National Schadenfreude Week

by David Benjamin

“Are we sure? Can we trust that? A man who so frequently and flamboyantly plays the victim, and who has been prophylactically compiling ways to explain away or dispute a projected election loss to Joe Biden, is now being forced off the campaign trail, which will be a monster of an excuse.”

—Frank Bruni, New York Times

MADISON, Wis. — As newscasters dutifully intone their thoughts and crocodile prayers over the coronavirus that has finally caught up to Don and FLOTUS, and express their dearest hopes that he will enjoy a “swift and complete” recovery, well… come on, man. There are millions of us Trump-weary Covid-dodgers out here, breathing carbon dioxide behind our N95s and asking, with a secret guilty thrill, the $750 question: “Could it be? Could this thing kill him?”

It’s difficult to stifle the inkling that, if this contagion were to end prematurely the most bizarre presidency on earth since Idi Amin in Uganda, it would sing a searing note of poetic justice for the 209,000 souls who have died while Trump stood by, preening, blustering, and denying the plague’s voracity.

If — heaven forbid, yada yada! — Trump were to suddenly shuffle off this mortal coil, leaving Mike Pence to keep his throne warm ’til the election settles the  succession, he might indeed ascend to heights of prestige that would have been inconceivable had he continued, alive and whiny, strutting and fretting his endless hour upon the national stage. He would attain the rare and sacrosanct status of martyrdom, morphing ironically into a holy and beloved prophet cut down by pagan science but elevated by his ventilated demise, like Jesus ascending — as his apostles stood agog — to the right hand of Fred the Father. 

I have to acknowledge that entertaining such thoughts is morbid and spiteful, an embarrassing mimicry of Trump’s own bloodless pathology. But really, is there anyone who hasn’t entertained, if only in passing, this mortal prospect?

Perhaps we could feel less crummy about such wishfulness if Trump just got terribly sick and had to spend a month or so in the ICU at Walter Reed. If we were to see him on TV, filmed through a gap in his oxygen tent, stripped of his Clairol pompadour, bald as a turkey vulture, scrubbed of his spray-on tangerine flakiness and gasping for breath, this might be schadenfreude enough. We could rejoice in his gradual, excruciating recovery and his months of convalescence staring out at the 18th green from the patio overlooking his insolvent New Jersey golf course.

As I ponder this dire moment in presidential health, a parody of Keats’ bleak lines creeps mischievous to mind: “Ah, what can ail thee, wretched lout, Alone and palely festering;/ The conk is withered from your gourd,/ And no Hope hicks…”

With the White House Covid-19 watch now begun, perhaps Congress — in honor of everyone who has yearned four years for just an ounce of Trumpian comeuppance — should declare the next seven days “National Schadenfreude Week.” Maybe Adam Schiff should be chosen to nail the announcement to the White House door. 

I doubt that such irreverence would be possible — and certainly not acceptable — if this regime had not egged America’s cynicism to its current apex. For example, Times columnist Frank Bruni, with all due apologies, posed the bizarre possibility that Trump, not infected at all, might be faking it. A welder in Waukesha named Josh Gunderson put the issue more bluntly: “Maybe he’s doing this to have Mike Pence take over so he could pardon him after the election.” 

Elliptically, Bruni suggests Trump might be faking so that next week, bursting miraculously from Walter Reed, he could boast that he’d licked the disease and recovered instantly because he’s the healthiest human anyone ever saw. By Friday, he’d be in Green Bay or Tuscaloosa, seething with antibodies, spewing droplets of lifesaving immunity among a herd of 20,000 raving, chanting, adoring zealots.

This would good fun and great theater, fully in keeping with Trump’s tradition of malign mendacity. But really, could Trump stand to pretend weakness — sick, woozy, pathetic — for even a day?

Better he should start to offset the malicious glee of his Democratic foes by cultivating the Pity Vote. He’ll be filmed voluminously on Fox News lying bravely abed (in contrast to his more familiar habit of lying on his feet), drinking gallons of orange juice with a remdesivir chaser, autographing proclamations, tweeting a torrent of self-pity and launching a blizzard of hashtags: #InfectedByAntifa, #ImmuneByHalloween, #ChinaDidItNukeWuhan, #BidenSickerThanMe, #IShouldntHaveLetHopeSitOnMyLapAndBlowInMyEar…

According to existing data and considering the formidable medical forces available to the president, the odds of his survival are overwhelming. He might even be able to ruin another “debate” before Election Day. However, speaking of medical forces, there’s a sour note. Dr. Scott Atlas, official White House witch doctor and resident quack, told Fox News Friday morning that he expects Trump and the first lady to make a “complete, full and rapid recovery.”

From a Fox News radiologist who advocates “herd immunity” — better known as “survival of the fittest” — for a hundred million folks with pre-existing medical vulnerabilities, this “full and rapid” stuff sounds eerily like the kiss of death. 

Whatever the outcome at Walter Reed, it’s going to be necessary for the Steve Miller/Vladimir Putin vortex to swiftly conjure a conspiracist whopper that somehow blames Trump’s sickness on his legion of enemies.

For example…

1) Perhaps, just offhand, the gang at Breitbart, Fox News and InfoWars could dredge up breathtaking evidence that a Chinaman infected with Wuhan Flu by the diabolical Dr. Fu Manchu and parachuted into the Duluth MAGA rally from Xi Jinping’s personal Lear jet, snuck up on Hope Hicks, pinned her against the American flag and French-kissed her ’til she fainted.

Or, 2) there was a Muslim saboteur, recruited by Barack Hussein Obama, disguised as a cute blonde makeup girl backstage at the Presidential Debacle in Cleveland, who ambushed Donald Trump’s shiny nose — just seconds before Chris Wallace dropped the puck — with a powder puff that had been seeded with billions of tiny, bloodthirsty coronavirus gremlins.

Or, 3) (my favorite), The Tarmac of the Damned. Just as Trump, along with Steve and Hope, Melania, Ivanka and Jared, all climbed off Air Force One this week in Cleveland or maybe Duluth, Hillary Clinton’s top-secret radar-proof “stealth” helicopter — developed by her husband during his days of smuggling cocaine and underage sex slaves into Arkansas — hovered unheard overhead. Hillary then opened up spray-jets that issued a fine, toxic mist of SARS-CoV-2 over everyone below on the tarmac, infecting them so insidiously that they had no idea that Hillary, the angel of death, was up above, cackling maniacally and eating the liver of an abducted infant with some fava beans and a nice chianti.