Reckless Endangerment
Trump rarely surprises me any more. I take for granted that he sinks to depths that normal human beings won’t, but in the last several days he has actually surprised me again.
I understood that he wouldn’t care if people he didn’t know got sick with COVID-19. I didn’t know that not caring would extend to people he interacts with all the time personally.
It starts with the timeline of his own COVID-19. There were two tests he took and there was about a day when one had indicated positive but the result on the other hadn’t come back yet. During that day, when he’d been informed that according to one test he was positive, he didn’t isolate. Quite the contrary. He went on Fox News with Sean Hannity. He attended a major fundraising function in Cleveland. Without masks, of course. What’s going to happen if wealthy donors in Cleveland or friendly news people at Fox catch this because he chose to be in a room with them without a mask while already knowing he had it? What’s going to happen if one of them dies? If donors or journalists ever wanted to know how little they mean to Trump, they’ve learned now.
But that’s not all. The other day he decided to take a ride from Walter Reed Hospital to go wave to his supporters. Sounds considerate, right? Give them a thrill. He even wore a mask. But as Dr. James Phillips, a doctor at Walter Reed and a professor at George Washington University pointed out, the vehicle he went in is designed specifically to avoid circulating outside air in case of gas attack. He was in a small, totally sealed environment with Secret Service agents while sick with a lethal disease that spreads through air. Transmission is based mainly on a formula of time of exposure times concentration of the virus, and this environment was super concentrated – very small and very sealed. All the agents in the car will have to quarantine for two weeks and that will be the limit of what happens to them if they’re very lucky. And agents have reportedly begun to talk about this anonymously, about how little he seems to care about the safety of the people who keep him safe.
Why did he do it? White House officials say he did it because the optics are important, not only for domestic politics but for international politics. We have tense relations with China (among others) right now and someone might think, quite rightly, that a good time to pull something militarily is when we have a really sick President who isn’t temporarily relinquishing executive responsibility while hospitalized.
Decent case, but highly unlikely to be his rationale. What we know about his state of mind at Walter Reed is that he was extremely bored. We know he goes to rallies not because he needs them politically but because they give him a lift personally, which this certainly did. He needs to be among people who idolize him. And for this he endangered the lives of the men and women who devote their lives to protecting his.
It’s not like he doesn’t know COVID-19 can be lethal. When he was going to Walter Reed, he asked if he was going to die from this a like a friend of his did.
I don’t know what his line is or if it exists. Does he care about the safety of his kids? I know he looks out for Number One, but is there even a Number Two?
There are some people for whom this won’t make a difference, people who will never understand that He Does Not Care About You. Will this make a difference to his major donors, given what he did to a group of them in Cleveland? Will this make a difference to friendly journalists, given what he did to people at Fox? Maybe we’ll know in a day or two.
I don’t like suffering, in anyone. It’s both a personal and a religious thing. But by “anyone” should I mean human beings? Does he qualify?
Oh well. I don’t really like suffering in animals either. I guess he at least qualifies there.
Art W. Stone
10/05/2020 @ 10:05 am
Our hopes and prayers need to be with him and…
Not.
Alan Milner
10/05/2020 @ 10:34 am
The people who were in that car with him are responsible for being there. There is this old English word that works very well in cases like this. The word is “No.” In extreme cases, you might say “Fuck, No.” His Secret Service detail has not been wearing masks because he doesn’t want them to. I will continue to wish Donald Trump ill, so ill that he cannot run for the office that he has besmirched. The last thing I will ever do is pray for his quick recovery, not that I would pray for anything because I don’t believe that the Lord gives a shit about whether you petition him with prayer or not. As a matter of fact, the best proof for the nonexistence of God is the existence of Donald Trump. (That’s a joke. There’s lots of other evidence.)
koshersalaami
10/05/2020 @ 11:27 am
I don’t know if masks would protect the agents in that environment. Maybe N95’s properly worn, but that would be about it. The most important mask in the car for their health was Trump’s and he was wearing his, but I absolutely would not count on that being enough. The concentration of the virus in the air in that car was likely to be really high because of the size of the cab and the nature of a hermetically sealed gaseous environment.
Jonna Connelly
10/05/2020 @ 1:01 pm
Wouldn’t it be illegal for him to put the SS lives at risk needlessly? And aren’t they supposed to refuse illegal orders? Seems like they have their honor or macho or whatever it is wrapped up in being willing to take a bullet for their charge. They would show greater courage, imo, by saying “NO.”
Ron Powell
10/05/2020 @ 8:35 pm
Donald Trump is the personification and the embodiment of the White Americans who believe that they are entitled to do and say anything they wish and get away with it.
Koshersalaami
10/05/2020 @ 9:25 pm
Ron,
The problem with that line of thinking is that the privilege you’re witnessing with Trump is not available to the vast majority of White people. This is about wealth and power. I’d say that more than 999 out of every thousand White people are on the same side of the line as you are.
Ron Powell
10/06/2020 @ 5:22 am
@Koshersalaami;
“I’d say that more than 999 out of every thousand White people are on the same side of the line as you are.”
….And, you’d be wrong…
Most of the White population aspire to have what he has. Many consciously display their ‘privilege’ in ‘white flight ‘ from racially diverse neighborhoods, exclusive private clubs and schools, participating in or are agreement with racially restrictive political policies, protocols, and procedures and on and on….
Somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of the population appear to be ready for a return to American Apartheid…
The Trump phenomenon can’t and doesn’t happen without white privilege…
President Lyndon B. Johnson once said, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
That’s not a one in a thousand proposition….
Maybe you should rethink your understanding of exactly what white privilege is….
Start with the mere feeling or sense of superiority which is supported and reaffirmed in the marketplace, and virtually every other aspect of the political, social, and economic environment in which we live….
Whether you are aware of it or not, like it or not, acknowledge it or not, white privilege put Trump in the White House he understands that and is counting on folks like you to participate in the denials…
Koshersalaami
10/06/2020 @ 4:57 pm
You’re conflating two things. I agree completely in terms of what got him into the White House but that’s not what this post is about at all. The idea that your average White person would feel free to infect everyone around them with a deadly disease with total disregard to their health and safety is way, way off. Keep in mind we’re not talking about people not wearing masks in general, we’re talking about someone not wearing a mask who knows he has already tested positive for COVID and, in the case of the Secret Service agents, is already certain he has the disease. I can’t link that to race. That kind of complete disregard for everyone around you, including friends and supporters, is not a general White characteristic. This phenomenon is not about White Privilege. He is getting away with it because he’s the President. Most White people would not. Most White people would be sued over this, and I think he eventually will be.
Not every form of privilege is race privilege.
Ron Powell
10/06/2020 @ 6:22 pm
“The idea that your average White person would feel free to infect everyone around them with a deadly disease with total disregard to their health and safety is way, way off.”
Tell that to the folks who show up at Trump events and rallies and the
3040% of the population that support him…
Better still tell that to the Republican elites who showed up in the Rose Garden to celebrate the nomination of a “conservative” justice…
No masks, no social distancing, not an iota of concern for the spread of a lethal virus…
These, and their ilk, are the ‘white folks’ who believe that they can say and do anything and get away with it…
Their problem is the virus didn’t get the memo…
Koshersalaami
10/06/2020 @ 11:44 pm
“Keep in mind we’re not talking about people not wearing masks in general, we’re talking about someone not wearing a mask who knows he has already tested positive for COVID and, in the case of the Secret Service agents, is already certain he has the disease.”
I’ve already said this, in the comment you last answered. To give you an idea of how abnormal this is, there is an insider report out saying that Don Jr. was very upset by the limo to the demonstrators stunt. The report also says that Ivanka and Jarod were in favor of not interfering. If this is right, we’re talking about something so extreme it worried Don Jr. That is not normal White people. That isn’t even normal Trump followers. There is a difference between not being afraid of the disease and being willing to infect people once you have it. The folks showing up at rallies do not assume they’re already sick, nor did most of the attendees at the Rose Garden superspreader event.
This is not the same thing at all. We are looking at a much more unusual phenomenon than refusing to wear a mask. This is clear in the post. In fact, it’s what the post is about. This is clear in the last comment you answered.