Covid 19, Trump 0

by David Benjamin

“Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus. Coronavirus. They’re politicizing it. And this is their new hoax.” 

— Donald Trump

WASHINGTON, 4 November 2020 — In the wake of President Donald Trump’s crushing defeat yesterday, pundits and analysts are speculating cautiously that Trump’s “base” of rabidly loyal followers might been been decisively reduced by the effects of the coronavirus.

Some observers surmise that Trump might have doomed his campaign for re-election in late April, when he boldly declared that he had personally outwitted the virus, after which he placed it inside a hermetically sealed Mason jar in his wall-safe — behind a 30×30-foot portrait of himself receiving the Ten Commandments from God — at his Mar-a-Lago “southern White House.” 

Trump announced his conquest and containment of the Covi-19 virus at a rally of 16,000 screaming, coughing, high-fiving zealots at a mega-rally in Wheeling, West Virginia. Trump hailed that rally as his “comeback” after “media hysteria” had forced hm to cancel thirty days worth of campaign events, in Mach and April, that had stretched from Biloxi to Spokane.

“Enough already with the Chicken Little FAKE NEWS,” he roared to his swaying, braying faithful. “I have cleansed America. China is in lockdown. I stopped caravans of contaminated Italians and infected Frenchmen in their tracks. I’m ba-a-a-a-ack! And I’m never going away again, because I have healed you. HEALED! Because I know more about germs and sickness and pestilence than anybody. My uncle went to MIT. So, I’m tellin‘ ya: This corolla thing, trust me. You’re healed. It’s over! I deported it and it’s on its way back to Niconduras, along with all those anchor babies and MS-13 rapists! All that’s left of this phony virus is a hoax. It’s a disgrace. One big Democrat hoax. Believe me. ONE BIG HOAX!”

The phrase, “One Big Hoax,” became a popular chant at Trump mega-rallies, soon morphing, without irony, into a de facto slogan for Trump’s re-election. 

Most sectors of American society gradually learned to cope with Covid-19, cancelling large gathering, postponing weddings, staying indoors as much possible, taking the coronavirus tests that became widely available by May, wearing masks and gloves when appropriate. The spread of the illness began to decline by mid-summer. This proved true even after Secretary of Health and Human Services, Alex Azar, suddenly ordered the dispersal of all personnel at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta to four new regional centers, in Needles, California, Fort Smith, Arkansas, Panama City, Florida, and a large pale-green RV parked behind the Walmart in Rapid City, South Dakota.

By June, the virus had shrunk to a number of “hot spots” and “vulnerable populations,” both of which correlated eerily with locations and congregations at presidential campaign mega-rallies.

“VD — viral denial,” said a former official of the National Institutes of Health (a “deep state” agency disbanded in May by executive order), “eventually became the lead factor in contracting the virus.” By late summer, new Covid-19 infections in the U.S. concentrated more and more among people who believed the president’s increasingly forceful assertions that the virus was gone — “Outa here, kaput! Okay? Trust me!” — and probably never existed. As thousands of Trump loyalists grew sick, they typically attributed their ill health to other causes, ranging from heart disease to “a secret mass poisoning campaign engineered by Hillary Clinton from her secret death-lab in Chappaqua.”

It was Trump himself, speaking at a mega-rally of 68,000 followers in Tuscaloosa, who fingered his 2016 Democratic rival as the murderess of thousands, calling her “the Lucy Borgia of the Democrat conspiracy.”

The Tuscaloosa rally was the first at which Trump did not make his signature entrance through a phalanx of fans, but was raised to the rostrum on a special elevator beneath the stage. From that date on, he spewed his incitements from inside a 360-degree circle of teleprompter panels. He also began to wear, on his famous midget hands, personally tailored flesh-colored latex surgical gloves. 

Throughout the campaign, as Trump pooh-poohed the “corona-hoax,” responses from the crowd were not just the familiar chants of “Lock her up!”, “Send them back!” and “Ten more years!” but also a constant growl of violent coughing and gross-me-out sputum-hawking. This discordant note was drowned out only when the president shouted “God bless America!” and descended magically beneath the stage amidst a disorienting light show and a crescendo of stertorous cheers. 

Tuscaloosa was the first rally, also, when the last to leave were the supine and unconscious. EMTs in hazmat suits quietly attended these mysteriously stricken believers, who were swiftly removed, direct to quarantine, by a fleet of unmarked ambulances. 

Such scenes might explain the alarmingly high mortality rate that has been reported, often without corroboration, among Trumpist rallygoers. “They’re a little older than the average bear. Perhaps more than most folks, they tend toward brown lungs, weak tickers, hypertension, morbid obesity, too much to drink, and piss-poor anger management. Plus, a lot of them think they can pray their way past a deadly disease. Put these risk factors together and you’re looking at the ideal coronavirus host. Then, you pile 50,000 of these potential carriers into a covered stadium with bad ventilation. You get them all screaming and spouting, hugging and kissing, salivating like mad dogs and, I mean, God help us. You’re talking about one gigantic flowering, festering Petri dish!”

In the latter days of the campaign, with outbreaks of Covid-19 following Trump rallies around the country like a road-show revival of “Typhoid Mary: The Musical,” epidemiologists were pressed by the media to connect the resulting morbidity clusters directly to the barnstorming president. 

But these experts chose silence, reluctantly. They could not speak because medical officials were banned — by Trump’s 1,759th Sharpie-intensive executive order — from sharing any data related even indirectly to Covid-19. A trickle of information came from Trump’s personal physician, Dr. Ronny Jackson, who regularly reminded reporters that the virus was a fraud perpetrated by a dead doctor in a fictional Hubei valley called Shangri-La. Fox News pitched in by comparing Trump rallies to concerts by Elvis Presley in the 1950s and the Beatles in the ’60s, when all the bodies left behind on the floor were hale and hearty fans who’d been so overcome by rock ’n’ roll that they fainted, later to be attended by emergency medical technicians and spirited away in ambulances.

In the 24 hours since Trump’s shocking defeat, it has become clear that many of the president’s rallygoers were afflicted with more than a case of the vapors. “He didn’t get enough votes,” said president-elect Joe Biden, “because a hell of a lot of his voters were dead. He brought ’em together. They spread the virus. They dropped like flies.”

In the wake of the election, one lingering question is why, after being the heart and soul of countless mega-rallies where the Covid-19 virus blew and drifted among throngs of medically compromised geezers like an invisible toxic miasma, did the president go completely unscathed. He, too, is a geezer. But he never even coughed.

“I think it’s that orange stuff he sprays on his face ten times a day,” said one fan who survived several rallies. “Nothing could penetrate that shit.”