You're gonna hear from a lot of people today imploring you to offer sympathy, thoughts, and prayers to President Donald Trump and Christmas-hating wife Melania since they have tested positive for COVID-19. You're gonna hear how Democrats should show how above politics we are when it comes to the human pain of our opponents. And that's all well and good, but we all have to make our own decisions here, and my initial response is "Yeah, fuck that."
See, there is nothing wrong with hearing Trump is sick and hoping that he suffers. It's a very human thing to do. We don't have to be better angels all the time. Frankly, it is wholly rational to me that when you hear that a rapist, racist, and con man whose evil and narcissistic actions have led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and the suffering of untold millions and who has torn children away from their parents while holding people running for their lives in squalor, disease, and torment and whose response to the suffering of others is apathy, if not a hope for more suffering and who has pledged to undermine the very nation and people he is supposed to lead, tearing them apart and wrecking their institutions just to assure he stays in power and whose entire life has been devoted to bathing in the misery of others, even mocking the ill and the disabled, and whose arrogance about the pandemic has left the nation battered and lost and who refused to follow basic medical advice, dismissing it outright and insulting those who did follow it, and did I mention rapist? well, I'm saying it again, yeah, when you hear that guy and his enabling, cruel wife are sick with a virus that might kill them, it's completely okay to say, "I hope you motherfuckers suffer."
And, goddamn, I wanna be able to just say that and feel the warm glow of schadenfreude, the hot blast of karma, pour over me like oil from the supple, strong hands of a skilled masseur. But I can't. It's not that easy. If Trump had had a heart attack or a stroke or if he had gotten cancer, I could have easily gone all Nelson Muntz and moved on.
Because, see, I think about all the people around him. Not his cabinet or any of his advisers. Those fuckers deserve to drown in their own fluids. I'm talking about the people who might have had the virus spread to them, like the staff at the White House - the people serving the president and his family, the lifers, the butlers, maids, and ushers, the people who bring Trump his Diet Cokes and Big Macs. I'm thinking about the people who work at Trump's Bedminster, NJ, golf resort, where he stupidly and greedily went for a fundraiser yesterday even after finding out that his aide Hope Hicks had tested positive for coronavirus. I'm thinking about the crews on Air Force One and Marine One, as well as Trump's Secret Service agents and members of the military at the White House. And I'm thinking about their families, their elderly relatives, their sick relatives.
This is not to mention how much this whole goddamned debacle weakens a nation already weakened by Trump's abject failure to confront the pandemic. If both Trump or Biden get too sick or die, their party's nomination doesn't simply go to their vice presidents. The whole election is thrown into turmoil and, with it, whatever sanity the nation had left. It's enraging to think of how easy it would have been for him to have just worn his fucking mask and told others to do the same. Instead, he turned it into a political statement, a signal of alpha masculinity to go maskless. He deserves our endless contempt, yes, at the very least that, because of the contempt he has for all of us.
Yet I can't compartmentalize Trump's suffering now from the suffering he's caused and from the suffering of the others he may have made ill. Every laugh at his misery is also laughing at their misery. If you can do it, more power to you.
However, I don't see this as a moment for a redemption arc in this terrible time we're damned to live through. Assuming he survives (since, sorry, most do, even with comorbidities), Trump won't come out of this changed and demanding action. He'll go on being the same vile cock he always has been. So when we destroy him at the ballot box, I will luxuriate in his pain.
