Donald Trump’s coronavirus illness and hospitalization have seemed to many of us like a comeuppance the president deserves, a reaping of the viral seeds he himself has helped sow across the country, with more than 200,000 Americans now dead and many thousands more debilitated by the disease due to his incompetence. But while it’s natural to feel a sense of righteousness at the president becoming the victim of his own retrograde attitudes and murderous polices, to feel that a sort of rough justice has been administered by the universe and even a dark pleasure at his suffering, we need to make a conscious effort to resist these temptations lest they distract us from the full scope of our crisis.
Donald Trump’s offenses are against our democracy and the American people, and so our democracy and citizens must be the masters of Donald Trump’s fate, not the coronavirus, his own stupidity — or even fate itself. Donald Trump deserves judgment at the ballot box and by our systems of justice, particularly because he has done so much to attack our government and our collective well-being. His attempts to undermine us demand that this country flex its collective muscles and refute everything he has done and everything he stands for, in the November election and going forward. An early death for this corrupt and evil man is too easy an escape for someone who we need to make an example of, both for our sake and for future generations.
Rooting for Donald Trump not to recover is too close for comfort to the authoritarian impulse to impose political decisions by force. The last thing we need is for Donald Trump to evade the judgment of voters in November — a judgment that will now be even more damning in light of his own self-inflicted illness, his crowing anti-achievement of incompetence. To borrow a line from the president, Death itself needs to stand back and stand by, indefinitely; the American people get first dibs on this monster.
The spectacle of the president battling the coronavirus once against threatens to distract us from the one fact I don’t want anyone to ever lose sight of: Donald Trump may be a uniquely malevolent president, but the threat he presents is inseparable from the anti-democratic Republican Party that supports him with everything it’s got, and that shares his basic authoritarian ideals. That the Republican Party has become the Trump-Republican Party means that we need to beat the GOP across the board, and that the threat it poses to our lives and livelihoods won’t disappear when the president is no longer in office.
The essential indistinguishability of the president and his party on crucial matters of policy and politics couldn’t have been clearer at the levels of symbol and substance in the apparent superspreader event that may well be the source of the president’s own illness: the Rose Garden ceremony and related events last week at which President Trump announced his nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. As The Washington Post summarizes, “Striking images of last weekend’s event, where influential Republicans and lawmakers mingled without masks, seemingly played on a loop on cable television, fueling critics who called the party reckless and enablers of superspreader events.” Multiple attendees have subsequently tested positive for the coronavirus, including Senator Mike Lee of Utah, Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, campaign manager Bill Stepien, and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.
As others have smartly written, the spectacle of Republican leadership catching a virus at an event celebrating the possible ascension of a justice who would very likely strike a death blow against Obamacare and health coverage for millions of Americans, after so many of them failed to protect the country against this virus, encapsulates the GOP’s incompetence and unfitness for power in one go. The sense one gets that they believe themselves immune to the virus, as they go about hugging and yapping into each others’s unmasked faces, adds a true “last days at Versailles” quality to the whole event. It is not just that their own incompetence and arrogance has endangered themselves - they also put in danger everyone they came into contact with, including ordinary Americans who have the misfortune to work for them.
So there should be no letting down of the guard in light of the president’s illness. In the event of his unlikely but possible death before election day, it would still be necessary to vote the Republican Party out of power. And no matter what direction his health turns, the GOP will continue its project to subvert the 2020 election, whether by attempting to discredit mail-in-ballots that might favor Democrats, closing down polling places in urban areas, and scrubbing likely Democratic voters from voting rolls. It is more important than ever to remember that Trump, while posing a crisis in and of himself, is part of a larger authoritarian threat that will not go away when he is no longer in office.
In fact, we may well see an escalation of current efforts to essentially steal the election to compensate for the hit Trump’s support will take in the wake of his illness and all it says about his incompetence. After this, there really is no way he can win, or for the GOP to stave off national- and state-level defeats of historic proportions, without Republicans fully going to war with American democracy itself.