Fintan O'Toole Once Again Absolutely Crushes It - "Vector-In-Chief"
Hard to know which excerpt to use, because it's all blazingly brilliant.
EDIT
Trump has long characterized those who do not appreciate his genius as “haters and losers”: “Haters and losers say I wear a wig (I don’t), say I went bankrupt (I didn’t), say I’m worth $3.9 billion (much more). They know the truth!” runs a typical tweet from April 2014. In The Art of the Deal, Trump claims that “there are people—I categorize them as life’s losers—who get their sense of accomplishment and achievement from trying to stop others.” But in Trumpworld, as in the right-wing ideology he embodies, life’s losers are not just hateful. They are a different species. Winners are one kind of human; losers a lesser breed. Trump—like so many of the superrich—believes that this division is inherited: “What my father really gave me,” he tweeted in June 2013, “is a good (great) brain, motivation and the benefit of his experience–unlike the haters and losers (lazy!).”
In How to Get Rich, Trump links his own germaphobia to the idea that some people are born losers. Winners are people who think positively—and positivity repels germs. “To me, germs are just another kind of negativity.” He then goes on to tell the story of an unnamed acquaintance who is driven home from the hospital in an ambulance after being treated for injuries sustained in a crash. The ambulance crashes and he has to be taken back to the hospital: “Maybe he’s just a really unlucky guy. Or maybe he’s a loser. I know that sounds harsh, but let’s face it—some people are losers.” The train of thought here is typically meandering, but the logic is clear enough. Losers are inevitably doomed by their own negativity, of which germs are a physical form. Infection happens to some people because they are natural losers.
In 2013 Trump suggested that there was an upside to the Great Recession caused by the banking crisis: “One good aspect of the Obama depression is that it will separate the winners from the losers. If you can make it now, you deserve it!” Apply this to Covid-19 and you get an instinctive belief that it too will separate the wheat from the human chaff. Great public crises are not collective experiences that bring citizens together. On the contrary, they reveal the true divisions in the world: between those who “deserve” to survive and thrive and those who do not. Faced with the threat of the coronavirus, this becomes an ideology of human sacrifice: Let the losers perish.
Trump’s business career, involving repeated bankruptcies in which the losers (his creditors) are mere roadkill on his own path to riches, exemplifies this view of risk as something borne, in the end, by those who are too dumb or too “negative” to avoid it. But his sexual career has also been fueled by a belief that people like him can take risks because they are special enough to avoid the consequences. It is well to remember that the Trump who is paranoid about germs has a kind of body double: a Trump who is less squeamish about the exchange of bodily fluids. In May 1998 he discussed with the radio host Howard Stern the threat of sexually transmitted diseases to promiscuous heterosexual men. Trump implied that he did not use condoms, but gloried in the consequent risks: “They say that more people were killed by women in this act than killed in Vietnam, OK?” As he saw it, he showed reckless valor in bed, winning, he said, “the Congressional Medal of Honor, in actuality.”*
EDIT
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/05/14/vector-in-chief/
= new reply since forum marked as read
