TRUMP’S TWILIGHT ZONE? THE CORONA GAMBIT

I can’t help but think that Donald J Trump does not actually have the corona virus. I know the idea the President might be lying about something is difficult to comprehend, but thought will not leave me, even though the timing makes sense if Hope Hicks is indeed the White House’s super spreader, because the positive test makes so much better sense if it turns out to be nothing more than another Trump stratagem. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I confess readily that I have no evidence. I have merely the idea that an October Surprise made up of the greatest piece of Fake News of his presidential regime would be the sort of political poetic injustice Roy Cohn or Steve Bannon would admire.

There is a long history of American presidents hiding illnesses from the public. Wilson’s Spanish flu and stroke, Harding’s illnesses which left him debilitated and are still debated (including the idea his death came by poisoning!), FDR’s crippling by polio, Eisenhower’s heart attacks, Kennedy’s Addison’s Disease, Reagan’s dementia. But in Trump we have the first president about whom the idea of claiming to be ill when he’s not, unlikely as that may be, is even conceivable.

It’s not that I wish him, or Melania, or any of the other 45,430 people infected in the US that day, ill. But it is difficult to feel comfortable with only Trump’s word, and the word of a physician who takes dictation on Trump’s physical and somehow believes he weighs only 239 pounds, that he is truly a victim.