I started out writing this post about President Donald J. Trump and taxes and then about Trump and the appalling debate and now about Trump having Covid-19. In the Trumpian universe, you really have to be blogging every minute. That’s how fast the news changes.
The most recent news, about the Covid-denier having Covid, has brought out the ironists. They speak of the man of a thousand PR/marketing masks who refuses to wear a real one; the protector of “freedom” (“liberate Minnesota!”) who jeopardizes the freedom of aides and reporters by bullying them into going maskless, who despite having an infectious disease gets into a car with Secret Service agents while still at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to go joyriding for his adulation fix. (Who does that? It’s not as if a hospital is a hotel.)
The episode has also brought out the conspiracy theorists on the other side. One of my neighbors thinks Trump’s Covid is a scam to promote drugs on the stock market. A cousin thinks it’s a deflection from the tax scandal and the debate debacle and a ploy to garner sympathy.
But what if another scenario were afoot? What if Trump were setting us up for his resignation and decampment to Florida, where he could broadcast “The Apprentice, Presidential Edition” or do a live talk show? Surely, no one could blame him from resting on his “laurels” after four long, hard years.
Whom are we kidding? Trump will only leave office when he’s voted out and even then it’s going to be a battle. He’s a narcissist who must be adored by all. The announcement of his Covid diagnosis, which sent markets and minds reeling, gave him that moment. For once, he seemed genuinely touched and appreciative. “I’ll never forget it,” he tweeted of the outpouring of concern. “Love!!!” Love? Triple exclamation points? It was almost poignant. Almost.
By Sunday, he was masked and motorcading around, exposing Secret Service agents to the disease. By Monday, he was back at the White House maskless. In between he told Americans that Covid was nothing to fear and that they shouldn’t let it dominate their lives. (Translation: They shouldn’t let it stop them from going to work and school and bringing the economy back to where it was in January so that he can be reelected.)
Some critics see in Covid Trump an ancient Greek antihero felled by hubris. But I think Trump is less Aeschylean and more Miltonian. Trump’s attitude really recalls the key lines from Satan’s great speech in John Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” in which having lost Heaven, the Devil decides to make due with Hell: “The mind is its own place and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”
Make no mistake about it. This is not the mind over matter of discipline in adversity that leads to transcendence. This is the monstrous ego that imposes its will not on itself but on you and everyone else, making a hell of your heaven and theirs as well.. In “Paradise Lost,” Satan gets all the best lines, because Milton understood this truth: The Devil is quite human. He may not wear Prada but instead a MAGA hat over an elaborate pompadour and lifts in his shoes and reside in the White House.