. . .It’s late, even here on the west coast, and I can’t help sitting here in the night and extrapolating from the little we know.
The Trump cult clearly thinks the man is a demigod already. Trump’s own line about being able to shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue without losing those supporters is sadly correct. If he now contracts (or claims to contract — another issue where his administration’s lack of candor raises ugly and inevitable questions ) the Covid virus, but recovers — especially if he recovers without suffering serious symptoms — that recovery will become a sword in the hands of his cultists, and in his own as well. See, the line will go, it really is nothing worse than the flu. Nothing to see here, no need to test, we can open everything back up without worrying, the death totals are obviously faked, Fauci is a wolf-crying alarmist trying to tilt the election to Biden, etc etc. Combine that with the perverse embrace evangelicals have given to Trump, and you have a near deifying story — the Man of Men, returned from the brink of death to lead the nation. Surely he is God’s chosen.
Make no mistake, I don’t wish ill health on Donald Trump, or death, or anything else like that — just a thorough ass kicking at the polls next month (and whatever justice might await him thereafter). I rather worry that this illness (or at least this positive test result) will become another self aggrandizing part of the Trump myth, and that it will benefit him electorally where it should do the precise opposite. His illness is the direct result of his ignorant dismissal of medical science, a dismissal that now threatens far too many officials at the highest levels of the entire Federal government. We know, or ought to know, better than to believe that we will be given honest information about his condition, prognosis, or recovery. He will be the greatest and healthiest survivor of the Covid pandemic in history. Just ask him, he’ll tell you. In fact, you won’t need to ask, he’ll tell you anyway.
Especially if it’s not true.