A White House official who fell ill with Covid-19 in September is recovering after three months in the hospital, though he lost his right foot and lower leg in his battle against the virus, according to a friend.
Crede Bailey, the director of the White House security office, was the most severely ill among dozens of Covid-19 cases known to be connected to the White House. Bailey’s family has asked the White House not to publicize his condition, and President Donald Trump has never publicly acknowledged his illness.
Bailey’s friends have raised more than $30,000 for his rehabilitation through a GoFundMe account. The White House declined to say whether Trump has contributed to the effort.
“Crede beat COVID-19 but it came at a significant cost: his big toe on his left foot as well as his right foot and lower leg had to be amputated,” Dawn McCrobie, who organized the GoFundMe effort for Bailey, wrote Dec. 7.
Bailey is now at a rehabilitation center and will be fitted for a prosthetic leg in the coming months, she wrote.
“His family has staggering medical bills from a hospital stay of 2+ months and still counting in the ICU and a long road ahead in rehab before he can go home,” McCrobie wrote Nov. 13, when she created the account. “When he does make it home there will be major changes necessary to deal with his new, and permanent, disability.”
Two people familiar with Bailey’s situation confirmed that McCrobie is a friend. They asked not to be identified because Bailey’s family has tried to keep his illness private.
McCrobie did not respond to messages and White House spokespeople declined to comment. Efforts to reach Bailey and multiple members of his family by phone, e-mail and social media have been unsuccessful.
After this story was published, McCrobie updated the GoFundMe page to advise Bailey’s friends to ignore messages from journalists. “Per Crede’s wishes, please let the media tell their story without your input,” she wrote.
Bailey’s office handles credentialing for access to the White House complex and works closely with the U.S. Secret Service on security measures. Bailey was known on the compound as a strong Trump supporter.
The president has repeatedly minimized the risk from Covid-19 since the beginning of the pandemic, both before and after he was hospitalized with the disease Oct. 2-5.
Doctors are still learning about the extent to which the coronavirus can damage the body, but loss of blood flow is one possible consequence. The virus is known to attack the vascular system and can cause deadly blood clots.
When she created the GoFundMe account, McCrobie wrote that “Crede will NOT be happy I’ve done this as he is a proud man who is the first to help everyone else but would never ask for help himself.”
She updated the post Dec. 7 with more details about his condition. He “is blown away by your generosity,” she said to donors.
“His house will need to be renovated to accommodate his disability; ramps to get in/out of the house, the bathroom shower will have to be modified, handrails will have to be installed, etc. etc.,” she wrote.
He’ll also need a new vehicle that can accommodate a wheelchair and that can be modified so the gas pedal can be operated with Bailey’s left leg, she wrote. “I could go on and on but you get the picture – there are a lot of adjustments ahead!”
Bruce Springsteen’s 2006 song, “Long Walk Home,” offered a stark metaphor for George W. Bush’s America. The protagonist returns to a hometown peopled by friends who, having abandoned their ideals, have become strangers to him.
Since 2016, that feeling has rung true for many of us, arguably to an even greater extent.
But the song is also resolute and hopeful about the long walk back to enduring ideals, a better town and a better country. Its most memorable lines are:
You know that flag flying over the courthouse means certain things are set in stone
Who we are, what we’ll do and what we won’t
That positive message came to mind this week, as the nation stepped back from a president who would do anything he could get away with and as we took key steps toward installing a successor who values the public interest and public health.
More specifically, the Electoral College officially affirmed Joe Biden as President-elect. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other top Republicans finally recognized Biden’s win, albeit shamefully belatedly.
Moreover, a New York nurse received the first shot in the national coronavirus inoculation campaign. The FDA cleared a second vaccine for imminent approval.
To use a phrase that Donald Trump misused so often, so dishonestly and so ridiculously, we’re finally rounding the corner.
A Rough Road
We still face an awfully long, awfully rough road ahead. In addition to the good news, the week also saw the United States top 300,000 official Covid fatalities (with the true Covid toll, measured in excess deaths, standing at over 350,00).
The worst is yet to come this deadly winter. Total lives lost here could reach half a million or more. Debates and egregious inequities regarding vaccine distribution will roil our country and the world.
We also could see Trump at his worst in his final weeks in office. Both before and after he sails off into his post-presidency sewer, he’ll do his best to poison our democracy. His supporters will try to make a fiasco out of Congress’s normally pro forma tallying of electoral votes on January 6. And if there is one lesson we’ve learned about Trump, there’s no low to which he won’t go, including lows we might not even imagine.
Finally, it’s clear that our problems transcend Trump. Even if he disappears from the scene, he’ll leave behind a Republican Party whose de facto denigration of democracy is only rivaled by its refusal to address climate change and the myriad other problems plaguing the country. What’s worse, a big chunk of the public supports such stands.
Back to Bruce
Which brings us back to Bruce and to some sense of hope. His assertion, “that flag flying over the courthouse means certain things are set in stone,” takes on retrospective resonance. The judiciary, including many Trump appointees, consistently rejected the president’s preposterous attempts to overturn the election. That flag still flies.
Springsteen’s insistence that there are certain things we won’t do originally applied to the Bush administration’s violations of our values, with torture topping the list. The administration shattered standards set in stone (even as it upheld some others, such as the president preaching tolerance toward Muslims in the aftermath of 9/11). It did so at the price of what the flag represents, of ideals we needed to restore.
Trump has committed so many transgressions that it’s hard to know where to begin listing what he’s done that previous American presidents would not do. Costing hundreds of thousands of lives through pandemic denialism and lies? Ripping hundreds of migrant children from their parents, perhaps permanently? Spewing and spreading hate at every opportunity? Seeking to destroy our democracy?
We’ve Been Here Before
But let’s recall the good news: This week saw us set out on the long walk to undo Trump’s legacy, to restore some normalcy and decency to our governance, to launch policies that will help millions of Americans and – after months of incompetence, indifference and disinformation – to conquer Covid.
We’ve trekked on such paths many times before in our history, never completing the journey but often achieving significant success. Springsteen wrote “Long Road Home” two years before Barack Obama’s election most recently took us back onto a positive course.
Obama’s presidency was far from perfect. However, he led the country out of a very dark phase, rescued it from an economic abyss, enacted health care reforms that helped many millions and otherwise showed us what our better angels can accomplish. The fact that Trump succeeded Obama does not negate such progress.
Begin Again
A “Long Road Home” also says this:
Here everybody has a neighbor, everybody has a friend
Everybody has a reason to begin again
My father said, “Son, we’re lucky in this town, it’s a beautiful place to be born…
We can begin again by grasping how lucky we still are, compared to so many other countries on their own obstruction-strewn roads.
I know that “lucky” is that last word we might want to use, in view of both the last four years and our many troubling long-term trends. I by no means suggest that we should be happy with our situation.
Nonetheless, America’s relative levels of wealth, education, resources, security and institutional independence and competence place us in a better state than numerous less fortunate nations. We should remain aware that reformers and ordinary citizens in those places have prevailed over their own, even more desperate plights or are now striving to do so.
Consider South Africa, for instance. Nelson Mandela aptly named his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom partly because of the decades of sustained struggle he and his anti-apartheid movement undertook. Like his fellow non-white citizens, he endured potentially spirit-crushing racist indignities and abuses for much of his life. He then spent 27 years in prison.
And he prevailed, leading the defeat of apartheid and ascending to his country’s presidency in 1994.
And consider Cambodia. As I write this, an old friend and other leaders of the country’s pro-democracy opposition party plan to fly back there from abroad early next month, to face trial and quite possibly jail on trumped-up charges.
Why? In order to shine an international light on the repressive thugocracy ruling the country. And to continue, potentially at great cost, their own long walks to freedom.
We can ignore such other nations’ struggles that should inspire us. We can view the wreckage Trump has wrought as impossible to overcome. We can surrender to the obstacles that he, McConnell and so many others throw in our path. We can understandably wonder what kind of populace accords him so many votes.
Or we can accept that the fight for freedom is never-ending, that the long walk home is grueling and that, while we can never get all the way there, we have reason to begin again.
Although Emily Murphy sounds defensive and a bit whiny in her letter, it does reveal some interesting details about the upcoming transition. Read the letter here. (Click on the image for the 2-page PDF version.)
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