Defiant, Now Infected: Trump Is a Morality Tale
The
president has the coronavirus. Let’s learn from that.
By Frank Bruni
Opinion
Columnist
·
Oct. 2, 2020
It’s a measure of the
cynicism that has infected American politics — and, yes, me — that among my
initial reactions to the news that President Trump had tested positive for the
coronavirus was: Are we sure? Can we trust that? A man who so frequently and
flamboyantly plays the victim, and who has been prophylactically compiling ways
to explain away or dispute a projected election loss to Joe Biden, is now being
forced off the campaign trail, which will be a monster of an excuse.
I couldn’t help
thinking that.
I couldn’t help
thinking, too, about karma, and I immediately felt and still feel petty for
that. Trump has spent much of the past six months, during which more than
200,000 Americans died of causes related to the coronavirus, downplaying the
pandemic, flinging out false reassurances and refusing to abide by the very
public health guidelines that officials in his own government were fervently
promoting.
He didn’t wear a
mask. He encouraged large gatherings — including the Tulsa, Okla., rally that
Herman Cain attended before falling sick with the coronavirus and dying, and
his big convention speech, at which hundreds and even thousands of people, many
without any facial covering, packed in tight. At the first presidential debate
on Tuesday night, he mocked Biden for so often wearing a mask, suggesting that it was
a sign of … what? Timidity? Weakness? Vogueishness? Moral vanity?
With Trump it can be
hard to know, and it’s hard to know whether his own defiance was a kind of
wishful thinking about the coronavirus’s true prevalence, a reflection of his
belief in his own physical invincibility, some combination of the two or none
of the above.
But it’s easy to
identify the morals of this story.
The most obvious is
that the coronavirus has not gone away and there is no guarantee, contrary to
the president’s sunny prophecies, that it’s going away anytime soon, certainly
not if we’re cavalier about it.
Which brings up
another moral, also obvious but apparently necessary to articulate: There is a
real risk in being cavalier. The president is now the embodiment of that. The
first lady, too. Also Hope Hicks, one of his closest advisers, and who knows
how many others in his immediate circle? That question exists because, from the
start, there has been a culture of cavalier attitudes and behavior at the White
House when it comes to the coronavirus.
That culture was on
flabbergasting display during those evening briefings the president used to do,
the ones that he used primarily to congratulate himself and his administration
on their fantabulous job battling the pandemic. They battled it all the way to
America’s exceptional status as the world leader in recorded cases of, and
deaths associated with, the coronavirus.
That culture was evident in the rallies that the
president arranged and insisted on doing over recent weeks. That culture
persisted on Thursday, when, according to an article by Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman in
The Times, Kayleigh McEnany, maskless, held a briefing with reporters after Hicks’s
infection with the virus was confirmed and after McEnany was
on a plane with her and exposed to her.
I read that and I
winced and I gasped — and then I wondered why in the world I was wincing and
gasping when it was par for the course. When it was business as usual. When it
was an explanation for why we are where we are as a country and why Trump is
where he is as a president and patient.
It is time, at long
last, to learn. To be smarter. To be safer. To be more responsible, to others
as well as to ourselves. We cannot erase the mistakes made in America’s
response to the coronavirus but we can vow not to continue making them. The way
to treat President Trump’s diagnosis is as a turning point and a new start.
This is when we woke up.
The presidency and
the president are always national mirrors, in many different ways at once, and
that’s another moral. Trump has shown America its resentments. He has modeled
its rage. Now he personifies its recklessness. How extraordinary and helpful it
would be if, when he talks to the country about this, whether on television or
in tweets, he reflects on that in a civic-minded way.
I’m certainly not
counting on that: He may wind up having a mild, largely asymptomatic experience
with the coronavirus and feeling somehow vindicated. But I’m rooting for a more
mature tack.
Because I don’t want
us to be cynical, no matter how much cause we’ve been given. I want us to be
better.
