here's what they would do, which is they test 50 people in the white House...Then you send it to the lab and you get the results. So no lab tech can ever know if there's even one positive result. You quarantine everybody.
What was predicted
Chamath speculated that around Trump’s March 13, 2020 COVID test, the White House would:
- Test a larger group of ~50 White House personnel at the same time as Trump.
- Label samples so that only a tiny inner circle knew which vial was the president’s, and lab technicians would not know which was his.
- If any of those samples were positive, they would quarantine the entire tested group, rather than publicly isolate only Trump.
This comes directly from the All-In “E0” transcript: he describes testing 50 people in the White House, anonymizing the vials so no lab tech knows which is which, and quarantining everyone if there is “even one positive result.” (podscripts.co)
What we can verify about Trump’s March 13, 2020 test
Public reporting and the White House physician’s memo show only that:
- Trump was tested for COVID-19 on March 13, 2020 after exposure to members of the Brazilian delegation. (ktep.org)
- Dr. Sean P. Conley, the physician to the president, stated in a memo that Trump elected to proceed with testing and that on March 14 he received confirmation the test was negative. (wgbh.org)
- The memo and contemporaneous news coverage describe Trump’s negative result and his remaining “symptom-free,” but do not describe any special protocol involving 50 staffers, pooled or anonymized samples, or a plan to quarantine a whole group based on any positive result. (wgbh.org)
Later reporting on the White House’s COVID practices (including the much-documented White House outbreaks in fall 2020) focuses on inadequate masking, incomplete contact tracing, and limited disclosure of testing, not on any sophisticated pooled/anonymized testing protocol around the president. (en.wikipedia.org) None of these sources retroactively describe the March 13 test as being conducted via a 50-person anonymized group or followed by a “quarantine everyone if any positive” policy.
Why this is classified as ambiguous, not right or wrong
- The internal handling of Trump’s March 13 sample—how many others were swabbed along with him, how vials were labeled, what the lab technicians were told—is not publicly documented in available sources. The Conley memo and news reports simply say he was tested and tested negative. (wgbh.org)
- Chamath’s contingent claim about what would happen if any sample in the group were positive (quarantine all 50 people) is also untestable for that episode, because the White House publicly reported Trump’s test as negative and did not announce any positive White House staff tests or mass staff quarantine tied to that batch at that time. (reviewjournal.com) If no one in such a hypothetical group was positive, the quarantine rule would never have been triggered.
- While later behavior of the Trump White House (e.g., during the 2020 White House outbreak) suggests they were less cautious than Chamath’s scenario assumes—there was no practice of quarantining everyone in a possibly exposed cohort—those later episodes do not directly reveal the precise protocol used for the March 13 test. (en.wikipedia.org)
Because:
- There is no direct evidence that the White House did use a 50-person anonymized testing pool around Trump’s March 13 test, and
- There is also no explicit evidence that they definitely did not use such an internal procedure (those details have not been reported or leaked),
we cannot conclusively determine whether Chamath’s specific, operational prediction about that test protocol came true.
Hence the proper classification is "ambiguous": enough time has passed, but the relevant internal details are not available in the public record, so the truth of the prediction cannot be determined from current evidence.