| When
word broke of the President and First Lady testing positive for
Covid19, an image flashed into my mind. The image was from the 1980s
series St.
Elsewhere,
about a hospital and its staff in Boston. A major character, played
by Mark Harmon, was a promiscuous doctor who regularly engaged in
unprotected sex, regardless of the warnings. Ultimately, and to his
great shock, the Harmon character tested positive for HIV/AIDS.
Why the
surprise, one might ask?
The same
question can and should be posed not only to the Trump family but to
the Republican deniers who have ignored - flaunted - all the
scientific warnings regarding the danger inherent in the Covid19
crisis.
I start here
because there will be the tendency among some people to express
sympathy and understanding to the Trump family for this tragedy. Such
expressions of sympathy, while understandable, can lead one to
misunderstand the nature of the current crisis and also to
misunderstand the importance of voting Trump out on November 3rd.
Donald Trump
ridiculed natural science. He encouraged his followers to discount
all scientific recommendations regarding how to lessen the impact of
the pandemic. Through public displays of contempt for mask-wearing
and social distancing, Trump, in typical masculinist mode, attempted
to display that his own strength and arrogance were sufficient to
defeat the Covid19 plague.
It turned out
that he was wrong.
As a result,
the White House is currently in nothing short of panic, at least
according to most media reports. They do not have a framework in
order to understand what has been happening. After months of
repeating and practicing the mantra that Dr. Fauci’s warnings
were allegedly irrelevant, they now have the President, First Lady,
and many other senior officials, plus several members of the Senate
and House infected with the ‘bug.’ And the White House
has no way of explaining it and, worse yet, no recommendations as to
what to do since any reasonable recommendation would run contrary to
the irrational rhetoric of King Donald.
As noted, in
this moment there will be a tendency by some voters to feel genuine
sympathy for the President and his family. Those same voters may wish
to vote for him as an expression of support for him in this time of
crisis. This would be a tragic mistake.
The sympathy
which anyone should feel is towards the 216,000+ who have died from
the Covid19 pandemic. 216,000+ people who might not have died had
Trump not engaged in public denial of the nature and extent of the
plague. 216,000+ people and their families who suffered, died,
watched someone dying, or for those who survived, remembering their
lost ones. Those and the millions of others who have been infected,
often painfully suffering from the pandemic, should be the targets of
our sympathy, not Donald Trump.
Though Trump
did not create the Covid19 crisis, his actions accentuated the
crisis. While he may seek to blame China, which is as stupid as if
the world blamed the USA for the 1918-1919 flu pandemic (which is
where it originated!), the real blame goes to Trump and his
administration for its thoroughly incompetent and cavalier approach
towards the pandemic. By actively encouraging millions of people to
believe that Covid19 was nothing worse than a bad flu and that it was
something that would go away on its own - in the absence of masks,
social distancing, and, eventually a vaccine - Trump brought about
more deaths in the last few months than the USA suffered in the
entirety of the Vietnam War.
There is no
amount of sympathy that I could ever muster to justify a vote for
someone who refused to protect the people of this country and,
ultimately and stupidly, refused to protect himself.
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