If the president finds himself facing a sympathy deficit among the public as he moves from photo op to photo op in his Walter Reed luxury suite, we don’t need to look much further than his catastrophic presidency that has inflicted mass death on the United States, coupled with his own utter lack of sympathy towards the victims of the coronavirus pandemic. But if we do look a little further, a very illness that would ordinarily provoke a nation’s sympathy has itself been an object lesson in why millions in this country are largely unburdened by the president’s coronaviral plight. The Trump administration has from the beginning dissembled and propagandized around the president’s illness. Their lies in fact now appear to encompass even the meaning of “the beginning” — the president tweeted early Friday morning that he had tested positive for the virus, yet comments from his doctors this weekend suggested that he actually tested positive as early as Wednesday. If true, this would mean that the president proceeded with his normal schedule for two days, possibly infecting dozens or hundreds of people through his malignant carelessness.
And since he’s been in the hospital, his doctors — clearly under instruction from the president or his advisors to hide the severity of his illness — have offered misleading and confusing information, such as when and whether he’s been on supplemental oxygen. Meanwhile, at odds with their positive prognosis, his chief of staff yesterday told the press that, “The president’s vitals over the last 24 hours were very concerning, and the next 48 hours will be critical in terms of his care. We’re still not on a clear path to a full recovery.” Compounding the confusion of the mixed medical messages have been the bizarre photos and videos released of the invalid president allegedly hard at work in his medical quarters, including a shot of Trump apparently signing his name to a blank piece of paper. Needless to say, a demonstration that the president needs to practice his own signature is not the reassuring image he and his advisors think it is.
These efforts to lie to and manipulate the public about the president’s health are more of the same from an administration that has for years shown contempt for the majority of Americans who did not vote for the president and do not support his presidency. They are of a piece with the authoritarian tendencies that have led Trump to lie about everything from the size of the crowds at his inauguration to whether he tried to coerce Ukraine into a plot to destroy Joe Biden’s candidacy.
So now, in illness, he still cannot stop reminding us that he does not see himself as our president but as a sort of supreme leader, never to be questioned no matter how absurd his pronouncements, even as some in the media and on the right argue for the unquestionable need for all to feel sympathy for our president. This is asking a lot, and for many of us, it really is too much, when even the illness that is supposed to arouse our sympathy is handled with the same mendacity and illiberal spirit as is so much else in this administration. Even as his life is in mortal danger, the president’s contempt for democracy and the American people is, to borrow a phrase from Ivanka Trump, relentless.