Editorial | When COVID-19 is treated like a game
Illustration by RUPALI INGLE, Illustrator
To address the elephant in the room: President Donald Trump has COVID-19.
If there’s anything to be shocked by, it’s that he didn’t catch the coronavirus sooner.
He held numerous in-person rallies in states like Oklahoma, North Carolina and Minnesota, that illustrated revolting displays of pandemic irresponsibility. Just three days before he tested positive early morning Oct. 2, Trump threw jabs at former Vice President Joe Biden during the presidential debate for wearing masks frequently. Biden tested negative, by the way.
Positive diagnoses on the hill started with Trump’s senior adviser Hope Hicks, and have grown to First Lady Melania Trump, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), former White House adviser Kellyanne Conway, Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, all of whom attended the in-person ceremony for Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court.
If you don’t take the virus seriously, you’re going to get it and you're going to spread it; most every credible medical professional has been saying this since March. Yet Trump has knowingly downplayed the coronavirus since the beginning, and only began occasionally wearing a mask in July.
In complete sincerity, we wish Trump a healthy recovery. Testing positive for the coronavirus is tragic. But this diagnosis is a product of his own negligence, his own hubris. Now Trump can blame no one but himself for being hospitalized at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, subject to “very concerning” symptoms. We – in no way, shape or form – feel sorry for him.
Who we do feel sorry for are the 209,000 Americans that have died from COVID-19 and the 7.4 million Americans who’ve contracted the virus. These numbers, indisputably, would be lower had Trump taken earlier action, extended the shutdowns, accurately warned citizens of the dangers and canceled his in-person campaign rallies instead of encouraging thousands of people to ignore social distancing guidelines in the middle of a global pandemic. Remember when Herman Cain died from the coronavirus a month after attending one of those rallies?
Plenty of conspiracy theories have emerged on the internet that this is some sort of political ploy by Trump to reveal that COVID-19 isn’t actually all that dangerous. We don’t believe this whatsoever, but it’s pathetic how we have a president who spews so many lies on a daily basis that the public’s first instinct is to question the validity of his health.
Despite the president’s blatant disregard for the severity of the coronavirus, even going as far as attempting to repeal the Affordable Care Act – which would leave 23 million Americans without healthcare coverage – he’s currently benefiting from that exact process. Trump had a team of medical professionals attend a press brief Oct. 3 to discuss the degree of care and treatment he’s receiving. Trump is privileged. He has a plethora of resources to pull from, despite only paying $1500 in federal income tax across 2016 and 2017. He doesn’t care about the American people; he only cares about profiting from them and the system he’s catered to his advantage.
How can we empathize with him when he shows little sympathy for the hundreds of thousands that have died on his watch?
So we don’t feel any sort of moral obligation to bat our eyes in Trump’s direction and empathize with his situation. In fact, this chilling dish of karma is what happens when you play a game with a deadly virus that’s taken over 1 million lives across the globe.