Infections, elections and antibodies
Let’s say we take at face value what information we’ve been given by the president’s physicians about his recent illness, hospitalization and quick recovery from COVID-19. Despite his age, weight and other high-risk factors, the patient by sheer force of megalomania appears to have overcome the coronavirus and reinforced the myth of his perennial youth, manly manhood, superhuman strength and indestructible physique. “Don’t let it dominate your life,” he advised others stricken with the flu-like ailment and those who are fearful of catching it — easy to say if you have a medical team attending your every breath and medicating you with a complex cocktail of experimental drugs unavailable to anyone else.
And so the president’s omnipotence is proved once again to be unbeatable and his massive body virtually immortal. In this respect he resembles the virus itself: Even if and when it is neutralized and its impact mitigated by a clinically tested treatment or vaccine, it will linger invisibly awaiting an opportunity to resume its assault on human health. In much the same way, Trumpismo, even after Mad King Donald has left the scene, will linger in the body politic awaiting another eruption. After all the scandals and indictments, the confessions and the pardons, the brutality and corruption, the chaos and incompetence of his regime, the president retains the unwavering support of roughly two-fifths of the population.
Embedded in this 40 percent base is an unknown number of white nationalists and white supremacists who believe there is something unAmerican in the increasing racial and cultural diversity of the country. So the “very fine people” chanting racist and anti- Semitic slogans may, in the event of a decisive Biden victory, crawl back under the rocks where they were hiding until the next incarnation of the Trumpian Beast — Ivanka or Don Jr. most likely — encourages them to come back out in the open. Viruses don’t die; they merely retreat until they can find a vulnerable host to colonize anew and spread their pestilence, just as Trump did not single-handedly create the toxic mess he has presided over but released it by giving it permission and setting an example of leadership by illusion, smoke and mirrors, fear and hatred.
And what of the Beast himself, the standard- smashing CEO who has promised to resist any effort, come January, to evict him from the White House no matter how badly he has lost the election. In a world of “alternative facts,” reality is up for grabs and whose reality prevails depends as much on force of will and the power of wishful invention as once upon a time it did on the law. The president’s “law and order” mantra is especially and bitterly ironic in light of his refusal to play by any rules but his own. Even the lethality of COVID-19 was no match for Trump’s reality distortion field that, up to now, has successfully bent history to his purposes.
If the coronavirus, which has stopped the world, could hardly put a dent in this president, that all but proves that God is on his side and that nothing can come between him and absolute domination, now guaranteed by a Supreme Court handpicked to affirm his right to do whatever he wants. Mad political scientists from the National Institutes of Horror and the Centers for Dominance and Control are on the brink of a breakthrough: an experimental drug that will empower the president to suspend the Constitution due to mass psychosis and remain in office indefinitely, rebranding the nation as a branch of the family business.
The only antidote to this affliction is the herd immunity of frontline workers mobilized to oppose the hostile takeover of a system in critical condition. We are the antibodies that we’ve been waiting for. The ballot box is our last line of defense. And if we are successful in containing and suppressing this political plague, democracy’s recovery will be long and difficult, with no assurance of a cure.