Can you have empathy for a man who, if you’re charitable, lacks any empathy himself? Or, if you’re honest, for a man who oozes antipathy out of every pore?
You likely cannot. At best, you can feign it. But should you?
Donald Trump does not deserve your empathy. He wouldn’t deserve it if he hadn’t led a months-long campaign to discredit science, lead his acolytes to likewise shun that science, and to belittle those who took the virus seriously.
It’s hard to think of a bill more past due in politics than Donald Trump contracting COVID-19 after his wanton disregard for social distancing and masks and barnstorming through states well underwater with COVID cases. And it’s hard to think of something more poetic than the 70-year-old+ sycophants in power* whose calculations led them to follow Trump down a ditch, only to find that ditch was COVID-laden and now they were COVID-positive.
*To be clear, I am talking about the White House staff and Senate who have access to far more intel than the normal citizens that hang on to every one of his words.
That is not to say that you cannot feel some base emotions for even the evilest people who may have contracted the virus. It’s natural, I guess. If that’s within your emotional state, I won’t complain.
We should all root for Trump’s recovery, so he is fit and coherent to see a landslide repudiation in the polls.
What about the empathy Trump failed to show when he showed up to a debate too late to be tested? What about the empathy he showed for his donors when he showed up to a fundraiser knowing his closer advisor had tested positive? The child separation? The mocking of the infirm and physically challenged? The placing of the journalists into harm’s way? I could go on and on.
Or the Trump administration failing to alert the Biden campaign to his positive test?
But beyond that, this is a nuclear bomb in a late-stage season that will determine the direction of the country for decades to come. What should the Dems do?
If there is anything the Republican Party establishment has demonstrated throughout its history, it is that politics is war. And so, it is without question that the Biden camp should push the throttle until it breaks.
We don’t need to imagine a hypothetical of whether Trump would suspend his campaign if he were healthy and Biden were sick.
That’s because Biden has reportedly “pulled” negative ads from the air, whereas the Trump campaign refused to pull their negative Biden ads.
But all of this is moot.
Donald Trump led a shambolic response to a deadly pandemic because all of the right decisions would have led to temporary economic recession or depression, which happened already because the sick couldn’t work anyway. His vainglorious obsession with spurring economic wealth made him unable to choose safety over prosperity, which absolutely made certain many more people would die than necessary.
They played politics with our lives, and it led to a slow-moving disaster that has no subsumed the very people who orchestrated it.
Allow me to be blunt: You are fucking delusional if you think for a second that Trump would not exploit the hell out of this if roles were reversed. He’d probably call Biden weak and feeble for getting the disease. He might blame him for the policies enacted that led to this disaster. But he would 110% certainly use this as evidence that Biden was not fit to be president. And Trump would be right!
Biden has the final argument on a platter. This president mocked the impact of a deadly virus and risked all of our lives for political gain, his suffering is unfortunate and deserves compassion (if you are charitable), but his leadership is an abject failure and he should be removed from office.
In short, this is the crystallization of why every candidate chose to run this year - Trump is unfit - and it’s a dereliction of duty of the highest order if the Dems do not hammer this home every single day.
But don’t mistake your compassion for the health of any one person (even though this one happens to be the more vile person in the world) for the opportunity afforded to demonstrate Trump’s diagnosis is the absolute pinnacle reason for his feckless leadership.
Hell, Biden doesn’t even need to think hard about the verbiage. He could just copy and paste from this picture-perfect statement by Rep. Ilhan Omar, one of our leading young progressive voices, who has never taken her eyes off of the biggest threats imperiling our safety and future and has already drafted a pitch-perfect statement for him.