The Reign of the Virus King is Nearing its End

The virus king has changed us. In ways that we may not realize or acknowledge, it has changed us; restricted our habits, made us re-evaluate our life’s routines; the way we socialize, the way we approach each other, the way we move, the way we think. It has changed the way we were. 

Whenever we try to “normalize” our existence in this pandemic, to live the way we did, the coronavirus reminds us – sometimes swiftly, other times subversively – that it wears the crown; that it is king, with the power to shut down the world—Corona, from the Latin for crown.

Anyone who fails to heed the king’s power can, and have, died—more than 1.6 million worldwide since its arrival nearly one year ago, moving steadily toward 2 million, and beyond. and growing exponentially. 

 

The coronavirus disease, named Covid-19, dedicated to the year its reign of infection began. In the eleven months since, more than 72 million around the globe have been infected, more than 16 million in this country including more than 300,000 dead. The counter keeps counting.

 

To reign, the virus king needs us. It can’t travel alone; we are its unwitting companions. It is most infectious – and stealthy – coming from the asymptomatic as water droplets expelled from the mouth and nostrils. 

 

Droplets fly like projectiles—the more we talk, the louder we talk (or shout), the more droplets expel and enter a non-infected person’s mouth or nostrils or eyes or hang in the air long enough for someone close by to inhale. 

 

We can curtail the virus’s power – not provide subjects for infection – but we could never defeat the king. Everyone must wear masks, keep socially distant; wash hands. Frequently. Warm humid weather appears to slow infection rates, but the king conquers in cold, dry weather. Particularly indoors. Wear a mask. Keep your distance.

 

Masks and physical distance protects you/me/us from the virus. We know this from reading about outbreaks in bars or clubs or dorms or restaurants or weddings or funerals or political rallies. Wherever the mask-less mass, the virus spreads exponentially, and kills indiscriminately. 

 

This is how we can subdue the virus, how we can save lives, even our own: wear the mask, keep your distance, test and trace, test and trace, test and trace. Get the vaccine.

 

Seven varieties of coronaviruses infect humans, this one has a will that no one can bend, not even the cold-blooded lizard kings who think they alone have the power to control the virus by denying its existence (hoax); the virus overwhelms to shows otherwise.

 

Along political fault lines are mask wearers and mask refusers. Refusers, infected with heavy loads of viral disinformation spread by lizard kings and their minions, are the virus king’s loyal soldiers—ignorant, defiant, they willingly, knowingly perpetuate infection and death. No words of empathy for the weak; no sympathy for those struggling to care for the sick and the dying. 

 

The virus changed everything. Shapes our daily lives in ways that we may have once considered as our future; never our time. People work, teach, learn and generally engage in life remotely. 

 

Friends and families visit and grieve remotely. 

 

We want to laugh, speak loud, hold one another, stand close to one another—to yell, to scream, to greet with a kiss, a hug, a hand grip; to bid adieu in long, warm embrace. The virus changed emotions and expressions and gestures to something missing—our human touch. 

 

Virologists assure us the pandemic’s end is near, effective vaccines are now on the way, but inoculation for all is months away. So, we wait for immunity; we wait for the king’s last day. 

Echoes from the Age of Fascism

In early October, a little less than a month before the 2020 election, President Donald Trump returned to the White House from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where for three days he battled infection from Covid-19.

 

After the Marine One helicopter set down on the South Lawn, Trump emerged wearing a mask, and marched to the White House portico. He occasionally waved or gave thumbs up to news reporters who yelled questions about his health. At the portico, he climbed the stairs to the balcony, posed for the cameras, removed his mask, and jutted his chin. 

 

Supporters viewed this as a sign of strength for a 74-year-old president treated – at one point on oxygen – for a disease that he had been telling Americans was no worse than the flu. However, some historians and journalist were reminded of the old news reels of Benito Mussolini.

Perhaps a more accurate comparison is of Adolf Hitler’s portrayal of himself at the 1934 Nazi Party Congress at Nuremberg that German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl directed for the 1935 film, “Triumph of the Will.” Either case, Trump, like Hitler, uses the image-making medium effectively.

Nineteenth century American writer Mark Twain said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Today, history echoes off the walls once erected by Europe’s fascist dictators, Mussolini and Hitler.

 

From Belarus to Russia to the Philippines to Brazil, the strongman has risen—modern-day versions of the 1930s fascist dictators. Most rose to power in these (ostensibly) democracies partly because of economic instability, but largely because of weak structures within their systems of government that opened the way for anti-democrat minorities to block democratic majorities from maintaining the compromise and consensus necessary to keep democracy viable.

 

Despite how Donald Trump characterizes his position as president, he was elected in a democracy that requires an oath-sworn adherence to the Constitution and to the laws of the land. No one, regardless of their station (or whatever memo a Justice Department official writes), is above law. 

 

In February 2016, as I followed the primary season and watched and listened as candidate Trump dispatch political friend and foe alike with vindictive barbs, character assassinations, and lies; as I listened to his divisive-fueled rhetoric that left no race or religion – except white supremacists – un-scorched at his campaign rallies, I became increasingly concerned by the national political apparatus’s failure or unwillingness to reign in Trump, who was urging incitement.   

 

Around that same time, I traveled to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. as a chaperone for my son’s middle school class. The first part of the museum provides significant details to Hitler and the Nazi Party’s rise to power.

 

Until then, I had not connected Trump’s rhetoric or his campaign rallies, where his supporters cheered every divisive, provocative remark he made, with Hitler’s rise in Germany in the late 1920s and early ‘30s. Hitler analogies for politicians found distasteful was nonsensical and not comparative. 

 

Yet, when I left the Holocaust Museum that day, I was alarmed. I returned home and wrote about my concerns in my blog. Hitler was a monster, and no one, particularly Americans, want to believe they could support and elect someone so horrible, but, in a recent re-read of that blog post, America did just that in 2016. 

 

Trump’s lifetime of behaving monstrously toward his school mates, family, women (Hitler also had issues with his familyand women), employees, vendors, contractors and anyone else who approaches him is recorded in countless lawsuits the last 40 years, and more recently in books whose authors range from his former consigliere Michael Cohen to his niece Mary Trump, a psychologist.

 

However, not many voters apparently were informed or willing to be informed, about the man who presented himself – following eight years of a popular Black, conservative-leaning centrist president – as the savior of white America. They believed he would make the country great again. 

 

Trump has spent his entire life selling himself, and most everyone who bought his sales pitch got burned in one way or another. Nearly 63 million voters bought his pitch four years ago; nearly 10 million more bought it in 2020. Trump lost the presidency, largely for his penchant for fascism, but Trumpism thrives amid 72 million Americans who voted for him. 

 

During his 2016 campaign, and then his presidency, Trump, like Hitler, appealed mostly to the “low-educated” voter, those in the working class who know a hard day’s work, how it wears and tears the body and tires the mind, and for wages that are just enough to keep them living but never enough to get them ahead. They provided the base he needed to control the Republican Party. 

 

Like Trump and his tax issues, Hitler had tax problems. He never paid them. Both men use/used the law and the courts to hide their cheating, particularly from their supporters. 

 

Trump trademarked his name countless times; Hitler also copyrighted his name and image, which made him enormously wealthy. Hitler and Trump gained popular familiarity, or notoriety, with their bombastic media presence, in particular through their books; for Hitler, it was “Mein Kampf”; for Trump, “Art of the Deal.”

 

Trump and Hitler portray themselves not as politicians (though both are/were skilled), but as plain-spoken men who told their supporters they alone could solve the problems that the government so far had not: Hitler: “The Strong Man is Mightiest Alone.” Trump: “I alone can fix it.”

 

In the eyes of their supporters they are almost supermen. A look at the images supporters made of them is telling: Hitler as Teutonic Knight; Trump as Rambo.  

 

What these comparisons illustrate is that both men capably filled a void created by weaknesses in the political and governmental systems. For Hitler, it was Germany’s failing Weimar Republic, where no single party controlled the Reichstag, that essentially allowed him to assume power without a majority of the vote. For Trump, who lost the popular vote to Hilary Clinton by nearly 3 million votes, it was the archaic Electoral College that won him the presidency.

 

For many reasons, in particular the weakly written and poorly followed Weimar Constitution that Hitler managed to subvert by invoking Article 48, which allowed him to assume dictatorial powers, the German government was unable to stabilize the nation economically and socially. As a result, Hitler blamed democracy for the troubles and suggested that the Nazi Party was the only political party Germany needed. Just enough voters agreed.

 

In the United States, Trump’s candidacy arrived as a crisis in the old order of things had reached a crescendo, largely because the Republican Party had come to believe that power, not shared governance, was paramount to an agenda they could not sell to most Americans. 

 

Through most of President Barack Obama’s two terms in office, congressional Republicans refused to work withDemocrats or the president. GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, unlike any of his predecessors, Republican or Democrat, vowed at the start of Obama’s first term to stop Obama’s agenda. When it came to Trump, who vanquished establishment Republicans in the primaries, GOP leaders lead by McConnell chose to support him for political gain—a packed federal judiciary of conservative judges including a U.S. Supreme Court.  

 

Until that moment, our democracy embraced compromise to ensure that government effectively worked to provide needed services and legislation. Instead, from Democratic President Bill Clinton to Obama, America routinely experienced government shut downs because the GOP refused to work toward compromise; the Supreme Court decided the 2000 presidential election because partisanship interfered with vote counting in Florida; and the endless Middle East wars.

 

Trump compares to Hitler only in that both men knew that media, through which they would easily capture the loyalty of a frustrated working class, was the path to power. Both used books and broadcasting to reach that goal in eras when the political structures were failing because voters no longer believed the experienced politicians could do the job.

 

Like Hitler, Trump relies on thuggery and parliamentary maneuvering to hold onto the presidency, which he views through an authoritarian lens as power. His call to the “Proud Boys” at this year’s first Presidential Debate was reminiscent of Hitler’s bullyboys, the violent Brown Shirts.

 

Trump refuses to accept that in a democracy the presidency is a powerful position from which to lead, not a leadership position from which to wield power. Trump does not disrupt democratic principles, he destroys them. His refusal to concede electoral defeat and lying about massive voter fraud that he never proved brought violence to the streets of Washington in a post-election rally. 

 

While Trump expresses a deep and abiding admiration for dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, he is not a dictator—yet. 

 

In a democracy, only the people allow a dictatorship. And then it’s no longer a democracy. 

Our Democracy: The Moment Between the ‘Right Time and Right Place’

Near the end of “Chinatown,” detective Jake Gittes confronts LA powerbroker Noah Cross, having learned he raped his own daughter and murdered his business partner for lust and power. Cross responds with perhaps one of the truest lines in film and literature:

“I don't blame myself. You see, Mr. Gittes, most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and right place, they're capable of anything.”

 

President Donald Trump had met that moment between the “right time and right place” often in his life and from all accounts chose the worst of himself. As the loser of the 2020 election, he has stayed true to form. 

 

Unfortunately, senior congressional Republicans have chosen to follow him in this post-election miasma of claiming, without an iota of evidence, widespread election fraud and criminal behavior by Democratic candidates and Republican officials who, in their moment between the “right time and right place,” chose to carry out their sworn duties without partisan influence. 

 

To avoid Trump’s wrath while he thrashes about trying to burn down the house of democracy and they cling tenuously to power in the Senate, Republicans – led by Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy – are providing the matches.

 

As writer Anne Applebaum so aptly described in a recent piece in The Atlantic, they are collaborating with Trump and Trumpism, much in the way the Vichy French collaborated with their Nazi occupiers. That’s a hard truth for Americans who believe their country is better than this, and it is, but right now, it isn’t, and that is dangerous.

Democracy is a shared experience, difficult as that may be for some to conceive, that requires informed, committed voters, finding ways to give small donations (dollars or time) to preferred cause or candidate, participating in the community, as volunteer or elected official. 

 

Moreover, it requires the maturity to accept an election loss, give the winner a chance, and work to fight another day, not with lies and character assassination, but with ideas that would appeal to enough people to win an election. 

 

It seems rather simple, but that is what our democracy is all about; people governing themselves by choosing elected officials, from president to local tax collector, to provide representation, vision and leadership for an equitable society that provides for everyone, not just the select few. 

 

That may not have been exactly what the founding fathers imagined 244 years ago, but they knowingly left a document with such broad concepts as to allow future American generations to re-imagine the American experience in order to ensure the true meaning of justice for all.

 

For four trying years, that hard fought-for system, imperfect as it seems, was torn apart by forces bent toward fascism. In 2016, the nation heard Trump’s call that “I alone” could address the problems of America. It was his “right time and right place” moment; the political system had been in gridlock for eight years, technology brought the seemingly chaotic world into our smart phones. Change, good and bad, was upturning life as many people, particularly white people, once knew it. Fear and anger in the country was palatable. 

 

Trump chose the strongman rule, and nearly half of America accepted it, but in 2020, a majority of voters realized his was the lure of a siren, that he actually wanted to dismantle our democracy, and rejected him with the most votes cast for a challenger, 78 million, and against an incumbent.

 

Yet, 72 million did vote for Trump, despite showing that he was incapable of leading an effort to control the pandemic, confessing to knowing about the dangers of the coronavirus before Covid-19 exploded and took more than 240,000 lives and infected 10 million Americans, and contracting the disease himself while telling the public it was no worse than the flu. 

 

According to polls, many of those who voted for him did not blame him for these failures. Indeed, he did not blame himself for failing to act on the responsibility that was clearly his alone.

 

In the autumn of 1936, as the popularity of fascism grew in Germany and Italy, a play opened in theatres across the United States, “It Can’t Happen Here,” based on the Sinclair Lewis novel. It warned of fascism occurring in America.

 

Eighty years later, in 2016, fascism, in the guise of Trumpism, arrived at America’s doorstep and has been trying to happen here, battering the pillars of our constitutional democracy: a free press, the rule of law, fair elections. 

 

With less than two months before Biden becomes president, Trump and his allies have stepped up their attacks, making endless false accusations about the voting process and about anyone who supports the undisputed outcome that was arrived at fairly and legally. 

 

Congressional Republicans, like the Vichy, are showing Americans, in particular 71 million, that elections are to be challenged without evidence of wrongdoing; that the presidency isn’t about the nation, but about one man who flouts the rule of law, and about one party that allows him. 

 

They may be doing this with a wink and a nod to give themselves an edge with their constituents, knowing President-elect Joe Biden did legitimately win the election, but that’s political gamesmanship that is lost on many Americans. 

 

We may yet dodge a bullet aimed at the heart of our democracy, but Trump and his Republican enablers already have done much to wound this nation and its democratic institutions.

 

Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris – carried into office by a diverse coalition of voters led by African Americans, Latinos, South Asians and Native Americans – face an immense job, from getting the pandemic under control to re-building the economy. 

 

Their most important job, though, is showing a nation divided by tribalism (Trump won the white vote) how to again live in a democracy together. Biden and Harris are about to face their moment between the “right time and right place.” We hope that they chose the best of themselves. 

 

(Image: Library of Congress)