Will Trump’s sickness make America sicker?

As I write this, the leader of the free world is still in Walter Reed hospital, receiving a panoply of experimental treatments to combat a disease that could potentially kill him: COVID-19.

Not surprisingly, the White House, and even the president’s attending physicians, have been feeding the public a steady diet of happy talk about his actual condition.

Other reports, meanwhile, suggest a different story. That Trump went through some dicey moments over the weekend. That his oxygen levels dropped on at least two occasions. That he had a “very high fever” on Friday, and maybe other times also. That he was given a shot of dexamethasone, a steroid not normally reserved for patients with mild disease.

It will come as no surprise to anyone that Trump is stage-managing the optics of his illness.

On Sunday, he had his Secret Service agents take him for a drive past supporters in his armored presidential SUV.

The goal of the stunt, of course, was to project an image of health, vibrancy and control. But as many doctors have pointed out, it also put the agents in the SUV in serious danger of contracting the disease.

Prior to Trump’s drive-by cameo, he released a one-minute video ( on Twitter of course) in which he offered the following reflection (if that’s the word for it) on his experience thus far as a COVID-19 patient:

“It’s been a very interesting journey. I learned a lot about COVID. I learned it by really going to school. This is the real school. This isn’t the let’sread-the-books school. And I get it. And I understand it. And it’s a very interesting thing and I’m going to be letting you know about it.”

Leave it to Trump, the great unreader, to shoe-horn in a quick shot at literacy-based education (i.e. “This isn’t the let’s-read-the-books school.”).

Leave it also to him to tease us with some future revelation, as though he’s subjecting the world to some nightmarish reality TV show.

Still, what’s most striking here is Trump’s use of the words “learned” and “I” in the same sentence.

If we have learned anything about Donald Trump, it’s that he manifestly does not learn. When facts do not fit his notion of reality, he changes those facts. I do not need to list examples of this. Turn on the news: there is a new example almost every day.

So what do we make of his claim that his “real-school” experience with COVID has actually taught him something? Does anyone believe that he will start wearing a mask and encouraging his supporters to do the same? That he experienced a Road to Damascus conversion at Walter Reed?

The answer, of course, is no—no one believes this. When Trump says he has learned something, it usually means that he has simply confirmed his existing prejudices.

So, what is the danger of Trump’s supposedly new “knowledge”?

Well, whether Trump suffers—or has already suffered—a mild or severe case of COVID will likely not make any difference. Unless he ends up unconscious, or worse, succumbs to the disease (in which case he can no longer lie about it), his strategy will almost certainly be to spin his time at the hospital as an unqualified triumph.

He will use his recovery as evidence of two “truths,” which, in typical fashion, will actually contradict each other: 1) that he is strong because he overcame COVID; and 2) that the disease is really not that big of a deal.

There will be no mention of the fact that he had a small army of doctors attending him, and access to the world’s most expensive, cutting-edge treatments.

Nor that many of his supporters are under-insured and will be lucky to get a hospital bed, if they ever get sick.

Nor even that his infection is not just about him, but all the other people who contracted COVID in and around the White House, as a result of his own cavalier attitude towards public health guidelines.

So whatever lesson Trump has “learned” here is most certainly one Americans can do without.

As its 7+ million cases show, America has largely failed to understand that taking COVID-19 seriously is not merely an act of self-interest.

It is an act of community. Of caring about others. Of patriotic, civic engagement.

So the lessons sorely needed here are those of empathy, consideration, and conscientiousness—lessons, sadly, that the current president simply cannot teach.