“Steve, respectfully, I would like to be asking this of a White House official, but they’re not putting anyone out this morning for us to question, so I’ve got to ask you,” Wallace said. “How is the president doing?”

In TV appearances Sunday and Monday, Trump campaign surrogates served double duty as cheerleaders for the president and official communicators of his closely guarded health condition, before Trump’s dramatic exit from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, frustrating network anchors who wanted officials who were less political.

Before appearing on TV as a campaign talking head, Cortes was best known for his role as a so-called pro-Trump contributor on CNN, paid to come on the air and defend the president on the issue of the day. Cortes told Wallace on Sunday that Trump “is a fighter in every sense of the word” and “very, very shortly, he is going to be