And a Plague Shall Cover the Land of Trump

‘Reality bursts the Trumpworld bubble’, as the New York Times’ headline put it. ‘The one-time reality-TV star has run smack into scientific reality’, says CNN. This might sound modern and sciency, but it is little different to when priests of old insisted that visitations of the pox were a case of people’s sinful behaviour crashing into God’s judgement. And it isn’t only Trump who has sinned, of course; so have his allegedly clueless, scientifically illiterate supporters. Much of the ‘karmic retribution’ commentary sees them as being reprimanded by the plague as much as Trump. It is Trumpworld that might finally be aroused to normalcy by Trump’s sickness, in the words of the NYT. Hopefully Trump’s smiting will be a ‘wake-up call’ to his supporters, says CNN with typical sniffyness. ‘Perhaps Trump’s illness will… be seen to have provided a much-needed national wake-up call’, says Geoffrey Kabaservice in the Guardian. Lord knows, the masses of ‘Trumpworld’ need a wake-up call, those maskless, expert-questioning brain sinners. They are to the technocratic, ‘evidence’-led rule of the new clerisy what the deviants of Gomorrah were to God’s writ.

CNN cut to the chase in one of its commentaries on Trump’s Covid diagnosis. The true sickness in America, it said, is the ‘sickness of hyper-partisanship’. And of course Trump is most responsible for this diseased form of politics which ‘too often elevates cruelty and justifies lies, through a vision of politics as a version of civil war’. Covid might be a serious virus, but what America really needs is ‘healing from hyper-partisanship… if we’re going to see something resembling real healing in the American body politic’.

This is what’s really going on here: Covid’s judgment, this plague-like retribution, is being marshalled by the old technocratic elites as a cudgel against what are presumed to be Trumpworld’s chief moral errors. The scepticism about lockdown, the broader doubting that experts have all the answers to our moral and political dilemmas, their temerity to clarify the huge political differences between ordinary people and the woke elites (what CNN refers to as ‘the sickness of hyper-partisanship’) – this is what the plague is apparently admonishing. Isn’t that funny? That a random virus should give retributive voice to the pre-existing views and prejudices of the liberal elites? The progressive view embodied by Sontag – that disease is ‘not a curse, not a punishment, not an embarrassment – without meaning’ – has been replaced by the view of Covid as lethal reproachment for the sins of Trumpism, the ills of politics, and the thoughtcrimes of dissenters in 21st-century America.

Strikingly, this isn’t the first time that Biblical metaphors have been deployed to chastise Trump and his supporters. Just a couple of weeks ago, the fires on the west coast of the US were heralded as heated punishment for Trumpworld’s thoughtcrimes against science. These flames were the direct consequence of Trump and his supporters’ temerity in questioning climate-change alarmism, we were told. In mid-September the New York Times – which then viewed fire rather than plague as the master reprimander of the inhabitants of Trumpworld – discussed the fires in the context of Trump once again ‘rejecting science’. Joe Biden went further, calling Trump a ‘climate arsonist’. Trump’s doubt about the manmade climate-change narrative will set America ‘ablaze’, said Biden. Suburban neighbourhoods will be ‘flooded out’, suburbs will be ‘blown away in superstorms’, and homes will be ‘burned in wildfires’.

And there you have it, in terrifying black and white, in explicit Biblical writ: if Trump stays in power, America will be visited by floods, fires and plagues; death will come to your door; pestilence will be visited upon the land. This pre-modernism among those who fancy themselves as modern – as enlightened and ‘woke’ – is striking. It speaks to their own profound inability to come up with a vision for the US that might inspire voters, so instead they must invoke a PC version of Leviticus and warn people that if you don’t choose us then you will be consumed by hellfire and disease. And it confirms what they find so distasteful about so-called Trumpworld – the fact that it has dared to question expert authority, pushed aside the liberal elites who believe that they are the only people sensible enough to rule, and propagated the apparently outrageous idea that ordinary people (eurgh) have something to contribute to the discussion about how we deal with Covid-19 and other crises.

This is what lurks behind the irrational, anti-Enlightened treatment of Covid as a metaphor for the sicknesses of 21st-century America – the desperation of the bruised old elites to regain their authority over a people whom they view as too dumb, vulgar and destructive to govern their own lives. Now that’s sick.