There are precedents to guide us. The right-wing populist leaders of two other major nations have been infected with the virus. Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson was careless of the virus and promised to keep shaking hands “continuously” until he was infected in March. He was admitted to intensive care, and later said that it “could have gone either way”.

The result? His approval rating soared on his release from hospital and remained above his pre-hospitalisation level for a couple of months afterwards, even as the number of British deaths continued to mount.

Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro dismissed COVID-19 as “a little flu”. He tried to force provincial governors to drop infection control measures in order to avoid economic slowdown. He was infected in July and emerged after only mild symptoms.

The result? He was more popular a month later than before being infected. Today he is more popular than ever even though Brazil has suffered 140,000 deaths from the pandemic, second only to the US.

So the evidence suggests that in the likely outcome that Trump survives he is unlikely to suffer any loss of political popularity before facing the polls. And how will his infection impair his ability to define reality as he pleases for his supporters?

Pundits have been predicting the imminent collapse of Trump’s campaigns, his presidency, his support base for over four years. Yet he has held firm the loyalty of a steadfast 40 to 42 per cent of the US electorate regardless of scandals, failures and revelations that would have destroyed a conventional politician.

His support base is undeterred. “Voting for Trump is a cultural statement” and not subject to events, as the veteran analyst Charlie Cook has observed.

It’s true that the polls show his Democrat rival, Joe Biden, leading in the polls in recent weeks. But the critical factor in a voluntary voting system is not what the surveys measure but who actually turns out to vote.

The strength of supporter commitment is more important than the number of poll responses – and we know that Biden’s supporters are less fervid than Trump’s.

If he emerges alive from Walter Reed military hospital, he will have triumphed over the virus that he has long belittled. Does anyone really think that will diminish his standing in the eyes of his supporters?

In the worst case scenario for Trump, the unlikely event that COVID kills him a couple of weeks before election day, does anybody seriously believe that Trump supporters would lose interest? If anything, it could well produce a sympathy vote to the benefit of his likely replacement, Mike Pence.

As for David Alexrod’s contention that you can’t spin a virus, he said that in April. Since then Trump has presided over the biggest pandemic death toll on the planet – 208,000 and counting – and still retains the devout support of his base. And he’s still spinning.