Juliet Samuel
If the president is removed by anything other than a democratic vote, the West will be a symbol of failure
It’s bound to bring out the best, the worst and the most insincere in us. The leader of the free world has fallen ill with a disease that his government has failed to contain. He is clinically obese and aged 74, both raising his risk of complications. Even so, his odds are good: most estimates put the survival rate for his risk profile over 90 per cent. But Covid could still deliver a big knock to his health and campaigning ability in the last five weeks before election day.
Predictably, there were those who could not restrain their spite, like the actor Dominic West and a former Hillary Clinton aide called Zara Rahim. Mr West “jumped for joy”; Ms Rahim declared that she “hope[s] he dies”. Others, political allies and opponents alike, declared they were praying for the president. Advocates of the popular Qanon conspiracy theory, who believe that Donald Trump is waging a heroic war to defeat a secret ring of Satanic paedophiles who control the world, claimed to have decoded Mr Trump’s tweet announcing his infection and concluded it was part of a brilliant plot “TO GET HER” – that is, to arrest Mrs Clinton.
His survival, by far the more likely outcome, could nonetheless have unpredictable consequences. He may brush off Covid easily, affirming his self-image as “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency”. Perhaps it would help his struggling campaign and encourage him to take an even more relaxed policy approach to the pandemic, unlike our own Prime Minister’s brush with death.
On the other hand, Mr Trump might suffer weeks of debilitating symptoms, irreparably damaging his macho persona and undermining his claims to have controlled or mitigated the impact of coronavirus. A lengthy illness might generate some good wishes and sympathy (as well as schadenfreude), but publics generally do not re-elect severely ailing septuagenarians, especially when gripped by the sense of crisis affecting the US. His replacement by vicepresident Mike Pence would leave the Republicans precious little time to make up any lost ground, although if Joe Biden commits some politically fatal gaffe, Mr Pence could conceivably ascend the throne by default.
Unless Mr Trump bounces back quickly, the campaign for US president will now enter a strange twilight zone, where what matters is not the pledges and rallies and debates, but whispers from the White House sickbed. While some are expressing relief that we may be spared another cantankerous debate of the kind seen on Tuesday – which, incidentally, didn’t seem that bad to me – this is no way for a democracy to make a decision of such significance.
Mr Trump’s infection shifts the discourse on Covid away from important questions about the US’S administrative competence, statecraft and how to deal with an increasingly malign regime in Beijing. A political and media machine running on rumours and close analysis of one man’s physical state is one unable to engage with the fundamental issues, like how to fix the health, crime, economic and environmental disasters raging across the country. Instead, those debates will get crowded out by emotional outpourings of hatred against China and, potentially, against Asian-americans, the supposed source of “the plague” by virtue of their race. In a country already racked by riots and division, the effect will be toxic.
An election ought to be a “fair fight”, insofar as that’s possible. Personally, I want to see Mr Trump rejected at the ballot box for his corruption, spite, incompetence and contemptible inability to condemn white supremacism.
No, he isn’t a fascist and no, he isn’t going to succeed in subverting the election result and mount some sort of coup, even if that were his plan. And yes, he has racked up some very positive foreign policy achievements, many to our advantage, on Huawei, China, North Korea, the Gulf and Israel, and Europe’s freeriding on Nato.
But at heart, he is a deeply unpleasant gangster whose closest aides have to carry around resignation letters in their breast pockets in fear of the day he asks them to do something truly unacceptable. He isn’t someone capable of winning or defusing the US’S culture wars or healing racial divisions, because he thrives on them. And his reign of chaos, far from bringing greatness or “law and order”, has helped turn the land of the free into a symbol of political failure. This matters far more for the UK than any trade deal or particular foreign policy the US might adopt.
For all that, it is imperative that Mr Trump be torn from power not by death or disease, but by a decisive public vote. To any supporter of Enlightenment values, it should be obvious that Mr Trump’s death from Covid would be a catastrophe, not just because he is a human being like anyone else, but because it would be a powerful symbol of dysfunction and breakdown at the heart of the world’s most important democracy.
Already, observers in many parts of the world even outside China cannot believe the images they see beamed on to their screens from the supposedly advanced Western world. Yes, Beijing’s image has suffered a huge blow from Covid, but the West’s struggling hospitals, administrative chaos and economic turmoil are also giving liberal democracy a bad name and, for many, making technological totalitarianism look rather worthwhile.
In Mr Trump’s case, it doesn’t matter that his death would be an instance of terrible bad luck or even that some people might agree with a policy of letting the virus spread. Like a kingdom overrun by locusts, it would tell the world a story irresistible to the superstitious human brain: the United States is a sick nation in decline. Its people live in fear of violence and plagues, its intellectuals hate their own country and its government can’t even protect its own elites.
Beyond the personal tragedy of an old man’s death, Mr Trump’s demise would be a political tragedy for the free world. Britain nearly lost its Prime Minister to Covid. Let’s hope this virus doesn’t take a US president.
‘At heart, he is a deeply unpleasant gangster whose closest aides have to carry around resignation letters in their breast pockets’