The days since we learned that the president has covid-19 have been a dizzying mix of unnerving, enraging. . . and unexpectedly invigorating. As predictable as Donald Trump’s illness is, I think many of us had been taken in by the image of invulnerability he has worked so hard to convey as he’s barnstormed the country like a maskless anti-hero. He had dodged the coronavirus for so long that his apparent invulnerability seemed like just another bizarre layer of this sick joke of a presidency. There was also of course the fact that he was at the center of a bubble of protection afforded no other U.S. citizen — but based on flawed tests and a deranged antipathy to masks, the bubble seems to have backfired, transforming the seemingly invulnerable White House into a hothouse of infection.
As folks like Jared Sexton and Jason Stanley have been telling us for years now, the president’s authoritarian approach to politics means that the idea of strength is at the center of his rhetoric and image-making. Yet not only did the president get sick from a virus he’s spent much of this year downplaying, he got truly, visibly sick, in a way that the camera captured and that he could not hide. But this has not stopped the president from trying to control his image, leading to efforts at state propaganda over the weekend that rightly left many Americans feeling nauseated and aghast that this could be happening in America.
The fact that many of us have some memory or awareness of similar strategies employed by ailing Soviet leaders made the propaganda all the more unsettling, and ridiculous. We were treated to photos of the president allegedly working at the hospital during the course of a day, though a quick analysis revealed that the photos allegedly capturing hours of work were taken ten minutes apart, and included a shot of the president signing his name to a blank piece of paper. Then there was the absurd, brief drive around Walter Reed to wave at Proud Boys and other cheering admirers. Above all else, though, there were the spin doctors, aka Trump’s actual doctors, in particular Dr. Sean Conley, who in the hallowed tradition of Trump’s previous physicians talked up his amazing resilience, and talked down or omitted his serious challenges on the low oxygen/high fever/pneumonia front. Above all else, the damning, discrediting reality of the situation had to be denied — that the president, aged, obese, and physically unfit, was battling a deadly virus that through his misrule has ravaged the nation and left more than 200,000 dead.
These efforts were all necessary because, as Greg Sargent writes, “The physical invincibility of the leader is a standard authoritarian trope.” For such a leader, illness is truly the enemy. Sargent went on to correctly predict what would come next: “Trump and his propagandists will try to spin his triumph over Covid (if it happens) into a symbol of the infallibility of his handling of it as president.” And so Trump’s spokespeople and allies are already hard at work at the first part of the effort, arguing that the president has defeated the virus in a sort of hand-to-hand combat, and has by extension defeated China (assumedly as the originator of the virus). They have also suggested, grotesquely but predictably, that Donald Trump is now better positioned to lead the nation because he has experienced the virus firsthand. All of this, of course, is to cover for the inescapable fact of the president’s failure to protect both the country and now himself from the pandemic.
To further the portrayal of a president triumphant over the enemy, the administration orchestrated a set piece of authoritarian imagery upon Donald Trump’s return to the White House. In a 90-second sequence brutally dissected by The Bulwark’s Tim Miller , the president removed his mask and saluted the departing Marine 1 for an abnormally long and agonizing time, all the while clearly short of breath and physically discombobulated. Seeking to project strength, he sweated weakness and weirdness. He came across as a pathetic man playing the role of pretend strongman.
This piece of fascist theater was accompanied by a short video the president also released upon his return to the White House. His repeated injunctions to not let the virus “dominate” our lives and that it is nothing to fear have rightly generated outrage and condemnation, but other comments within the video haven’t gotten nearly enough attention. I had to transcribe the words for myself to make sure I wasn’t mishearing them:
I could have left two days ago. Two days ago I felt great, better than I have in a long time. I said just recently better than 20 years ago. Don’t let it dominate, don’t let it take over your lives. We’re going back, we’re going back to work, we’re going to be out front, as your leader I had to do that I knew there’s danger to it but I had to do it I stood out front I led, nobody that’s a leader would not do what I did and I know there’s a risk a danger but that’s OK and now I’m better and maybe I’m immune I don’t know but don’t let it dominate your lives.
I don’t think it’s possible to interpret this as anything other than a declaration that Donald Trump more or less intentionally got sick in order to take the virus on, mano a mano, on behalf of the nation, to suffer and triumph on our behalf in order to show the way forward, Jesus Christ and Rambo rolled into one. Donald Trump has said many deranged things during his presidency, but I submit that this videotaped spiel is the apex of all the pudding-brained assertions he had gawped out before. It is sick; it is stupid; it is revealing of a diseased mind and an authoritarian spirit. Amazingly, though, it ramifies even beyond this: in its utter self-serving stupidity, it shows a bottomless contempt for the American people, and constitutes an insult to our collective intelligence that, even if this were somehow the only malign thing he had ever uttered, would be enough to assure his place as the most unfit president in our history.
The insult and contempt leveled at the public has in fact been the real story of the president’s covid illness. The easily disproved lies about the president’s health; the message that Americans don’t deserve information about their leaders; the president’s renewed falsehoods, based on his still-unresolved illness while receiving literally the best medical care in the world, that Americans should not be scared of getting this deadly disease; the grotesque proposition that he has purposely gotten sick in order to personally defeat the virus, and in so doing has proven that Joe Biden is weak because he refuses to tear off his mask and freebase virus like a real man — collectively, these messages convey that Trump and his administration think that we’re a nation of fools and marks.
I think Donald Trump’s last remaining paths to re-election were destroyed this weekend by this very display of contempt for America’s collective intelligence and common sense. Trump revealed himself as a fool, a moron, and a weakling in ways that cannot be undone. But whatever hope may be on the horizon, there is no escaping the horror and the sadness that this obvious sociopath has been supported by so many of us for so long, and that it has taken the needless deaths of thousands to at last turn the tide against him.