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In every way that mattered to him, Trump was dying even before he was helicoptered to Walter Reed Hospital (after the stock market closed) on Friday.
He was getting killed in the polls. Biden had destroyed him in the first debate. His tax returns were out—exposing him as a sad loser or a tax cheat or both. Even his trophy First Lady was being exposed as the kind of cage-loving, Christmas-hating villain that makes Cruella de Vil look sympathetic.
His own monumental failures had put him on course for a crushing election defeat that meant, aside from the humiliation of losing, a fate worse than death for him and his corrupt spawn. Defeat in the election would likely lead to the Trump Crime Family’s long-awaited exposure—and potential punishment—for their most massive financial crimes, and possibly more.
Diagnosed with COVID-19, Trump’s first thought was death. To acknowledge that season-ending storyline, Trump on Friday produced and starred in a sympathy-inducing pre-hospital video.
His second thought, of course, was survival. Waking up Saturday morning, surrounded by a team of experts, and maybe feeling slightly better, Trump’s psychopathic mind went to work. He quickly began exploring ways not to use his illness as a cautionary tale to protect others and possibly prevent hundreds of thousands of future deaths, but to turn the situation to his advantage.
He latched onto the second storyline in which he was the hero and the star.
The Myth of the Invincible
Through the weekend, Trump, his family, and his surrogates focused on telling the fairy tale that Trump was defeating the coronavirus because of his incredible strength and willpower. (This propaganda effort gives Trump all the credit and ignores both the White House and Walter Reed medical teams, the door-to-door helicopter service, and the unprecedented access to experimental drugs not usually given free to people who average $0-$750 in taxes each year.)
The “Invincible Trump” story was offensive from the get-go, minimizing the death and despair suffered nationwide in 2020 as a direct result of Trump’s own recklessness and incompetence.
The insensitivity was mind-boggling, but not surprising until…
Yesterday, a tweet from Trump that said “Don’t be afraid of Covid” was followed by a “Mussolini moment” on the White House balcony where he took off his mask and immediately interacted with staffers who happened to be on hand to shoot a campaign video. It all felt like a “slap in the face” for families of Covid victims and “long haulers” still suffering for the lingering effects of the disease.
Promoting Disease and Chaos
Even before his diagnosis, researchers had pinpointed Trump as the “super-spreader” of COVID-19 misinformation. Trump’s relentless history of downplaying the virus, mocking masks and promoting quack treatments has helped create the crisis America now faces. We lead the world in cases. And we have 20% of the deaths—despite having just 4% of the world’s population.
Trump was the host of the recent “super-spreader” event at the White House that has left many top Republicans and White House staff infected. The White House has halted any efforts to contact-trace following that event, possibly to avoid confirming that Trump himself was the “super-spreader.”
To make matters worse, the world’s most famous Covid patient just engineered a made-for-TV moment—carried live by the main broadcast networks—in which his most memorable move was REMOVING HIS MASK. He followed that up with a tweet this morning comparing Covid to the flu and telling America it’s just something we have to learn to live with.
According to Worldometers, there are still more than 2.5 million active cases of COVID-19 in America.
In the real-time cable news version of 2020, Trump is relentlessly showing his own stupidity and, desperate to look macho, is consistently modeling bad behavior. He’s signaling to his supporters that they have his OK to take off their own masks, ignore their own symptoms, go back to work—and to keep spreading the virus in a way that will infect and kill many more people, potentially overwhelming hospitals in key battleground states, and, conveniently for him, adding to the fear, chaos and confusion that Trump, Putin and the GOP are hoping to cause on Election Day.
In the nightmare movie version of 2020, Trump is a frantic, psychopathic terrorist looking to overthrow democracy and seize power by unleashing a deadly biological weapon across the country. He has successfully implanted this weapon inside the bodies of millions of his supporters. He has trained these supporters to mimic everything he does. He activates his plan with a simple visual command: TAKE OFF YOUR MASKS.
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