Reality Bursts the Trumpworld Bubble
In a
moment that feels biblical, the implacable virus has come to the president’s
door.
By Maureen Dowd
Opinion
Columnist
·
Oct. 3, 2020
WASHINGTON — Fate leads the willing,
Seneca said, while the unwilling get dragged.
For his entire life, Donald Trump has
stayed one step ahead of disaster, plying his gift for holding reality at bay.
He conjured his own threadbare reality,
about success, about virility, about imbroglios with women, even about the
height of Trump Tower.
As president, he has created a bubble
within his bubble, keeping out science and anything that made him look bad. He
has played a dangerous game of alchemizing wishes to facts, pretending that he
was a strong leader, pretending that the virus will magically disappear and
that it “affects virtually nobody,’’ pretending that we don’t have to wear
masks, pretending that dicey remedies could work, pretending that the vaccine
is right around the corner.
Now, in a moment that feels biblical,
the implacable virus has come to his door.
This was the week when
many of the president’s pernicious deceptions boomeranged on him. It was
redolent of the “Night on Bald Mountain” scene in “Fantasia,’’ when all the bad
spirits come out in a dark swarm.
The man whose father told him there are
only killers and zeros, the man who cruelly castigated others as losers, the
man who was taught to fear losing above all else, has been doing some very
public losing of his own.
Upsetting as it is to see the president
and first lady facing a mortal threat — and the glee and memes from some on the
left were vulgar — it was undeniable that reality was crashing in on the former
reality star.
Remarkable new reporting in The New
York Times exposed the hoax of Trump, master businessman.
Even as he was beginning to swagger around “The Apprentice” to the tune of “For
the Love of Money” by The O’Jays in 2004, he was filing a tax return reporting
$89.9 million in net losses. The gilt barely covered the rot.
“The red ink spilled from everywhere,
even as American television audiences saw him as a savvy business mogul with
the Midas touch,’’ the Times reported, adding: “the show’s big ratings meant
that everyone wanted a piece of the Trump brand, and he grabbed at the
opportunity to rent it out. There was $500,000 to pitch Double Stuf Oreos,
another half-million to sell Domino’s Pizza and $850,000 to push laundry
detergent.’’
There were Trump
seminars on wealth, and that Midas myth propelled the coarse political neophyte
into the White House. But the year Trump won the presidency and his first year
as president, he paid only $750 in federal income taxes.
Tuesday’s debate pierced another
reality that Trump had been hawking on Fox for months — that his opponent was
an addled husk who would need performance drugs to stand at the podium, and
that Trump would stride in like a colossus and clobber him in a trice.
Instead, the ugly reality was there for
all to see: Trump was truculent, whiny and nasty, and Joe Biden was fine. Trump
was indecent, on everything from white supremacists to Hunter Biden’s
addiction, and Biden was decent.
And, in the end, the con man in the
Oval Office could not con the virus. He was a perverse Pied Piper of contagion,
luring crowds to his rallies and events on the White House lawn, even as he
mocked the safety measures recommended by his own government, sidelined and
undermined Dr. Anthony Fauci, and turned the mask into a symbol of blue-state
wimpiness.
“I don’t wear masks like him,’’ Trump
sneered about Biden, at the obstreperous Cleveland debate. “Every time you see
him, he’s got a mask.
“He could be speaking 200 feet away,’’
the president continued, “and he shows up with the biggest mask I’ve ever
seen.”
Members of the Trump family, sitting in
the front row, followed the patriarch’s example. They ditched their masks
during the debate, ignoring the requirements that they keep them on.
It seemed inevitable
that Trump would get infected, given his insouciance on the issue of protective
measures combined with his age, weight and ambitious travel schedule. He seemed
oddly intent on tempting fate. Certainly, he put a lot of his fans, especially
older ones in the most vulnerable demographic (like Herman Cain, who died of Covid after attending a Trump rally in
Tulsa, Okla.), at risk with his dismissiveness about the virus, laxity on
testing and tracing, and his insistence on continuing rallies.
Even for Trump, it was an astonishing
act of hubris, asking his base to choose between paying homage to him or
protecting their own lives.
As Nancy Pelosi told Stephanie Ruhle on
MSNBC Friday morning, “Going into crowds unmasked and all the rest was sort of
a brazen invitation for something like this to happen, sad that it did, but
nonetheless, hopeful that it will be a transition to a saner approach to what
this virus is all about.”
But now that it has happened, it
creates an alarming situation. How will a White House shrouded in secrecy and
lies deal with a sick president who specializes in secrecy and lies?
The public never found out what
happened that Saturday last year when the president was whisked off to Walter
Reed medical center, a visit that was raised again this weekend, as reporters
noted that we might not even know all Trump’s underlying conditions.
White House officials tried to be
reassuring on Friday, saying that the president’s symptoms were “mild,’’ but it
was clear that things could be serious when the White House doctor, Sean
Conley, put out a statement in the late afternoon saying that Trump was taking
an experimental antibody cocktail.
There was also an eerie silence all day
from the president’s usually rambunctious Twitter account. Then, Marine One
landed on the South Lawn in the evening to take him to Walter Reed for a few
days. At 6:31 p.m., the president tweeted a video saying that Melania was
“doing very well” and that he thought he was doing “very well,” but that he was
going to hospital to “make sure that things work out.” And at 11:31 p.m., he
tweeted: “Going well, I think! Thank you to all. LOVE!!!”
Democrats tried to be
nice. On Friday, the Biden campaign paused their negative ads, and Barack Obama
said at a virtual fund-raiser that despite being in a fight “with issues that
have a lot at stake,’’ we’re still Americans and “we want to make sure
everybody is healthy.” (At the same moment, the Trump campaign issued an attack
on “lyin’ Obama.”)
I have long marveled that Donald Trump
never seemed to get sick, either during the campaign or in office, and had an
extraordinary amount of energy for a man of 74 who binged junk food and skipped
the gym. He has been a great advertisement for not smoking and drinking. So it
was stunning to see Trump walk out, finally wearing a mask, waving as he took
off for Walter Reed, with the election only a month away and the next scheduled
presidential debate two weeks from now.
With the West Wing in a panic, and with
Republicans feeling the White House and Senate slipping away, the Democrats
made moves on two fronts.
Pelosi thought the Republicans might be
more amenable to the bigger aid package that she has been pushing, now that
Covid had become scarily real to them.
As she pointed out, if the president
could get infected — “with all the protection that he has”— think of how
vulnerable ordinary people are, “if you’ve lost your job and lost your health
care and you’re food insecure and you’re on the verge of eviction.’’ Trump’s
diagnosis should be, she said, “a learning experience.”
It also could change the dynamic of
Mitch McConnell’s hypocritical push to get Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court
nomination crammed through the Senate, because she will have to do more of her
meetings with lawmakers virtually. The Democrats now hope to slow down the rush
to appoint the conservative judge who, according to news reports this
week, signed a newspaper ad in 2006 that called Roe v. Wade “a barbaric legacy”
and supported overturning it.
As Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein
said in a joint statement, Democrats need to “ensure a full and fair hearing
that is not rushed, not truncated and not virtual.”
The pictures from the
Rose Garden last Saturday, where President Trump nominated Judge Barrett,
scream superspreader. There’s a maskless Trump and maskless Republican
lawmakers and a maskless president of the University of Notre Dame and lots of
hugs, kisses and handshakes. Mike Lee and Thom Tillis, both Republicans on the
Senate Judiciary Committee, were there; on Friday they said they had tested
positive for the virus, as did John Jenkins, the president of Notre Dame, and
Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s former top aide who was also in the Rose Garden that
day. (Judge Barrett, who recovered from
the virus this summer, graduated from the law school and became a professor
there.) Bill Stepien, Trump’s campaign manager, also tested positive. Three White House
reporters have also reported testing positive this past week.
After Britain’s leader, Boris Johnson,
had a life-or-death fight with Covid earlier this year, he came out of the
hospital a bit more inclined to take scientific advice and more ready to put
restrictive measures in place than he had been at the start of the pandemic. He
was still torn, though, between his medical advisers and the Tories in his
Cabinet, who were deeply opposed to another lockdown because they feared it
could shatter the economy.
CNN’s Kaitlan Collins reported that
Trump was “spooked” and “alarmed” at having the virus.
It’s impossible to know how — or even
whether — this illness will change the president. But hopefully it will change
his skeptical followers and make them realize that this vicious microbe really
is contagious, that President Trump is not invulnerable and that therefore they
are not either, that crowding together at rallies is not smart, that wearing a
mask is important, and that it’s not all going to disappear like a miracle.