919 -- 1918-1919, really did a number on President Wilson. One thing that should be kept in mind is that his doctors were not honest, at all, to the American people about the nature of his -- of his health.

First of all, they didn't reveal, to the American public, that he had had the flu; secondly, they downplayed the effect of the stroke. After his massive stroke, they never revealed that he had been -- that he was disabled, that he was completely paralyzed on his left side. So that story is a story of misinformation and a coverup by the president's doctors.

CUOMO: And we didn't really learn that much from 1918 already. You know, it was -- Tim knows this. He actually told me this. It was called the Spanish flu but not because it was in Spain. It's because Spain blew the whistle. It had been going on in Europe for six, eight months before that.

And then, they let soldiers come home who they knew had it, to do a victory celebration here in the United States, I think in Philadelphia. And it wound up blowing up all over the country. We know the rest of that story.

So we haven't learned the need for transparency, which is the shame in this president being sick. He is sick because he's been hoisted on his own petard of not needing to wear a mask and having these dense crowds around him when clinicians have told him not to.

So then, you have got Reagan, '81. But a gunshot. And you knew, pretty soon thereafter, that he would survive.

How does that one kind of square with you, with this?

NAFTALI: I'd like to bring up one other president because one of the challenges for Americans is to get transparency and truth from presidential doctors. This has been a problem and it's not just story of Woodrow Wilson.

During the Eisenhower administration, President Eisenhower had three serious health crises. He had a major heart attack. He had an obstructed bowel. And then, he had a minor stroke. The information about the first two were pretty good. The doctors downplayed the actual effect of the stroke.

After what happened to Eisenhower, members of Congress decided to pass legislation, which became an amendment to our Constitution, which made it possible to transfer -- to transfer power from the president to the vice president in times of -- in a health crisis. That's the power, the 25th Amendment that we talk about now in the case of our current president becoming, in some way, debilitated.

So it's -- it's -- we've learned, over time, that we need to know more about our presidents and that we have to have procedures so, if they get very sick, there is a way for our government to continue.

CUOMO: Change is slow, right?

Eisenhower --

(CROSSTALK)

CUOMO: -- 1967 to get it ratified, the 25th Amendment. Wasn't until 1967. So that took some time. All right. So they don't often tell us the truth. Especially, when it's going to be mental incapacity. That's the information you want out there least, you know, because it suggests incapacity.

[01:55:00]

CUOMO: So Reagan. We had a picture I saw online or, maybe, we'll put it up here now, where he was doing work in the hospital. Now he had a story with us not really knowing the real deal of his mental capacity, either, while he was in office.

NAFTALI: Of course. Yes. And -- and he uses the 25th Amendment to pass authority to George Herbert Walker Bush, who was the vice president. And then, he regained his powers.

He probably regained them a little early because one of the great mistakes of his administration, the Iran-contra scandal, he made the decision to pay ransom, in a sense, by selling weapons to Iran to get Iran's allies in Lebanon to release American hostages in Beirut.

That was made just after his colon cancer surgery. He probably was in no shape to be thinking about that kind of foreign policy machination. He did it, anyway.

CUOMO: Hopefully, this time, the president's going to be OK. The transparency has not been good, to this point, even in this very episode, even the timing of how he got sick, we're not really sure.

So at some point, maybe, we will learn a lesson and do better going forward. Tim Naftali, those who do not learn from history, dot, dot, dot, doomed to repeat it. Thank you very much, brother, as always.

All right. The coverage is going to continue. In fact, today, Saturday, I will be on, again, tonight. Special, live Saturday, two- hour edition of PRIME TIME, 10:00 pm Eastern. Stay with CNN. We will give you the latest, as it happens, and we will think through this situation together.