Stranger Than Fiction
After months of effectively playing roulette, Donald Trump now has COVID-19, and in yet another mask-off moment, liberals remind the Left that they view politics as spectacle.
Welcome to Terminally Chill—a newsletter that discusses politics, sports, and other issues from a left perspective—by Aaron Mayorga, an award-winning photojournalist.
I.
After Tuesday’s presidential debate in Cleveland, among other things, I said that America ‘is in decline’—and I realize that that seems rather bleak. After thinking it over and taking into account the news of these last few days, I’m here to inform you that that’s still true, but I’ve grossly underestimated the amount of Hope in the world—so yeah, maybe Andrew from MGMT might be on the something.
Unless you’ve (justifiably, I would say) gone on a bender in the past 72 hours, you’ve heard the news: Donald Trump, after months of downplaying the COVID pandemic and mismanaging the American response to it, is now infected with the coronavirus—and it’s not just the president, either. As of the latest count, at least 25 positive cases are connected to the White House, including the First Lady, Republican Sens. Mike Lee (Utah) and Thom Tillis (N.C.), and senior advisors Kellyanne Conway and Hope Hicks, the latter of whom was the first in Trump’s inner-circle to publicly test positive.
That Trump would eventually become sick with COVID was inevitable, given his recklessly cavalier continued public appearances. Lest we forget, before the World Health Organization declared a pandemic in early March, Trump ‘passed within a handshake’ of the virus at the CPAC 2020 conference according to The Washington Post.
The late February gathering of American political conservatives at the Gaylord National Resort, in Oxen Hill, Md., hosted both Trump and Vice President Mike Pence as keynote speakers, but days later, an attendee—a New Jersey doctor—informed event organizers of his positive test result. As a result of the scare, four Republican congressmen—Reps. Matt Gaetz (Fla.), Doug Collins (Ga.), and Paul Gosar (Az.), and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz—as well as Mark Meadows, now the president’s chief of staff, self-quarantined. Ultimately, none would contract the virus.
Still, Gaetz was informed of his possible exposure to the virus aboard Air Force One after having spent days with the Trumps at their Mar-a-Lago resort. Meanwhile, the brush with COVID prompted Gosar to fire off this immaculately bizarre tweet.
Then, there was Trump’s rally in Tulsa, Okla., on June 20—the first public event for his re-election campaign since the pandemic’s onset, which I had mentioned in my debate recap from a few nights’ ago. With attendees disregarding social distancing and refusing to wear face coverings and despite six campaign staffers having tested positive prior to the event, the president spoke for more than 100 minutes.
In the following days, two more staffers tested positive for coronavirus in addition to a pair of Secret Service agents, an Oklahoma-based journalist, and former presidential candidate Herman Cain—the latter a fact Joe Biden neglected to mention on Tuesday when given an opening. Kimberly Guilfoyle, the former Fox News host and Donald Trump Jr.’s girlfriend, also later tested positive for coronavirus after attending. Three weeks after the rally, Oklahoma reported a record-high in new COVID-19 cases, and on July 30, Cain—after spending weeks in the hospital—succumbed to the infection at age 74, incidentally, the same age as the president.
Despite his death, Cain continues to post on Twitter, which should come as some solace to Donald Trump, who is currently taking joyrides around Walter Reed Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., and is receiving an experimental antibody cocktail and the drugs dexamethasone, a steroid, and Remdesivir, the anti-hepatitis medication. The White House, meanwhile, insists his condition is not at all serious.
It’s not clear how Trump’s illness will affect his participation in the next debate, scheduled for Oct. 15 in Miami, but I can’t imagine it’ll move the polls much—unless, of course, his condition deteriorates to the point that either the 25th Amendment needs to be invoked or, uh, he dies. Elsewhere, on Capitol Hill, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell remains committed to confirming conservative Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court as soon as possible. Despite the new cases in Congress’ upper chamber, confirmation hearings are expected to start Oct. 12, he said.
On the other side, the Biden campaign announced it was suspending all negative advertising against Trump due to the news, because… um, uh, civility, I guess.
It was a move that Rep. Ilhan Omar—whose recent statement in response to Trump’s positive COVID result, should serve as a template for other Democrats—accurately criticized the Biden campaign for since unsurprisingly, Trump’s campaign has not reciprocated. Online, the memes have come in many forms, and morale is high—although this has not sat well with the libs, who are at it again.
II.
Over the last four years, of all of the media talking heads, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow has emerged as the on-television face of the so-called ‘Resistance’ to Donald Trump’s presidency. Through her winding opening monologues about Trump’s past business dealings with Russia and relationships with shady figures, such as Lev Parnas, as well as her wall-to-wall coverage of Robert Mueller’s investigation, she has—in the words of The New York Times Magazine—‘ascended, in the imagination of liberals, from beloved cable-news host to a kind of oracle in the age of Trump.’
In June 2018, Maddow justifiably broke down on-air as she relayed the initial reports of the Trump administration’s ‘family separation’ policy at the U.S.’s southern border. Then, the AP revealed that children, including some under the age of five, where being taken from their parents and sent to ‘tender age’ facilities in Texas. Two years later, this past July, Maddow said of family separation, ‘If you are a person who believes in hell, you have to think this is the one for which multiple Trump administration officials are most likely to spend eternity in cosmic penance and damnation.’
When news of Trump’s positive COVID-19 test broke shortly after midnight on Friday, however, her strong statements against the ‘depravity’ of Trump’s White House fell by the wayside, giving way to a puzzling, fealty plea for the public to pray for the man. Other prominent liberals, including Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, expressed similar sentiments.
This—the same man whose administration that, in her view, had committed acts atonable only via an ‘eternity in cosmic penance and damnation’; the same man who privately admitted that coronavirus is ‘a killer,’ while publicly assuring it would just ‘disappear’ even as 210,000 have perished with millions of more lives upended; the same man who had riot police tear-gas a peaceful protest, so he could have a photo op with a Bible. And, now, somehow, ‘God bless’… that man?
How—you might be wondering?
More than anything, it’s a reflection of how many liberals view politics – as spectacle, their team engaged in unending, civic intramurals with the Republicans. Each side committed to improving life in America while abiding by the ‘rules’ and notions of civility. Their ‘faves’—lawmakers around which liberals have erected cults of personality and considered beyond reproach—we’re told, don’t owe us anything. But, in return, voters are expected to routinely pledge their support at the ballot box (itself little more than a proxy of the greater ‘battle of ideas’), or risk being shamed for their disinterest. Here, aesthetic triumphs over substance, and the horizon of political action narrows to ‘voting blue no matter who’ on the first Tuesday in November.
And, if you lose, well, better luck next time! You don’t have to take my word for it, either; here’s what Barack Obama said from the White House Rose Garden on Nov. 9, 2016:
BARACK OBAMA: Now, everybody is sad when their side loses an election. But the day after, we have to remember that we’re actually all on one team. This is an intramural scrimmage. We’re not Democrats first. We're not Republicans first. We are Americans first. We’re patriots first. We all want what’s best for this country…
…
OBAMA (cont.): Sometimes you lose an argument. Sometimes you lose an election. The path that this country has taken has never been a straight line. We zig and zag, and sometimes we move in ways that some people think is forward and others think is moving back. And that's okay.
Obama made these remarks knowing full well that Trump would not only get the chance to fill a stolen Supreme Court seat—the one vacated by Antonin Scalia’s death in February 2016—in addition to 103 lower courtships held vacant by Mitch McConnell but would also seek to undermine his biggest domestic accomplishment: the Affordable Care Act. And in doing so, leave tens of millions uninsured. Is that ‘what’s best for this country?’ Is 'that okay?’ Really? Legislatively, the effort to repeal Obamacare failed in Congress in 2017, but thanks to Republicans’ iron-grip on the federal courts, it may still succeed via judicial fiat.
Liberals didn’t learn this from Barack Obama, however, nor is it exclusive to the former president. Although it was at the core of his governing ethos—explaining Obama’s penchant to seek compromises when there were none to be found, it precedes his presidency. Ironically, for all their protestations against the reality television host president, some liberals have literally taken their cues from the TV, and in particular, the early-aughts political drama The West Wing.
It may seem strange to invoke a work of fiction in this regard, yet as Luke Savage opined in Current Affairs, ‘in the history of prestige TV, few dramas have had quite the cultural staying power.’ Chronicling the two-term presidency of Democrat Josiah Bartlett, played by Martin Sheen, The West Wing is illustrative of a worldview that deifies deference to norms and institutions and romanticizes bipartisan compromise as the serious and enlightened path of Democratic governance.
Numerous episodes of the show—ironically called The Left Wing by some conservative critics—saw Bartlett’s inner-circle frequently punch left, framing progressive political demands to oppose proposed cuts to Social Security and to support increased taxes on the wealthy as naive, unrealistic, and potentially ruinous to Bartlett’s presidency.
In one telling episode, as Savage notes, Bartlett and his senior advisors scheme to get what’s essentially Glenn Close playing a Ruth Bader Ginsburg clone confirmed as the first female Supreme Court Chief Justice by, get this, also nominating a conservative jurist, played by guest actor William Fichtner, to the bench. Why? Because, as Fichtner’s character relays to Sheen’s Bartlett, ‘The court was at its best when they were fighting.’ In other words, simply to maintain the bench’s ‘ideological balance’—an idea with which real-world Republicans, who rightly view the Court as a vehicle of power rather than simply an arena of academic debate, have tossed by the wayside.
And, like Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino to Midwestern men above the age of 58, The West Wing, too, serves up dramatizations of liberal fever dreams, the likes that probably made the rounds as chain-emails in the mid-2000s, or as Facebook posts circa 2010. For example, in one of the show’s more memorable bits, President Bartlett—a Catholic, like his actor Sheen—invokes the Bible in humiliating a homophobic, evangelical talk-radio host.
That said, you might wonder—just how much of an impact can a TV drama have, really? Turns out, more than you would think, or even frankly want.
Back in 2008, at the peak of pre-presidency Obamamania, you might recall stories involving Reggie Love—Barack Obama’s so-called body man and frequent pick-up basketball opponent during that year’s primaries. As the Scottish satirist Armando Iannucci—creator of the BBC’s The Thick Of It and HBO’s Veep—would learn during a White House visit, Love was among a cohort of Obama officials who, well, loved The West Wing. ‘They kind of hold that show in higher regard than their own job,’ Iannucci said at the 2017 Sydney Writers’ Festival, characterizing Obama’s West Wing as ‘absolutely obsessed’ with that of show creator Aaron Sorkin’s fictionalized one.
At one point, the Scotsman recalled Love showing him the Roosevelt Room, located within the actual White House’s West Wing, and remarking, ‘This would be where CJ and Josh’ (referring to characters from the show)—to which Iannucci interjected, ‘It’s you! Why don’t you say this is where I would sit down?’
The West Wing’s influence didn’t just end at the boundaries of the White House premises, though. Future Vox cofounders Ezra Klein and Matthew Yglesias, then writing for separate publications, both admitted to Vanity Fair in 2012, that the show had been an influence; meanwhile, in New York City, West Wing-inspired political protege Micah Lasher had ascended to the role of chief negotiator with New York State under Michael Bloomberg. A law professor even suggested in Slate that Obama and McConnell turn to the aforementioned SCOTUS episode ‘for inspiration’ in filling Scalia’s seat. Moreover, New York magazine recently asked Sorkin how he would write Election Night 2020. (It sucks.) It’s also lived on, in a way, through Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s 2020 campaign, which found itself defined by the candidate’s insistence on ‘plans’ and the general sense that, ‘if we just make the smartest argument, we’ll win.’
Viewed in this light, then, the public sympathy expressed for the president by liberals makes sense yet it remains jarring nevertheless considering how often Democrats extoll the existential threat that Trump represents.
Recall these are the same people who rehabilitated the image of George W. Bush—who, among other things, wrecked the global economy; initiated two illegal, forever wars in the Middle East that have killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and thousands of American troops; explicitly campaigned on a constitutional amendment outlawing same-sex marriage in 2004; and established the post-9/11 surveillance state that remains with us to this day—in breakneck speed. (Bush was also the progenitor of Trump’s ongoing war against the Post Office in his effort to undermine mail-in voting.)
To reiterate, for this variety of liberal, aesthetic triumphs substance and civility over consequence, and we’ve already seen a glimpse of mainstream liberalism’s inevitable rehabilitation of Donald Trump’s post-presidential image—below, you’ll see MSNBC weekend anchor Alex Witt expressing her view that the now-infected Trump has a ‘gentler tone’ and sounded ‘heartfelt.’
As unthinkable as it may seem now, assuming Donald Trump survives his brush with the coronavirus and enters the history books as a one-term president, one day you might turn on the TV to see Ellen and Dubya palling around with Trump, too.
Get ready!