Live and Let Die, Trump-Style
The world’s greatest con
artist has finally come up against a foe he can’t fool.
By Maureen Dowd
Opinion
Columnist
·
May 9, 2020, 2:30 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON — This is not a good time
for vampires.
Or bats.
Which
is disorienting for me because, as a lifelong aficionado of vampires, I have a
big collection of bat T-shirts, Victorian bat pins and vampire books and movies.
Once
the imagery was hot: Batman with his bat signal; Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise
slinking around New Orleans in “Interview With the Vampire”; Sookie Stackhouse
from “True Blood” naked and drenched in blood on the cover of “Rolling Stone”; the
Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson sensation in “Twilight.” (Their broken
romance was a favorite subject of
Donald Trump’s early tweets.)
But
now the bat is a global villain, sparking memes like, “Whoever said one person
can’t change the world never ate an undercooked bat” and rants like Bill Maher’s denunciation of Chinese wet markets
because eating bats is batty.
Vampires
were conjured centuries ago in part as a response to plagues passed from
animals to humans, when the afflicted turned to the supernatural to explain the
many terrors.
According
to Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio, the president’s own grandfather,
Friedrich, a German immigrant, might have died of the Spanish flu, contracted as he
walked around Queens looking for real estate properties in 1918.
Many
struck by the coronavirus describe the awful sensation of the virus receding
during the day only to viciously strike once the sun sets. As Chris Cuomo put
it, “The beast comes at night.”
The
metaphor is also cropping up as members of the Trump dynasty are exposed as
leeches. A podcast by The Daily Beast this week was titled “Jared Kushner, Our First
Android Vampire President.”
David
Axelrod wrote a Times Op-Ed with David Plouffe, advising Joe Biden, whom
they dubbed “the Man in the Basement,” to juice up his campaign.
“Trump
is like a vampire!” Axelrod told me, adding a salty expletive. “You’ve got to
drive a stake right through his heart. He’s going to keep coming. There’s
nothing he won’t do. Even in this environment, you can’t count on him losing.”
Now
the monstrous virus has invaded the Oval Office. Both the president’s valet and
a Pence staffer, Katie Miller, the wife of the racist Stephen Miller, who looks
like he hasn’t seen daylight in decades, have succumbed. Yet just a few days
ago Axios reported that
the president and some top aides were questioning the high death toll.
Trump
has always been fixated on numbers and perfectly willing to fake them — his
billions, his inaugural crowd, even the number of stories in Trump Tower — and
he knows the number of dead, now surpassing 77,500, could be the death knell of
his campaign.
So
he is despicably turning the dead into the undead, trying to figure out how to
claim they weren’t lost.
His
talent as an escape artist has run out because he’s up against an even more
amoral, vicious enemy. Microbes don’t give a damn about Trump’s fake narrative
and suppression of the facts.
When
the new Trump press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, was asked
Friday what the plan was for reopening, she replied that we must trust the
president to open safely because he is relying on the data. Risible.
Trump
is too much of a fake tough guy to wear a mask and Mike Pence is too much of a
sycophant to the fake tough guy to wear a mask. It was apt that, as the
maskless Trump toured a Honeywell factory making masks in Arizona, Guns N’
Roses’ cover of “Live and Let Die” was playing.
Trump’s
unmoored assertions add up to a horror story, from his failure on testing to
his advice to inject bleach to encouraging rowdy protesters and impatient
states to “LIBERATE” from the government’s own guidelines to perpetrating the
suicidal idea that we have to choose between public health and the economy when
they are the same thing.
When
Mike Pompeo tried to push the 2020 re-election line demonizing China, saying
there is “enormous evidence” that the virus escaped from a
lab in Wuhan, even intelligence and senior officials pushed back. The man who
is trusted to lead America beyond the plague, Anthony Fauci, dismissed it,
reiterating with near certainty that the virus originated with a bat and jumped
species.
Trump
has sidelined the nonpareil Fauci and, no doubt consumed with jealousy and
irritated by his honesty, would like to get rid of him. He barred the N.I.H.
scientist from testifying before the House this month because the committee has
“every Trump hater” who “want our situation to be unsuccessful, which means death.”
Wallowing
in petty insults, vindictiveness and p.r. piffle even in such a tragic season,
the president tried to shut down the pandemic task force as the pandemic is
still ravaging the country until alarmed associates intervened. The White House
scuppered the safety guidelines the C.D.C. wanted to put out, for fear they
would crimp the reopening.
Trump
has been leaning into his son-in-law, the pallid nonentity. Jared is like
Renfield, the “zoophagous maniac” in Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” who eats flies and
death’s head moths and does the vampire king’s bidding.
For
two of the most urgent missions in American history, hunting for supplies and a
vaccine, the president — who is always accusing Joe Biden of nepotism — relied
on nepotism and favoritism. As The Times reported the other day, Jared bollixed up the
desperate search for masks, gloves and ventilators this spring, heading a group
of volunteers that prioritized tips from those with Trump connections, putting
them on a VIP list, like a lead on N95 masks from a former “Apprentice” contestant
who runs Women for Trump.
D’Antonio
says that Trump was always preoccupied with death. When he was young, he was
convinced he would die before 40. The early death of his alcoholic older
brother, Fred, was his formative experience. He regards every loss or
humiliation as a small death.
Trump’s
campaign manager, Brad Parscale, compared their 2020 bid to the Death Star.
(Parscale also modeled a
“Trump-Pence, Keep America Great!” mask on Twitter. A pandemic is, most
important, a branding opportunity.)
One of Trump’s favorite songs is the
morbid Peggy Lee ballad “Is That All There Is?”
Yet
now that it is his duty to lead us out of the valley of death, Trump appears
removed, shirking responsibility and deflecting blame. He’s the world’s worst
empath. As the president tries to prematurely yank the country back to work, he
seems less focused on the real suffering than reviving his precious stock
market. Maybe Trump doesn’t seem real to Trump, either.
So I
must ask, Mr. President, is that all there is, to live and let die?
