HE CAUGHT THE COVID (AND LEFT ME A MULE TO RIDE)
So The Donald and The Melania have COVID-19 now.
Which, as October Surprises go, is a humdinger.
It’s also the kind of ironic plot twist that would get most scriptwriters thrown out of the room, but then that’s 2020 for you.
Commentary:
1. Understandably, there is a lot of talk that Trump is faking it to play the patriotism card, or to get out of the rest of the debates, or to push hydroxychloroquine as a miracle cure, or to recover quickly and thus prove he was right that COVID-19 is no big deal, or claim it was an assassination attempt by Biden or Pelosi, something. Or maybe he’s planning to fake his death and disappear to a remote island fortress to avoid jail, his creditors and Putin’s assassins.
And of course - this being Trump - I can’t rule that out.
The obvious problem is that Trump is a well-established pathological liar who hires people to pathologically lie on his behalf, so it’s hard to know if this is true. And even if it is, it will be difficult to trust any info we get from him or the White House on his status. Granted, this would be true with most Presidents a month before their possible re-election. But it’s so much more true with this admin.
But for now I’m assuming it’s legit until someone can prove otherwise.
2. Despite his age and obviously bad physical and mental condition, I think there’s a good chance he’ll survive, if only because he’s the POTUS and thus has access to the best and most expensive healthcare anywhere. Knowing what we know about the coronavirus, the next 10 days will be the most crucial, but we also know that testing positive is not in itself an automatic death sentence.
3. Meanwhile - and I know this is a very unpopular thing to say - I hope he and FLOTUS recover. I don’t gleefully wish death on him, because that would make me more like him, and I want to be as much the opposite of him as possible.
4. That said, if he ends up in the ICU between now and then, I also hope he has some kind of epiphany that will make him a better, wiser and more empathetic person who will finally take COVID-19 seriously and come up with a real policy to deal with it.
Yes, that is very long odds, I know. I do think it’s far more likely that - like Boris Johnson - he’ll get back to being an awful person and milk the sympathy card for everything it's worth while making things tougher for everyone who isn’t his rich friends. Also, all the stuff I mentioned about Trump pretending to get COVID-19 to play the patriotism card, get out of the rest of the debates, push hydroxychloroquine as a miracle cure, claim Obama ordered the Deep State to infect him, etc? Trump will probably do one or more of those even if he really has it.
But that’s why they call it “hope”, you know.
5. As for the election, who knows? There are too many “what if” scenarios at this stage to make any kind of reliable prediction, so we’ll just have to see how this plays out before we can get an idea. But it’s a fair bet that is MAGA cult - which is primed to accept no result other than a Trump landslide - can’t be counted on to take this calmly or rationally.
License to ill,
This is dF
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