I don’t know what makes me feel worse: the rampant coronavirus that could kill me if somebody sneezes or the fact that Donald Trump is still the president of the United States. I can protect myself from the virus by staying at home a lot, wearing a mask, and keeping away from other people, but there is no social distancing from this president and from our national nightmare.
Both things—the virus and the president—make me feel a sickness in the pit of my stomach. It is not a stretch to conflate the two. They are both nightmares.
Most of the time, I keep my mind busy with an assortment of activities and distractions because I try not to dwell on things that make me feel bad, and I suppose that’s good for my mental health. But my mind likes to wander, and my thoughts seem often to gravitate toward what’s wrong in my world.
I am getting used to a vaguely queasy sensation that something is not right, that my life is somehow out of balance. It is not just a fear of becoming infected. The coronavirus and the coronapresident are parts of the same pattern. The virus and what the president is doing about it, or failing to do, are not two different things but they are one unresolved story that has been playing over and over in my mind since early March.
The coronavirus does its deadly work by spreading from person to person and by replicating, a process that chokes off our oxygen supply and attacks our vital organs in ways that are not yet well-understood by science. Some of the damage may be permanent. It is both microscopic and bigger than any one of us. Stopping its global trail of death—over 283,000 deaths worldwide as of this writing—demands a national and global response.
An effective national response calls for a kind of leadership that that the coronapresident does not have. Instead, he denies the risk, complains about a hoax, ignores the science, blames the Chinese and Obama, hides or distorts the facts and now has begun to doubt the death toll.
Yet, as John Adams is credited with saying: “facts are stubborn things, and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” As of this writing, the death toll in the United States is approaching 80,000 people.
The medical experts who advise the president speak to the public through a White House filter, careful not to contradict him. He can barely hide his boredom with them but they are useful props, standing by him on the same platform as if he were their equal.
While there seems to be universal agreement in the medical community that a greatly accelerated testing and contact tracing effort is the only way to begin to stop the coronavirus, the coronapresident is not enthusiastic about testing because he believes that more testing will reveal more cases of COVID-19 and more cases will make him look bad and undermine his reelection campaign. The idea that more testing could prevent infections, reduce suffering and save lives is of little importance to him.
All he wants to talk about now is “reopening” the country because “we can’t let the cure be worse than the problem itself.” Let me fill in the blanks.
The “problem itself” is a deadly and uncontrolled virus that is super-contagious and for which the world has no treatment or vaccine.
The “cure” is the whole range of measures to reduce the spread of the virus: social distancing, wearing masks, and finding out, by a lot of testing, how widespread the virus has become. The cure, at present, means that some types of social and commercial interaction must be curtailed because those interactions enable the virus to spread and make the problem worse. Such interactions will be unsafe until human ingenuity finds new ways to block viral spread from person to person in workplaces, shops, restaurants, theaters, public transportation, and other places where people come in close contact.
The coronapresident rejects the cure and by implication prefers to do nothing about the problem, even if doing nothing about the problem means more disease and more death. The problem, he says, will go away on its own, without a vaccine and without all that much testing, like a miracle, it will disappear.
The coronapresident is not a real president. He is an accomplice. He is the virus made visible.
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Some other stuff for later,
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