| | | Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images |
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The president of the United States has contracted Covid-19. This is an extraordinary thing to have happened, considering that the president of the United States enjoys the benefits of both a massive security infrastructure with the sole purpose of protecting him from everything and everybody in the wide world and the ability to call upon the advice of the world’s leading experts on any topic imaginable at a moment’s notice. This is to the benefit of everybody. The old saying is that when America sneezes, the world quickly catches a cold. You can imagine just how bad it is for everyone that the Leader of the Free World has caught the coronavirus. Just extend that metaphor!
These developments broke late in the night on October 1, leading many to quip about “October surprises”—not necessarily in the sense that “catching Covid-19” was drawn up in some political playbook as the next move the Trump team was going to run after his disastrous debate; more like, “Oh, this is what the screenwriters who govern our lives have planned for us—a whole month in which, every day, the news gets more insane and chaotic.” October thus becomes, in this imagining, a monthlong advent calendar of surprises: Instead of a piece of chocolate behind every door, there is a punch to the gut. |
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| But make no mistake: Trump getting Covid-19 is not an October surprise. It is perhaps the least surprising thing in the world. It is a thing we saw coming for some time and from several hundred miles off. In fact, it’s a thing that people in Trump’s own White House have been worried about, and for good reason: It’s hard to stay safe in a pandemic when the salary you receive is entirely dependent on not taking the pandemic seriously. But the pandemic, it doesn’t care!
It was only back in July that Politico’s Jake Sherman reported that he was “getting more and more messages from deep inside the Trump administration from aides and senior officials who feel like they cannot work safely during COVID, and are being told not to wear masks.” (Only in This Town would people in these kinds of dire straits turn to the author of Politico Playbook for help.) This was all mere hours after it was reported that Herman Cain, who attended the president’s superspreader event in Tulsa, Oklahoma, had succumbed to the virus’s ravages. Weeks later, the White House played host to a Hatch Act–defying night of Republican National Convention festivities, during which the overarching theme of the convention—“The Coronavirus Pandemic Is Over!”—was reflected in the almost nonexistent measures put in place to keep attendees safe from harm.
The president has essentially spent the bulk of this pandemic year either downplaying the severity of the coronavirus crisis or interfering in our response to suit his own political ends. A timely report from the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis has all the gory details, documenting 47 occasions over the past eight months when Trump administration officials “attacked or undermined” public health experts on the way to more than seven million infected Americans, of whom more than 200,000 have perished. Per the report, the administration pressured health experts to adopt the Administration’s talking points, even when they conflict with the science; criticized, sidelined, and fired experts who insisted on sharing accurate scientific information with the public; Altered, delayed, and suppressed guidance and scientific reports on testing, protecting children, reopening schools, voting safely, and other topics; Authorized questionable virus treatments over the objections of scientists; Resisted efforts to ensure the safe development of a vaccine; and diverted $265 million from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for an ad campaign to “defeat despair and inspire hope” weeks before Election Day.
Make no mistake, the reason the president and his administration went to these lengths was so that they could appear impervious, immune, and bulletproof, because to admit any other reality would make the president look weak. Again: Coronavirus don’t care, son!
The salient point is this: We are living in a golden age of natural consequences. You threw an unsafe wedding, and people got sick? Your gigantic motorcycle rally turned into a superspreader event? You reopened school for in-person learning and turned the classroom into a Covid cluster? Yes, well, there you have it: natural consequences at work in the world, tireless and inevitable. And so, after a year of playing fast and loose during a health crisis, downplaying its seriousness, inhibiting and interfering with the public health response for political purposes, and flamboyantly flouting the advice of medical professionals who’ve urged the public to mask up and observe a few sensible precautions, it’s come to pass that the president has caught Covid-19. Well … surprise, I guess!
—Jason Linkins, deputy editor |
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| There was a debate this week, and if you missed it, you can catch up on all our coverage. It was a mess! Also a mess: Trump’s tax returns. As Casey Michel writes, First Daughter Ivanka looks especially exposed after The New York Times forced every editor in America to find a synonym for “bombshell report.” You may have heard something about the Proud Boys this week; it turns out that they’re very knit up in the world of James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas. It already seems like a year has passed since the president tapped Amy Coney Barrett to be the next Supreme Court justice, but this actually happened a week ago. Matt Ford, who found a troubling dissent in Barrett’s limited supply of legal decisions, notes that the emerging discourse around her personal life is a trap. Nevertheless, she has a unique view of a woman’s place in the world, according to Melissa Gira Grant. Elsewhere, Talia Lavin goes deep into the ancient origins of today’s QAnon conspiracy theory, Bruce Bartlett explains how stock buybacks have warped the economy, and Steven Higashide warns lawmakers that Uber and Lyft are coming through the regulatory revolving door. |
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