Donald Trump has learnt nothing from his brush with COVID-19

It seems like it’s been a near-constant refrain over the last three-plus years, but the past week in American politics was really beyond the pale.

COVID-19 has been tearing through the White House — which has more active cases than several countries — and it all starts with President Donald Trump. It’s become clear that the President was responsible for a “superspreader event” in which he and several top aides, US Senators, and countless other high-level officials became infected with the virus.

In the President’s case, it’s also become clear that his was a severe case, requiring several different, quite robust treatments. However, as with so many other things, he not only disregarded his circumstances, but also put other people in grave danger. This has been a running theme with Trump since well before his days as President, but it’s never carried anywhere near the level of consequences.

The perfect example comes from his time at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. The White House staged a photo-op of the President “hard at work” — but he was signing a blank piece of paper with a marker, and the White House released a photo the next day claiming that the President was back at work, but according to photo metadata, it had been taken minutes after the photo from the previous day.

In the middle of his treatment, presumably when he was at his most contagious, he was paraded around the hospital in his hermetically-sealed car, thus risking the lives of the Secret Service agents in the car with him. He was driven around to wave at supporters who had gathered outside.

Less than a week later, he declared himself healthy, flew back to the White House, and posed on the balcony — again without his mask, which he removed almost immediately. Since leaving the hospital, the President has released videos telling people not to be afraid of the virus.

To be clear, COVID-19 has killed nearly 250,000 Americans, we have an idea what the long term effects of the illness are, and cases are still rising. The President not only doesn’t care, he’s actively working against people who do.

It’s not just COVID-19 and his complete disregard for any sort of measure that could protect people from this horrible illness, it goes so much deeper than that.

Last week in Michigan, a group of Right-wing domestic terrorists were thwarted in their attempt to kidnap the governor, stage a coup, and start a civil war.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has, for years, warned of the threat of Right-wing, white nationalist terrorism — and is particularly concerned about the next few months. Local police have handled these groups with kid gloves for years. However, perhaps more important is the President’s rhetoric. People hear what they want to hear. He had been directly invoked in at least 54 instances of political or racial violence as of May, according to ABC News.

Trump called CNN "the enemy of the people”, and Cesar Sayoc sent pipe bombs to more than a dozen CNN locations. Trump tweeted about "anarchists" in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse drove there from a different state and killed two people with an assault rifle. Trump tweeted ‘LIBERATE MICHIGAN’ during a wave of protests in the state over COVID-19-related government restrictions, business closures, and mask rules, and a group of men hatched an elaborate plot to kidnap the governor.

These are not coincidences, they are consequences.

There’s a very simple explanation for why these groups are as publicly active and bold as they are — they have the President’s explicit support. On the debate stage, the Presidential debate stage, he told one of the most prominent white nationalist groups to “stand down and stand by”. By all accounts, they received the message.

There’s not a lot of wiggle room there. It’s clear what he meant, what he thinks, and how he plans to approach the results of the election. He’ll fight it in the courts, and he wants his brown shirts to fight in the streets.

One would hope a brush with death would spawn a bit of humility, but this is Trump and he probably thinks “humility” is the name of a perfume line. He is back in the White House, likely infecting more people, and says he will hold more rallies. He’s the consummate superspreader of everything awful in the world, and, if recent polling is any indication, Americans are finally catching on.

It’s time to get him out of the presidency and into the hands of his debt collectors — of which there are many.

Sree Sreenivasan is Marshall Loeb Visiting Professor of Digital Innovation at Stony Brook Journalism School in New York, and cofounder of Digimentors, a social, digital and virtual events consultancy. Twitter: @sree. Views are personal.

(Look out for Sree Sreenivasan’s take on the upcoming US presidential elections every fortnight.)