No prizes for guessing the subject of this entry from its title. The news that the Trumps have contracted Coronavirus is exactly as surprising as the fact that the first presidential 'debate' turned into farce, with one of the participants in particular keener on a chimps' tea party than actually engaging in debate. (Always a potential problem when one of the candidates is nobody's idea of a great public speaker and the other is barely capable of stringing a coherent sentence together. Wonder if that came up in the producers' planning meetings?)
Anyway, now the next debate is in doubt thanks to Trump contracting a virus that just a week ago he told people 'not to worry about' because it 'affects virtually nobody', only the 'elderly and those with heart conditions'. 208,000 fatalities in the States strongly suggests otherwise, but don't worry, because he also said they're 'rounding the turn' of the pandemic, and has criticised his opponent Biden for wearing a mask and not gathering large numbers of people together at campaign rallies.
Now I don't believe in karma, but it's the only word that adequately stands as a synecdoche for what I feel is going on right now. And I know I'm hardly alone in that feeling, if my limited view of social media is anything to go by. I try to be a decent person when I hear news like this about somebody for whom I feel genuine antipathy – see my entry on Thatcher's death for a similar conscience wrestle some time ago. But Trump makes it very, very, very difficult to wish him a recovery. No, strike that – he makes it impossible. Even when Boris Johnson was hospitalised with Covid, I didn't want the man to die. I hoped, instead, that he'd learn from it and come out with a renewed appreciation of the value of the NHS. Fat chance, of course, but that was nonetheless my feeling at the time.
Now I don't want Trump to die either, but the reasons are rather less noble. I don't want him becoming some kind of political martyr to the extremists, climate-change deniers, MAGA dickheads and ultra-conservative right that he represents. I don't want those of his followers who believe the virus is a Chinese-engineered biological weapon to have any further 'evidence' for their bizarre claims. And I don't want any kind of sympathy that may be generated for the man if he gets properly ill to be converted into votes.
So despite my glee at the entirely appropriate condition in which he finds himself, and despite that fact that if he comes out of it without having been seriously ill, it will add fuel to his 'don't worry about it' line, I'm in the awkward position of having to hope he recovers quickly enough that he can't make political capital out of it. Better he comes out of it looking stupid (sorry; more stupid) than he comes out of it looking like some kind of tough-nut 'fighter'.
This year has been comfortably the worst that many millions of people can ever remember. In every corner of the globe, whether it's forest fires, the pandemic, refugee crises, the ongoing rise of the extreme right, increasingly extreme weather events, Brexit looming, human sacrifice or dogs and cats living together (one for the Ghostbusters fans there), it's just been a complete shit-show from the fucking start. It may yet, though, have one positive note to end on, or almost end on.
I'll tell you what, 2020. You give us the gift of a Biden victory on November 3rd – a clear victory that can't be dragged through the courts for six months while Trump takes to squatting in the Oval Office – and we'll let bygones be bygones, eh?
