In May 1998, when HIV was still a deadly virus, Donald Trump discussed the threat of infection with the radio shock jock Howard Stern. Neither man seemed even to consider the question of whether he might infect his sexual partner – the question was exclusively the other way around.
Stern put it to Trump that he might say to a woman: “Look, you’ve got to go take a medical test before I do you.” Trump agreed, but added that “the problem is that sometimes your own chemicals take over and you can’t wait”.
However, Trump added: "They say that more people were killed by women in this act than killed in Vietnam, okay?"
He liked the comparison so much that he returned to it later in the interview: “It’s Vietnam. It is very dangerous. So I’m very, very careful.” Stern assured Trump, “You’re braver than any Vietnam vet because you’re out there screwing a lot of women.” “Getting the Congressional Medal of Honor, in actuality,” said Trump.
On Monday night, after he had returned to the White House from the Walter Reed medical centre, Trump again metaphorically awarded himself a medal of honour for facing down the threat of a virus.
In a video released on Twitter, he portrayed himself as a warrior wounded in the service of his country: “I knew there’s danger to it, but I had to do it. I stood out front. I led. Nobody that’s a leader would not do what I did.”
Quack cures
Refusing to wear a mask or observe social distancing, holding mass rallies at which his fans spread coronavirus, promoting quack cures and promising (literally) miracles – these are not the acts of a psychopathic narcissist criminally indifferent to the lives of others. They are manifestations of courage in the face of the enemy.
Greater self-love hath no man than that he lay down his fans for his own interests
Trump’s own infection was not the result of a malign fecklessness. He was taking one for the team. Like one of his own secret service bodyguards, he stood out front and took the full force of the viral load on behalf of all Americans. Had he died, it would have been a martyr’s death.
And so we reached the moment when reality is finally, fully, standing on its head. That reality is not just that Trump has not sacrificed himself for the common good. It is the exact opposite: he has sacrificed tens of thousands of people for his own political convenience.
As Bob Woodward reveals in his recent book, Rage, Trump knew from early on how dangerous Covid-19 truly was, but, as he told Woodward: "I wanted to always play it down." A Quinnipiac poll on March 9th showed how effective he was in doing so: while 68 per cent of Democrats said they were concerned that they or someone they knew would be infected, only 35 per cent of Republicans felt likewise. Trump (amplified by Rupert Murdoch's Fox News) deliberately spread a false and fatal reassurance – nothing to worry about, just like the flu, will all be over by Easter.
Greater self-love hath no man than that he lay down his fans for his own interests. If dicing with death in bed during the Aids crisis was Trump’s Vietnam War movie, the coronavirus pandemic is his director’s cut – Apocalypse Now Redux.
If the US had the same proportion of Covid-19 deaths as it has of global population - 4 per cent- it would have 56,000 fatalities rather than 210,000
And this time, the screen is even bigger. By the end of April, the number of US deaths from Covid-19 had surpassed the total suffered in Vietnam.
With 210,000 fatalities so far, it now exceeds the combined death toll of all the wars the country has ever fought, excluding the second World War and the Civil War.
How many of these losses are Trump's fault? That, of course, can never be determined. But some order of magnitude can be guessed at. The leading English epidemiological modeller, Prof Neil Ferguson, estimated in June that half of all deaths in the UK could have been saved if Boris Johnson had locked the country down even a week earlier. Or: if the US had the same proportion of Covid-19 deaths as it has of global population (4 per cent) it would have 56,000 fatalities rather than 210,000.
US’s huge advantages
These are very crude calculations. But given the huge advantages the US had going into the pandemic – a long warning period before the virus struck, the world’s greatest concentration of scientific and medical expertise, a vast logistical capacity – it seems reasonable to suggest that a competent and public-spirited administration could have saved something of the order of 100,000 lives.
With any other president, the moral burden of this knowledge would be overwhelming. Lyndon Johnson, a man, in his own way every bit as bumptious as Trump, was so broken by Vietnam that he did not run for re-election.
But the current incumbent, even when he is brought face to face with the reality of the disease he has so blithely spread, tweets that he hasn’t felt better in 20 years. And then proclaims himself a national hero.
He surely knows at some level that he is killing yet more Americans by playing out the triumphal tale of how he kicked the virus's ass
There is a kind of wonder in this. It does indeed take a very special kind of person to double down on a message that has already amplified a plague with such horrific consequences. But Trump did so both visually, by removing his mask before re-entering a White House occupied by unfortunate domestic, security and political staff, and verbally, by telling his followers not to be afraid of the virus and lying to them that vaccines “are coming momentarily”.
Since Trump knew in March that he was deliberately playing down the threat of the virus, he presumably knows it now too. He surely knows at some level that he is killing yet more Americans by playing out the triumphal tale of how he kicked the virus’s ass. But his instincts tell him that this swagger is his best remaining chance of winning the election. Nothing else matters.
Casinos
We should never forget that Trump used to run casinos. Having posed during the Aids pandemic as the alpha male who played the HIV slot machines and hit the jackpot, he is now playing the part of the man who broke the bank at the Covid-19 casino. He has always had contempt for the poor suckers who fall for the illusion that they can be high rollers too – but there are big profits to be made by encouraging them to keep gambling.
But we should not forget either that Trump was, in the end, not even a competent casino capitalist. His gambling empire collapsed in multiple bankruptcies. He has now gone back to the table one last time and placed on it not just his own health but the lives of tens of thousands of his citizens.
His fans will see that recklessness as magnificent devil-may-care daring. Everyone else will see it as the desperate prelude to the biggest bankruptcy of his career – the audacity of hopelessness.