President Trump made his bed, now he is lying in it
FormerUS President Donald Trump. Photo/TASS
Daelynn Moore, Katelyn Balakir
President Donald Trump was admitted to the Walter Reed Medical Center Friday following recommendations from his physician, Dr Sean Conley.
This development came 24 hours after the president announced both himself and first lady Melania had tested positive for Covid-19.
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Trump now refers to the virus as Covid-19 rather than the ‘Wuhan virus’ and other variations.
Suddenly, members of the Republican Party demand your unrequited empathy and ask you to realise the severity of the disease.
Many Americans do not feel compelled to express sympathy for the president and his party, who exacerbated the pandemic by ignoring its existence as a legitimate threat while also repeatedly putting their own health at risk.
During the first presidential debate Tuesday, Trump commented on Covid-19 and masks.
“I don’t wear a mask like him. Every time you see him, he’s got a mask.
He could be speaking 200 feet away and he shows up with the biggest mask I’ve ever seen,” Trump said, referencing his opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden.
Aside from the president trivialising preventive measures to fight the coronavirus that killed more than 200,000 Americans and 1,000,000 people worldwide, the insult was in poor taste.
It is clear Trump tried to emasculate Biden because he took preventive measures against Covid-19.
The debate was about policy as much as it was about establishing masculinity in a way similar to teenage boys comparing their manhood in the locker room.
Trump attempted to make Biden out to be less of a man and a coward for wearing a mask.
The first family arrived too late to be tested prior to the debate and refused to follow the mask mandate throughout the night.
Unsurprisingly and in a bout of dramatic irony, Trump tested positive for Covid-19 just a few days later.
Although he claims to wear a mask when necessary, it seems he did not deem most of his public events this year as appropriate occasions.
First, he only wore a mask four times in total; his cumulative rally attendance surpassed 50,000 people (excluding 10 rallies where attendance was not directly reported or instances where a Trump campaign stop was not classified as a rally explicitly).
Third, while masks were available at all of official rallies, reports detail supporters rarely wore a mask and were often discouraged from doing so by the president’s remarks.
The timeline does not detail events hosted by the White House, primarily the Rose Garden event held a little over a week ago to formally nominate Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.
It is difficult to feel sympathy for a man directly responsible for dismissing early warnings of Covid-19. Trump’s diagnosis is a form of punishment in and of itself.
However, it will never allow him to feel the pain of the hundreds of thousands of Americans who watched their loved ones die in the hallways of overcrowded hospitals, heard their mother was loaded onto a freezer truck or said goodbye to their grandfather over a cell phone.
Instead, the president will rest comfortably in his six-room suite at Walter Reed Medical Center and receive arguably the best care in the world executed by a team of more than 14 physicians and nurses.
Trump is now facing the consequences of his own inaction. Acknowledging this fact does not require you to actively wish him ill. Rather, it allows you to empathize with every American held captive by the debilitating jaws of Covid-19 while the lifeguard watched from a distance. — The writers are students at the Indiana University in Bloominton, Indiana
