A champion wrestler awkwardly kept his distance from Donald Trump on stage at a rally in Iowa, despite the President insisting he was immune to Covid-19.
The President announced he was giving Iowa legend Dan Gable the Presidential Medal of Freedom during his speech in Des Moines.
But when he welcomed Gable to the stage, there was a stilted moment where the pair bumped elbows instead of shaking hands.
The President returned to his microphone, saying: “Hey Dan, I’m immune and I can’t give it to you, so that’s good.”
Trump revealed he had tested positive for Covid-19 13 days ago.
His doctors now say he has recovered and is not contagious.
Gable, an olympic gold medallist, said of Trump: “He’s open for learning and he’s already very competent, he’s going to be a mutli-champion president of the United States of America.”
Trump spoke in more detail about his experience of coronavirus than in his previous stump speeches.
“When I had it, you might have read I had it too. I didn’t love it,” he said.
“It’s a little tough you know I had the temperature and you don’t feel good.
“But the scariest part is where is it going? You know you’ve got a 101 or 102 and then you say “I don’t love this”.
“You haven’t had a temperature in years and then all of a sudden you have it. But you see what happens to people.”
He claimed to have been given the option of a series of treatments while in Walter Reed military hospital, from which he had selected Regeneron.
In fact, Trump was administered with a cocktail of treatments, including antibodies, steroids and other treatments.
Trump said: “And I looked at the alternatives, all things we have developed in the last seven months and one of them was Regeneron, and I said I’ll take that one, because it was very early in the testing but it had great numbers.
“And I took it and they call it a therapeutic, but to me it’s a cure. I felt like Superman the following morning.
“In fact I made a speech a day later, someone said he looks better now than he did two weeks ago, what the hell’s going on?”
President Trump said he was working to make Regeneron and similar alternatives available to “everyone who is eligible” for free.
He went on to claim he could have recovered from the disease without treatment.
“Maybe I would have been perfect anyway,” he said. “I like to say I didn’t need it, I would have been perfect anyway because I’m so strong.”
