President Trump would let his friend who “looks like shit” die at his rally.
“I travel with more doctors than any human being. If people get sick in the audience, they leave ’em alone. You know what they call them? Collateral damage,” Trump said at his Wednesday rally in Arizona, receiving some chuckles from the crowd. “If that person right over there, a friend of mine—he looks like shit, actually. He looks like he’s ready to have a heart attack. If he actually had a heart attack, you know what my doctors would do? … They would leave him alone!”
“I say, ‘Please help him!’ They’d say, ‘No sir, we can’t leave your side.’ But he’s dying of a heart attack! ‘Sir, he’s collateral damage,’” he continued. “Can you believe it? They got like six ambulances, and they won’t use one for anybody else.”
It’s unclear who exactly Trump was saying “looks like shit.” But the crowd full of his most loyal supporters just laughed along with him—as if they weren’t collateral damage to him too.
Some commentators pointed to Trump’s lack of filter as a sign of dementia, and indeed shortly before his remarks, Trump was bragging about acing a dementia test.
CNN medical analyst Jonathan Reiner challenged Trump’s notion that doctors would ignore sick people or refer to them as collateral damage.
“This is completely untrue, and an actual insult to the fabulous doctors, nurses, and PAs of the White House Medical Unit,” he wrote online. “Over the years I’ve been honored to get to know many members of the WHMU and I know that they would never call a spectator ‘collateral damage’. They would save their life.”