Covita Trump and Chekhov's Gunshow

In the immediate aftermath of the Rose Garden ceremony introducing SCOTUS nominee Amy Coney Barrett to an unmasked, shoulder-to-shoulder multitude of Republican movers and shakers, when news first broke that Hope Hicks AND Donald and Melania Trump AND Utah Senator Mike Lee AND many others who attended Amy Barrett's White House social on Tuesday all tested positive for covid-19, several of my literary-minded social-media acquaintances made comments about Chekhov's gun. But this went  waaay beyond Chekhov's gun; this was Chekhov's illegal illicit unlicensed underground gun show, held in an abandoned and condemned building, which just caught on fire, and now all the ammunition's starting to go off.

That said: if I knew absolutely nothing of the context, I would have felt deep pity for Trump when I watched his "Mussolini on the balcony" stunt from the other day -- that was obviously a very sick man having great difficulty breathing, to the point where he needed to use almost all of his upper-body musculature to do so. And he put additional strain on his lungs and body, solely for a photo op, because his fear of "looking weak" is so intense that he can't or won't admit "Sometimes, even the strongest people have a genuine medical need to stay in bed and avoid exertion for awhile."

 

A truly strong man is not afraid of looking weak, but a weak man is obsessed with always looking strong. 

 

If covid works through Trump's body at the same timeline as it did with Herman Cain, Trump will die only a day or two before the election. Nothing remotely like this has happened in our country's history, and I worry what the results will be. (By this point, sadly, I'm taking for granted that the GOP is not going to act in good faith. It's not the party of Reagan anymore, and hasn't been for a long while.)