I’m surest of someone’s strength when he has shown me his weakness. I’m most confident in someone’s smarts when he has confessed all that he doesn’t know. |
And if his life is one long pantomime of potency and pretense of omniscience? Then I’ve no faith whatsoever in his strength or his smarts. |
Yes, I’m talking about President Trump: That’s why I used “he” and “his.” And I’m prompted by this crazy past week, when he insisted on cloaking the full truth of his experience with Covid-19 and then downplayed the threat of the coronavirus through and through. |
I’m not going to rehash his recklessness, which I explored in a column published on Friday morning, hours after we learned that he had tested positive, and in another published on Monday morning. |
What draws my interest is a related topic: the criminally squandered opportunity of the president’s infection. |
He could have used it as the most powerful of tools to educate Americans about the public-health threat that we still confront and to rally all of us toward better, safer behavior. |
He could have described it as a kind of wake-up call, cast it as a moment to regroup and refortify. |
Of course, he did neither, and I say “of course” because if there is one changeless facet of his presidency, it’s his refusal to change. To grow. To be strong enough to admit weakness. To be smart enough to cop to foolishness. |
I’m no dreamer. I live in the fact-based universe, with my expectations tempered accordingly. So I never expected this president to say anything as blunt and self-knowing as: “I was cavalier. Irresponsible. I screwed up. Learn from me, and don’t you screw up.” |
To be fair, most of our presidents wouldn’t have been that openly reflective, that boldly apologetic. American politics beats much of the humanity and humility out of its highest-ranking practitioners, and a politician’s opponents attack rather than applaud such candor. |
But Trump could have found enormously constructive ground shy of that. Imagine this: In his videos from the hospital, instead of saying (falsely) that he’d had no choice but to stage crowded events and dangerously reassuring Americans of treatments that were “miracles,” he muses about how easy it is for any one of us to feel invincible and how vulnerable each of us is in the end. |
He takes a brief vacation from the first-person singular to dwell on how many Americans have suffered and how much they’ve lost, exhorting all of us to a magnitude of concern for the people around us that we don’t always muster. He speaks of the methods by which we can and must protect them as well as ourselves. Then he models those methods. He puts as much flourish into the donning of a mask as he does into ripping one off. |
That’s not just my imagination talking. Apparently, at least a few of his campaign advisers hoped and rooted for a scenario like that, according to reporting by Maggie Haberman and Annie Karni in The Times. |
Those advisers reasoned that if the president “appeared sympathetic to the public in how he talked about his own experience and that of millions of other Americans, he could have something of a political reset” and improve his re-election prospects, which don’t look good. |
I won’t lie: I don’t care that he fumbled the reset. I want this presidency over, because it and he have betrayed the American people. No correction this late in the game will redeem all that Trump has done wrong, all that he has cost us. |
But I care, very much, that he could have illuminated the country over the past week and instead chose darkness. Again. |
I shouldn’t say “chose.” He’s not choosing. He’s a prisoner of his constitution — of his character — and of a preposterous belief that he must project indomitability and infallibility, which is a guarantee of falling tragically short of both. |
He couldn’t and can’t rise to real leadership and do right by Americans because he’s not that strong, and he’s not that smart. |
