Opinion | Get Well, Mr. President! And Don’t Lie About Your Health.

Some time this morning after President Joe Biden tested positive for Covid, a low-level staffer may have been dispatched to the White House carport to start the engine on the 25th Amendment. Keep it idling, they’d be told, just in case he becomes seriously ill and is unable to perform the duties of his office. If that happens, a high-level staffer would quickly open the throttle on the amendment and invoke its powers to begin the temporary transfer of power to Vice President Kamala Harris.

It’s unlikely Biden will die. He has the best care possible, and unvaccinated people are about 7.2 times more likely to expire than the vaccinated and boosted, a club to which he belongs. He’s on the miracle antiviral Paxlovid. But depending on the severity of his case, Biden could still be damn sick for a week, as the vaccinated and boosted who’ve contracted Covid-19 can tell you.

However high Biden’s viral load goes, we can count on two things to happen. The press corps, the political class and the public will demand to be read in on his medical prospect — not because we want anybody to abuse his HIPAA rights — but because as president he owes us a transparent view. A president’s illness is not his private business, especially if he is 79 years old.

But don’t expect medical candor from the Biden White House, even though his press secretary has promised a daily update on his status. Eager to maintain the image of being large and in control, presidents from both parties have traditionally masked their medical conditions from the public, confiding only after the fact the gravity of their conditions. Biden would be breaking against the historical flow if he leveled with us. Being president means you need never be totally open about your health.

President Donald Trump probably set the modern standard for concealing his true fitness. During the 2015 campaign, he dictated to his doctor a preposterous health letter that claimed if Trump won, he would be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.” The doctor issued the letter as his own assessment. Trump’s White House doctor insisted the president's extraordinary health was due to “incredible genes.” When Trump made a mysterious, unscheduled visit to the hospital in 2019, the White House portrayed it as “a quick exam and labs.” That was later revealed as a lie. Vice President Mike Pence had been put on standby to assume presidential power if Trump had to be anesthetized, and nobody gets anesthesia for labs. In 2020, Trump didn’t as much contract Covid as he invited it into his life by staging a superspreader event in the Rose Garden in September 2020 that infected nearly a dozen people. He got much, much sicker than the White House let on, the New York Times reported in February 2021, at one point becoming a possible candidate for a ventilator.

Trump only made overt what other presidents made covert. President Ronald Reagan, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s eight years after he left the White House, conducted himself in such a wobbly, detached state in 1987 that his aides considered activating the 25th Amendment. President John Kennedy hid his Addison’s disease, other ailments, and his history of hospitalization from public knowledge. President Dwight Eisenhower soft-soaped his severe 1955 heart attack. President Franklin Roosevelt lied about his ill health during the 1944 campaign and the aides and family of President Woodrow Wilson erected a Potemkin presidency after he suffered a series of strokes, which left him debilitated for the last 17 months of his term. President Lyndon Johnson was the candid outlier. In 1965, when he showed off his gall bladder incision to reporters after surgery, some joked it was a good thing he hadn’t been treated for hemorrhoids.

Biden has every motive to engage in a medical cover-up like his predecessors. Presidents believe that they must not appear to be infirm, disconnected from their higher faculties, or otherwise addled. Even before Covid-19 landed on him, Biden struggled to hit these markers. He’s 79, for crying out loud, and he looks and acts it. Ladle a dose of Covid-19 on Biden’s baseline and if you’re not at least thinking about the 25th Amendment, then you’re the one who needs their head inspected. Biden’s 2024 ambitions compound the image-projection problem the White House has been dealt. The longer he’s in sickbay, the worse it will be for his reelection prospects. Remember that New York Times poll from last week that had 64 percent of Democratic voters longing for a nominee other than Joe in 2024? Every day he spends in bed will add to that margin and weaken him to attacks from his own party and the opposition. If ever a president needed a faith healer, it’s Biden.

If this White House follows previous White House scripts, it will do whatever it takes to make Biden’s illness seem like nothing more than a bad cold no matter how sick he is. His former press secretary and incoming MSNBC host Jen Psaki divined the White House’s next move on the network earlier today. “What they need to do over the next couple of days is show him working and show him still active and serving as president and I’m certain they’ll likely do that,” she said. How effective will it be? Remember the stagey videos the Trump administration released when he was recovering from Covid at Walter Reed? They were as believable as those home videos you made of your young children when they set up a pretend grocery store in your kitchen and checked your order out on their toy cash register.

The first “I’m feeling swell” Biden video, released this afternoon, makes him seem robust enough. But his illness reminds us, as if we need reminding, of how fragile Biden is and of how unseemly it is for a man about to enter his ninth decade, no matter how studly he imagines himself to be, to campaign for another four years as president. We should hope that the increasingly dire political atmosphere surrounding his presidency will not cause him to imitate previous presidents and cloak and shroud the fundamentals of his health from public view and discussion.

And if this bout with Covid — wishing you a quick recovery, Mr. President! — dissuades him from running again, it will have been a blessing.

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Some of us thought Biden was too old to run in 2020. Send your vaccination records to Shafer.Politico@gmail.com. My email alerts are accepting no new subscriptions. My Twitter has yet to get Covid. My RSS feed is troubled by the world’s last case of Guinea worm disease.