Normally, a president who fell ill, and with the very illness that is punishing the entire planet no less, would be a figure of enormous sympathy. Normally, even a decent percentage of people from the other party would feel unconflicted sympathy. Normally, also, that president would behave with grace and humility—and transparency, well aware that the credibility of the United States of America before the eyes of the world was at risk.
But this is Donald Trump we’re talking about, and, as ever with him and his retinue of blackshirts and droogies, nothing tracks. Trump was given a drug that is reserved for COVID patients with serious cases, and yet, he’s doing great and he may be released today! And he does this bizarre drive-by Sunday evening, endangering Secret Service agents, so he can drink in the adoration of a “crowd” in a city where he’s going to be very lucky next month to win 12 percent of the vote. At least he wasn’t holding an upside-down Bible. It’s all lies to get through a news cycle, which is all it ever is with this crowd.
Trump will not get that unconflicted sympathy, and he won’t get it because he doesn’t deserve it. He’ll get sympathy; most people are decent people who wish any sick person a recovery, as indeed I did in my last column. But it will be deeply conflicted sympathy, because most of America agrees that he’s a vain madman who doesn’t care who he got sick at Bedminster and who will happily put the credibility of this nation through a sausage-grinder before he’ll tell the world the full truth about this.
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They never, ever stop cheating and lying and whining when they get busted. That performance by Trump campaign aide Steve Cortes on Chris Wallace’s show Sunday morning was sleazy and dishonest and in fact un-democratic in the sense that democracy requires transparency at times of crisis:
WALLACE: They weren’t distanced and there were rules and there was no freedom of choice. They broke the rules. Why did they break the rules?
CORTES: Look, those chairs were not close together, and again, we also believe that—
WALLACE: It doesn’t matter. They were close together, Steve, and the rules from the Cleveland Clinic were everybody wears a mask. Why didn’t they?
CORTES: Chris, the way you’re starting to harangue me now actually reminds me of what you did to the president during that debate on Tuesday night.
That’s all they know (by the way, Wallace responded to that by noting that Trump interrupted him and Joe Biden 145 times during the 90 minutes of the debate, or just about every 37 seconds). Cortes also pulled the classic move, which Trump uses, which they use on non-Wallace Fox all the time, of defending their utterly indefensible behavior by positing the extreme opposite as the only possible alternative course of action. When Wallace was pressing Cortes about the Amy Coney Barrett spreader event, Cortes suggested that the alternative was to remain “hermetically sealed.”
Monstrous nonsense, just like the nonsense Trump threw at Bob Woodward about not wanting to make people panic. It’s a point worth dwelling on for a moment. Demagogues and authoritarians always do this. Hitler: It’s either me or the communists. Lenin: It’s either me or the fascists. Mao: It’s either me or the capitalists. They do it because they have to crush the reasonable middle ground, because the reasonable middle ground is where their deceits and lies die. The middle ground is where decent human beings like Joe Biden win. So they must destroy the middle ground in every way they can, not least rhetorically.
It’s stunning and sad that we’ve gotten to the point where a large majority of Americans just take it as a given that Trump is going to lie about everything. You may have seen the Reuters-Ipsos poll that came out Sunday. By 55 to 34 percent, respondents think Trump hasn’t been telling the truth about the virus, and 65 percent agreed that he probably could have avoided the virus if he’d taken it more seriously.
Every sentence from here on in will be a lie or an excuse. It seems pretty clear they weren’t even going to tell us about Trump’s diagnosis if Bloomberg reporter Jennifer Jacobs hadn’t broken the story about Hope Hicks’ diagnosis. If Biden becomes president, I’d like him to revoke Rush Limbaugh’s Presidential Medal of Freedom and give it to Jacobs.
So Trump will emerge, presumably, and we’ll see what we’ll see. We’ll see if more White House staffers—the Times reported Saturday that he regularly taunts staffers who wear masks at meetings to “get that thing off”—test positive. More Republican senators, too. Funny how more Republicans are getting sick than Democrats, isn’t it? I saw some wingnut speculation about this strange “coincidence” on Twitter over the weekend. Hmm, let’s see. It could be because the whole thing is a conspiracy cooked up by George Soros and the Clinton Foundation in the basement of Comet Pizza. Or maybe it could be because Democrats wear masks and social distance and Republicans don’t.
And the reporting on the exact timeline of this catastrophe will continue to unfold, and we’ll learn more about how many people Trump may have put at risk.
That’s behavior for which any normal person can be prosecuted. Back in May, for example, a home health aide was charged with endangering an 80-year-old for whom she worked because she didn’t isolate while awaiting test results. Oh yes—this happened in New Jersey, where last Thursday’s Bedminster fundraiser was held.
He’ll return, no doubt before he’s recovered, to his rallies, which will continue to be largely maskless, because the lesson he will take from this will not be that he dodged a bullet and he’d better start following the science but that he is invincible and the science is for weak losers. He will continue to ask people to be willing to die for him, because, as I wrote all the way back in April, authoritarians always make this demand of their legions of devotees.
Because Americans are mostly pretty decent, he’ll get some baseline sympathy—which, by the way, he and his people would never extend to Biden were the situation reversed. But the sympathy will not change people’s basic opinions of him—or, I think, their votes. And depending on what lies are coming this week, it may dry up fast. People are decent, but they’re not suckers.
