Cold Take: Donald Trump, on the Truman Balcony, with the Coronavirus
Donald Trump adopts the pageantry of a strongman. A wheezing, gasping strongman. But who is he trying to convince?
Yesterday, Donald Trump returned from Walter Reed Medical Center, where he had remained for three days recovering from Covid-19. His course of treatment involved antibody injections (an as-yet experimental treatment), Remdesivir (an anti-viral with an emergency use authorization), Dexamethasone (also experimental at this stage), Pepcid, zinc, melatonin, aspirin and a partridge in a pear tree. He received this bevy of interventions despite repeated (and incredible) insistence from his doctors that he wasn’t really all that bad. He just likes pills!
Trump strode across the South Lawn, climbed the stairs and stood atop the Truman Balcony. He flashed a thumbs up, saluted no one in particular (as far as I could tell), and, most controversially, took off his mask to expose his bare, freshly painted face. In the middle of an airborne respiratory pandemic, Trump, who is almost certainly still contagious, removed the one tiny thing he had put on to try to protect the people around him.
His brazen indifference is best understood through the tweet that preceeded his stage show and the video he posted after. He exhorted Americans not to be “dominated” by Covid. It all reminds me of National Treasure Susan Sarandon insisting that Hillary was dangerous in 2016. It’s very easy to avoid the consequences of your catastrophic decisions when you’re a National Treasury and can just hide out in your Hollywood Hills mansion, occasionally emerging for colabs with Ryan Murphy. Money mitigates problems, and lots of money mitigates lots of problems. Similarly, if you can be guaranteed every pill under the sun and that you will feel like you’re 20 years younger, sure, go ahead, get Covid. Why not?
Most people just don’t have consequence-free lives, though.
The term “dominated” is one that pops up here and there in the annals of Trump’s logorrhea — recall that early on during the post-George Floyd protests, he demanded that governors “dominate” protestors. There is an insight into Trump’s psychology to be had here — in his mind, no doubt, winners “dominate” and losers “submit.” Just like he used to play a business man on the teevee, he’s now playing a strongman.
Probably not an electorally successful one, though. I’m not sure who Trump thinks he’s appealing to. I understand that the strongman act appeals to his base, who see him as the greatest of alpha males (stuffed into the body of Grimace). Other than the die hards, though, to whom does this appeal?
The Covid diagnosis really did offer Trump an inflection point — a chance to reverse course on his approach to the pandemic and make up some of the ground he has lost on the issue that is both considered among the most important and on which he has the worst numbers. Not that I expected him to admit any defeat, exactly, but he could have taken a new direction, which is apparently what his advisers wanted him to do. This was his great (and perhaps last) opportunity to help change the course of the campaign.
To anyone who still thinks Trump is playing three dimensional chess, I offer this as Exhibit A. He is doubling down on his base while polls are showing him losing the race by 16 points (admittedly, that polls is an outlier, but it reflects a general trend in Biden’s favor and should scare the hell out of Trump).
He’s not smart. He’s not clever. He’s still very sick. At this point, the only chance for the GOP is probably for Pence to take over or for California to slide off the continent.
CT
