Thomas Hughes House Speaker Nancy Pelosi began calling the coronavirus the “Trump Virus” this past week, in an attempt to dig at the president’s response to the pandemic. She should stop. With the number of Americans dead approaching 150,000 since March, there needs to be respect paid to the seriousness and non-political nature of this pandemic. It characterizes the deadly virus in exactly the same sort of cheap way that the President has repeatedly attempted to do, and it further inflames the disturbing political divide that has emerged since the first few weeks of national unity that briefly emerged in late March. It is the sort of name calling that the Right is often better at, because they know how irritating and distracting it is. Her renaming a novel coronavirus for the president is an insult to the dead and the bereaved. It also mischaracterizes another thing: the Trump Virus is Trump himself.
By refusing to initiate mitigation measures and combating stay-at-home and mask mandates, Trump Virus has contributed to the spread of, and deaths from, Covid-19. The president has abandoned the Oval Office for the golf links at a time of national crisis, one he never took seriously, repeatedly said would simply disappear on its own, and early on called a hoax. Trump Virus makes you doubt everything you hear. Trump Virus makes you suspicious of your neighbors. Trump Virus makes you work against your own interests. It is Trump Virus that has made Christian Americans into American Christians, people who are proud to support immigration gulags and snatching babies from mothers, tax policies that take from the poor and give to the rich, and a man who has only ever used their holy book as a tool to sell himself.
Trump Virus makes you protest against temporary, emergency, locally-enacted social distance policies, and refuse to wear a mask, because taking reasonable, common sense measures to prevent the spread of a highly communicable disease violates your idea of freedom, even though the shared sacrifice of doing so for a short period of time will allow the nation, and world, to get back to its pre-existing condition.
Trump Virus makes you shout, “White Power” at political rallies, because the Virus makes you think that that is pleasing somebody, that it is actually appealing to somebody, that there is support for such a cry. Trump Virus makes a white person respond to direct questions about Black Americans being disproportionately killed by police by saying dismissively, “So are white people.”
Trump Virus makes you want to get rid of a comprehensive health insurance law designed to help sick children and poor Americans have access to health care, without any alternative.
Trump Virus makes you denounce China for its human rights violations and data manipulations, while politicizing the CDC and implementing Chinese-style authoritarianism and cronyism in America. It makes you cheer camouflaged federal troops attacking Americans with gas and bullets, ripping them off the streets and doing so with impunity. It makes you support using the State Department as a personal slush fund and event space, and the Justice Department as a tool to harass political opponents and give pardons to friends who broke the law.
Trump Virus makes you chant “law and order” while supporting a man who has only used courts like Scrooge McDuck used his swimming pool of gold coins—flooding the building with money and suffocating the process. Trump Virus makes you want to go after law breakers, unless the Virus convinces you that some laws are unfair, and some judges are unfair, and when they rule against you, they did so because they are biased. It makes you excited to capture and command the Supreme Court with the intention of making policy changes, not upholding the Constitution, and the Virus makes you extremely angry when your personal advocacy court does not rule how you instructed them to.
The Virus makes you ignore American history, distort American ideals, and attack opponents as self hating country haters. It makes you hate the people who hate America. It makes you protest at local health officials’ homes because you think getting advice from a medical professional is a conspiracy.
The Virus makes you believe that the president is actually not in charge, that he is powerless in the face of bigger, shadowy forces. And if the president is not in charge, he can hardly be blamed. The Virus makes you ignore the president’s failings and focus on: presidents no longer in office, governors, other countries, political opponents, journalists, comedy shows, doctors, and shop keepers, because the virus makes you a celebrity worshiper. And in America, celebrities get a lot of passes for a lot of things.
The Virus makes you froth over our great democracy, but do everything you can to prevent people from voting. It makes you attack journalists as enemies of the people, when they are trying to report on what is, through all the bluster, simply typical Washington corruption that you originally claimed to reject: pay for access, private club over government, personal interests over public. It makes you call the media liars while the president hires newspapers to kill stories about his adultery.
Trump Virus makes you put yourself, your family, your friends, your business, your co-workers, your bus or Uber driver, your neighbors, your fellow community members at risk of debilitation or death because the Trump Virus has made you value money more than life, whether it’s valuing other people’s money more than your own life, or your own money over other people’s lives.
Luckily, America has a tough and tested immune system, and while we are waiting for a cure, which will likely outlast the election even if Trump loses (he might start a cable network!), we do have some effective therapeutics. Since the nation caught the Virus, here’s how it has fought back and developed antibodies: first, it tried to social distance—more people voted for Trump’s opponent to be president. The American people did not want Trump to be their president, but the Electoral College did.
The day after his inauguration, an estimated 4.1 million Americans took to the streets in the Women’s March, protesting the election of a man who bragged about having no hesitation about sexual assault because he was a celebrity, and his victims were powerless.
Just days later, Trump tried an illegal decree-by-Tweet that the country would be closed to Muslim nations. (Despite the prolonged Islamophobia campaign, Trump Virus makes you fearful of Muslims, but ignore that the nation that gave support to their citizens to attack America on 9/11 wasn’t even on the banned list, and Trump Virus makes you suspicious of Hunter Biden but not mind the president’s son-in-law begging for business deals in Saudi Arabia.) The move was immediately challenged in court and declared illegal.
His next big agenda item was to take healthcare away from millions of Americans without any replacement plan, but that was thwarted by a Republican-controlled Senate. A key vote was John McCain. Trump Virus makes you fervently pro-military but denigrate American Prisoners Of War and champion a wealthy draft dodger who was too weak to fight, but talks tough when “surging” troops into American cities to beat veterans, gas mayors, and hijack protests calling for justice for Breonna Taylor and the rejection of impunity with which Minnesota cops tortured George Floyd to death.
Refusing to succumb to the Virus, Americans flipped the House of Representatives back to the Democrats as soon as they could. Republicans, who caught the Virus at rates higher than New York nursing homes, continued to go to bars and large house parties while ignoring emoluments violations, ignoring political reprisals, ignoring baffling policy ideas that promoted Russian interests over American ones, and denouncing efforts to fight back in what was a declared war on American sovereignty by the Russian military.
When Trump was caught seeking more foreign influence in elections, trying to use American aid to further his own personal political agenda, the House went for the internal disinfectant. The president was impeached, and while a consensus emerged in the infected Senate that he was guilty, the Virus made them swallow their oaths for political gain (so they thought). Susan Collins of Maine was so delirious from battling the Virus that she proclaimed that such high crimes didn’t need a remedy. The Virus, she said, would just magically disappear, like a miracle. Then former National Security Advisor John Bolton went public explaining that the Ukraine quid pro-quo was only the tip of the iceberg in presidential betrayal. Collins is now in the fight for her political life, as Mainers have grown suspicious of a political anti-masker.
The American people have fought back against Trump Virus by listening to more local leaders, including governors and mayors. But there was too much community spread for it to be eradicated. Those with Trump Virus ignored common sense and contributed to many more infections, months of increased death, prolonged economic pain, and a total loss of American standing, both at home and abroad.
The Speaker needs to stop calling the pandemic the Trump Virus. We need to fight SARS-coV-2 with medical science, persistence, and patience. To defeat the pandemic we need to isolate. To defeat Trump Virus, we need to come together. To end Trump Virus, we just need patriotism. Unlike coronavirus, to cure Trump Virus, you simply need to love your country. And vote.
