A feature of Trump’s presidency is he’s been able to torque everyone in proximity to him to tell transparent lies. The point of the lies is not necessarily that they be believed but that they demonstrate the authoritarian power that compels the subordinates to pronounce them.

This transparent lying has happened famously in the National Park Service’s estimation of crowd sizes at his inauguration, in the military, in the intelligence community, at the Justice Department, at State, at NOAA weather forecasting centers, etc.

It also happened at the White House Medical Unit, where Dr. Ronny Jackson gave a patently BS account of the president’s health to the press in 2018 and Trump attempted to reward him with a cabinet post.

Nevertheless, a lot of people—myself included—were holding out hope that practicing physicians in a hospital setting treating the president as a patient would not fall into the same pattern of transparent truckling lies. As it turns out, they have, and it feels terrible to watch.

The medical profession is a trusted institution in American society, and producing a doctor who will give plain, reliable facts to the public in an emergency is one of its institutional roles. That utterly failed today, presumably because these doctors are in orbit around Trump.