Given that Donald Trump has ignored, downplayed, and grotesquely mishandled the coronavirus epidemic, it’s no surprise that even the Secret Service personnel who protect him and Vice President Mike Pence have been sickened by covid. But this account from The Washington Post helps drive home the toll the president has inflicted on the agency. It’s not just that Secret Service personnel have been sickened while protecting the president during recent rallies, but that the president’s disregard for basic safety protocols has raised the risks for his own security personnel. To date, dozens of Secret Service agents have been sickened or forced to quarantine in connection with presidential visits to cities like Tulsa and Tampa. The strain has been so great that a trip by Pence had to be delayed until a sufficient number of healthy Secret Service agents were available.

The Post notes that some critics are asking whether agents who are already pledged to protect the president from a bullet should “be required to risk contracting a lethal disease — and infecting a loved one — to secure an event that does not follow health protocols?” This question, of course, is moot, because they have been, and have been done so, by a president clearly unfazed by the horrific butcher’s bill of this virus. One wonders, in fact, if he has spared so much as a second’s thought of how his indifference to even basic protocols at rallies threatens to sicken or kill those whose job includes a willingness to die for his own safety. It is incredible to think that even Secret Service agents have become collateral damage in the president’s quest to deny the severity and persistence of the coronavirus. There really is no part of American government or service that he shows the slightest regard for.