One of the strangest moments of the 2020 presidential election was the first debate between then President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden. This debate occurred on September 29th, only about five weeks before the election. Biden was leading in most polls at the time, so Trump needed a very strong debate. Trump failed to do that as his performance was, even by his very low standards, exceptionally unhinged, manic, angry and rude. At the time, Trump’s message to the white supremacist group the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” was the most memorable moment of the debate.

Within days of that debate, we learned that Trump had tested positive for Covid and that he and several others in his debate entourage had refused to honor the Covid protocols that the debate organizers had requested. We are now learning, courtesy of a soon to be released memoir by Trump’s former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, that Trump knew he had Covid before the debate itself. Meadows is a loyalist who was complicit in many of Trump’s authoritarian and corrupt excesses, so this news is not coming from an opponent of the disgraced former, and perhaps future, president. The momentary online hysteria notwithstanding, nobody should be surprised by this piece of news. In the bigger picture, the key to understanding Donald Trump and the obscenity that has been his life in politics is never to be surprised and to know that his cruelty, bigotry and ignorance is unbounded.

Nonetheless, we now know that Trump knowingly exposed the likely next President of the United States to a deadly virus, one that given Biden’s advanced age, could very well have been fatal for the Democratic candidate. It is not obvious what the legal term for that is, but the immorality of that is unmistakable. Again, we cannot be surprised by this.

Since Trump left office, and in some respects during the latter half of his presidency, new information about his despotic, craven and erratic behavior have been treated as a kind of curiosity-a form of political voyeurism-as if these were just the latest antics of some third tier cultural figure who had stumbled onto rough times. That is, of course, precisely what Trump was before turning to politics.

The problem with this approach is that it fails to treat Trump’s actions with the gravity they deserve. Trump lack of caution regarding spreading Covid is not just a curiosity. It comes perilously close to deliberately trying to kill people. His tantrums as January 6th approached are not just evidence of petulance, they were genuine, if failed and clumsy, efforts to destroy American democracy. His famous phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, was not just Trump as the leader of a criminal family acting thuggish, but was an American president seeking to further his own political interests by carrying water for Russian President Vladimir Putin. In all these cases, the depravity of his misdeeds is overshadowed by the quirkiness of Trump’s behavior; and the people around him are too frequently lionized for revealing the details of things we generally already knew rather than held accountable for their months or years of complicity with Trump.

This phenomenon is particularly evident in Trump’s ghastly mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic. Trump’s absurd Covid related shenanigans such as proposing people inject themselves with bleach, asserting the pandemic would disappear “like a miracle,” or rabbiting on nonsensically about not wanting “the cure to be worse than the disease” were more than just bizarre, they led directly to the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans. Trump’s behavior during Covid pandemic was nothing less than a deliberate effort to misinform the American people and, by doing that, accelerate the spread of the disease and increase fatalities. That is the context in which the new information about when Trump likely knew he had Covid should be understood.

Restating the Covid crimes of Trump may be interesting from an historical or voyeuristic angle, but they are also important because they are not simply relegated to the past. It is a reminder of what is lurking around the political corner if the GOP gets back in power or even if they win back control of one or both houses of congress in 2022. In the past few weeks, Jim Jordan, the fanatical Trump supporting congressman from Ohio, has Tweeted that “real America is done with Covid,” while Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas took time off from his online fight with an eight foot tall fictional bird (which by most measures he was losing) to verbally attack Anthony Fauci. This is evidence that Trump’s Covid policy-a hybrid of denial and ignorance-still reflects the views of the GOP.

Trump’s Covid policy, and recent revelations about how he endangered the life of Joe Biden are not just stories that demonstrate his erratic behavior and tenuous grip on reality, but a reminder of the danger Donald Trump represents in so many different ways and that even though the disgraced former president has always been a big buffoonish, we must continue to take him very seriously.

Photo: cc/Elvert Barnes

Lincoln Mitchell