President Trump and Melania announced that they had tested positive for Covid-19 last night. I find this as surprising as tomorrow's sunrise.
Back on July 4, I commented on the covid-problematic design of the outdoor rally pavilion in South Dakota. Given the president's fondness for rallies sans face masks and social distancing, his positive test was just a matter of time.
Falling on your sword while completing a year of anti-science proclamations and high risk behavior is one thing. That harms only yourself. If initial reports are true, however, and Trump risked infecting donors after Hope Hicks' diagnosis, and if the Trump campaign failed to alert Biden of the positive tests...well, that is (once again) a level of irresponsibility almost beyond belief. It's as if the president is hell bent on doing as much damage as possible in the months he has left in office. At times, it appears that Putin possesses Trump like Pazuzu possessed Regan in The Exorcist.
Call me cynical. I figured as soon as Hicks' positive test was announced that the president had already tested positive. I suspect that if the president had tested negative, Ms. Hicks might have taken a long vacation due to, as the president tweeted, her having worked nonstop so many long months. As to whether her Covid-19 diagnosis would have made it to the newsrooms, I'm guessing not immediately. Again, call me overly analytical, but I found the incorporation of "nonstop working" references in the Hicks positive-reveal tweet to possibly be more than coincidental. The president, like many amateur writers, may have had a tweet prepared to explain her imminent "vacation," and was loathe to not use a line already in his mental docket.
In any event, we now have a covid-positive president. The line of infection has been presented as Hicks-to-Trump, but who really knows? She had symptoms Wednesday; he had them Thursday. That is not guaranteed evidence of disease provenance. It's been presented as a gospel chain-of-infection, but the sequence, who gave what to whom, is not a mortal lock at all. So take all current information with a salt shaker.
After the debate debacle Tuesday night, I found a Biden -130 the next morning and bet it, but only for three digits, mainly because I didn't necessarily trust him to live until November 3. Now both candidates are seriously at risk, as we await Biden's test results from his Trump exposure.
What preventable absurdity comes next? My blog series addressing the U.S. pandemic response is called "Tales from the Asylum." A better title eludes me.
Bob Dietz
October 2, 2020
