The demise of denial
Denialism, a hallmark of this nation since the founding, has been in crescendo ever since the moderate Republican Party of Dwight D. Eisenhower began morphing into the super-rightwing GOP of recent decades. This process has now culminated in the presidency of Donald J. Trump whose entire administration has been a master class in denial, a postdoc in deadly delusion.
Denial can be a short-term strategy for survival when a situation is so overwhelming that the self can’t cope with the reality. You see this, for instance, among parents whose children have gone missing and are feared dead and among some patients who have been given a terminal prognosis. As a long-term strategy, denial is a formula for disaster, a path of destruction for oneself and for others caught in the web of lies and illusions erected to buttress an illusory edifice.
A significant percentage of the American people suffer from all, or some, of the main forms of historical denial which leaves them with a distorted view of their own history. Denial about what the settlers and the federal government did to native Americans. Denial about the brutal nature of slavery and denial of the significance of its enduring consequences. Denial about how the Southwest was acquired, which is through a war of aggression against Mexico based on a pretext more bogus than weapons of mass destruction in Iraq amounting to a land theft on a gigantic scale.
You can often get away with denying what we have done to others. Denying what we do to ourselves and what others do to us, the consequences of which we feel in our own lives, is more difficult.
Denial has been the default mode in the Trump administration on everything, from climate change to systemic racism to the Coronavirus pandemic. Although it persists in zombie form, denialism about COVID is dead.
Trump’s COVID diagnosis was the coup de grace. The growing wave of infections among White House staffers and Republican lawmakers was the nail in the coffin.
The Coronavirus has cut a wide swath of death, especially among the population older than 55 who represent about 90 percent of those who have died from the disease. The virus also is taking the lives a disproportionate number of minorities, front line workers in meat-packing and other industries, and medical personnel and first responders. Now, the Coronavirus is infecting numerous people in and around the Trump administration.
Starting with the president and the First Lady, a slew of people have been infected, some of Trump’s closest aides, key senators, the press secretary, an admiral on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and one of Trump’s military valets. These new COVID-19 positive people are now experiencing the truth first-hand. The Coronavirus is real, and the only hoax is Trump’s pretense that COVID is no big deal and we should all go on with business as usual.
Trump’s diagnosis and his hospitalization should have led to a chastening. Instead, Trump has acted as irresponsibly as ever, risking the lives of Secret Service agents by having them drive him around the hospital—in an air-tight car—to wave at fawning fans. He is also minimizing the seriousness of his own condition. Finally, Trump is modeling exactly the wrong behavior by defiantly tearing off his mask as soon as he stepped on the White House balcony.
Trump’s orbit has become a microcosm of the country as virus infections have spiked not only in high places inside the Beltway but also in states as different as Wisconsin and Texas. Most damning of all, as the grim reaper does its work across the country, Trump continues to spout misinformation about the pandemic.
A study by Cornell University just published “analyzed 38 million articles published by traditional English-language news media from all over the world from Jan. 1 to May 26, 2020, using Cision Global Insights, and found 1.1 million instances of coronavirus misinformation. Of those 1.1 million articles, 37.9 percent included mentions of Trump in relation to misinformation, making him easily the leader, at least in the English-language media landscape.”
What would have happened if Dwight Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander, had told his troops, as they got ready to storm the Normandy beaches, that the Germans would be firing blanks, their artillery shells were duds, the Panzer divisions and the Luftwaffe mirages? Don’t worry about wearing a helmet if you don’t want to or making sure to spread out so that a single shell or air strike won’t kill dozens of you.
Carnage. Then outrage among the armed forces and the American people as they found out about the top commander’s criminal malfeasance.
It didn’t happen. Ike had confidence in the valor of his troops, and it did not occur to him to deceive them so they would not panic. But Eisenhower was a leader and a soldier. Trump is a white-collar criminal who has been conning people all his life and getting away with it.
Conning almost half the U.S. population in 2016 was the crowning achievement of a long career of wrongdoing. Conning millions of people about COVID is only the latest and most criminal of his many frauds. In the end, though, he could not con a virus. Although he is out of the hospital, he is by his own doctor’s account, not out of the woods.
Trump might survive by the skin of his teeth. Or COVID, which has a nasty habit of coming back for a second and deadlier bite, might get him. Either way, COVID-19 will continue to sow disease and death among the general population and the people close to Trump.
Tuesday evening it was announced that Stephen Miller, the president’s de facto minister for deportation, the architect of the family separation policy, the subject of a recent book aptly titled ‘Hatemonger,’ has contracted COVID-19.
I may have to reconsider my hard-core religious unbelief. Maybe there is a God. Perhaps Karma is real.
