Seek and Hide: The Tangled History of the Right to Privacy by Amy Gajda

Author:Amy Gajda [Gajda, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-04-12T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nineteen

A PRESIDENT AND HIS TAX RETURNS

(PRIVACY IN POLITICS)

In November 2020, three professional photographers grabbed their cameras and long-range lenses and lined up along a Potomac River footpath in Maryland just outside Washington, D.C. Each photographer’s camera sat atop a tripod: the longest of their lenses was about the length of a man’s arm, it was meant to capture faraway things, and shots would be blurry otherwise.

The photographers weren’t there to capture birds. They were there to capture a lame-duck president.

About a mile away in Virginia, on the other side of the Potomac, the incumbent president, Donald Trump, wearing a white Make America Great Again cap and a dark blue zippered jacket, stepped out of a golf cart, lined up his shot, and swung his club. It was a move far more momentous than the one President Warren Harding had taken and missed on a different Washington-area golf course decades before: Pennsylvania had just been called for Joe Biden, and that meant Biden would become the next president of the United States. At one point, President Trump looked across the river toward those long-range lenses and schlumped. But this time the presidential fuss couldn’t be blamed on airplane-like camera sounds.

Just a few weeks before, as the COVID-19 pandemic and the election season both raged, a military helicopter had flown President Trump the few miles from the White House to Walter Reed Medical Center for some sort of treatment. He’d tested positive for the coronavirus that had already killed more than 200,000 people in the United States alone, many of them, like President Trump, older and with preexisting medical conditions.

This was huge news; the leader of the free world was sick enough to be hospitalized, and it wasn’t too much of a stretch to think that maybe he might not get well.

But the president’s doctors refused to tell Americans much at all about how their leader was doing, or about the course of the president’s illness or the president’s precise treatment or his vital signs or the first time he’d tested positive for COVID-19 or the last time he’d tested negative. In fact, doctors were “relentlessly positive,” painting a “rosy picture of his condition,” The New York Times reported.

Maybe that’s understandable in context. Not only had President Trump claimed a right to privacy in his health information and called journalists interested in it sick and dangerous, but military doctors at Walter Reed had signed nondisclosure agreements. An NDA was unusual for a politician and especially a president; HIPAA covers interactions between doctor and patient, as would ethics provisions, and military confidentiality would surely also play a role. But Trump had made the doctors sign NDAs in 2019 anyway, the year he’d been rushed from the White House to Walter Reed for a different “undisclosed health issue.” HIPAA doesn’t offer individuals the right to sue for a violation, but it’s quite easy to sue for damages and win if someone violates an NDA contract. Trump’s doctors surely understood that.

It was only later, once Trump left office, that we found out just how bad things were when he had COVID-19.

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