I will be leaving the great Walter Reed Medical Center today at 6:30 P.M. Feeling really good! Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life. We have developed, under the Trump Administration, some really great drugs & knowledge. I feel better than I did 20 years ago!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 5, 2020
I think people wondered whether there was any event that could open the door into that human experience for Donald Trump. Some people thought maybe becoming one of 7 million [COVID-19] positives would do it. It doesn’t appear to have had that impact on him.
– Nicolle Wallace, MSNBC
Trump’s puerile, narcissistic tweet, followed by his defiant removal of his mask back at the White House from Walter Reed hospital, is additional proof — as if it were needed — that the president lacks even a shred of understanding, empathy, or concern for anybody but himself.
His mask ceremoniously pocketed, Trump stood, jut-jawed, on a balcony and posed for a photo-op and a video, heedlessly exposing photographers and videographers to a disease that has killed more than 210,000 Americans. The stunt triggered a torrent of ridicule and comparisons to Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator. George Conway, spouse of coronavirus-infected Trump acolyte Kellyanne Conway, dubbed Trump “Mussoloony and “Il Dufus.”
At least the president is consistent. When he saw cheering, flag-waving fans outside his room at Walter Reed, he fecklessly ordered Secret Service agents to drive him past the faithful in “The Beast,” an enclosed, armored presidential SUV.
Trump is already the worst president. One of the best, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was, not coincidentally, beloved for his unwavering understanding, empathy, and concern for millions of his fellow citizens suffering in the Great Depression, the country’s worst economic catastrophe.
So far, Trump has survived COVID-19. At age 39, Roosevelt contracted polio. Also a virus, polio killed or crippled thousands of Americans. The disease paralyzed FDR’s legs.
Polio was the great leveler. It struck rich and poor alike. Roosevelt was born to wealth and aristocracy. But historians say polio — sometimes called infantile paralysis — did much to shape his empathy for others, notably those the Good Book calls “the least among us.”
“After his struggle with polio, he seemed less arrogant, less smug, less superficial, more focused, more complex, more interesting,” wrote Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris Kerns Goodwin.
She quoted his labor secretary, Frances Perkins: “There had been a plowing up of his nature. The man emerged completely warm-hearted, with new humility of spirit and a firmer understanding of philosophical concepts.”
Goodwin added that FDR “had always taken great pleasure in people, but now they became what one historian has called ‘his vital links to life.’ Far more intensely than before, he reached out to know them, to understand them, to pick up their emotions, to put himself into their shoes. No longer belonging to his old world in the same way, he came to empathize with the poor and the underprivileged, with people to whom fate had dealt a difficult hand.”
Trump has undergone no such Road to Damascus experience. From the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, he knew the virus was potentially lethal, but, worried about the deleterious effect it might have on the stock market and the economy, he downplayed the disease. He pushed quack cures. He belittled people who wore masks and practiced social distancing to protect themselves. He denigrated and mocked medical science.
His legs withered by polio, FDR took the opposite tack. “…Roosevelt’s struggle against polio — the mysterious virus that swept through the country in epidemics that terrified Americans in a manner not unlike the fear generated by the coronavirus today — is perhaps more relevant to the current battle against COVID-19 than his presidential tenure,” wrote historian David B. Woolner in The Washington Post. “It was out of this experience that Roosevelt gained a deep appreciation for the science of medicine, and the important role that the federal government can and must play in the promotion of public health.”
The historian said that while Roosevelt was never able to walk unaided again, the president’s faith in the healing arts never flagged, “nor did his belief in the inherent compassion that drove doctors and nurses.”
He concluded: “As we struggle to overcome the deep political divisions that have done nothing to help our nation solve this pandemic, we would do well to embrace these ‘conquering forces’ and take heed of what Roosevelt said about the wisdom of science and character of the medical professionals who are risking their lives to keep us safe.”
We would do equally well to abolish Trump and Trumpism via an electoral landslide to rival FDR’s four historic blowouts at the polls.
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