Yes, it's bad

Over the past weeks and months, Donald Trump's reactions to the coronavirus pandemic have consistently tracked in lockstep parallel to those of the average minimally-informed member of our society—except with about a twelve day lag-time. At first, it was a scary thing happening far away, and thus somebody else's problem. Then, it was something that was going to reach us, but would basically just be another version of the seasonal flu—bad, but by no means catastrophic. Then, it was something we had to take seriously for a couple weeks, but that would eventually pass.

And now, this week, something changed. He knew someone personally, he told us, who had gotten terribly sick from the virus. Now, it had started to seem real to him. He apprehended the magnitude of it. And he was ready to do what it took to try to slow the spread of the contagion.

All of this would be an understandable and human reaction. It reflects what has been a more broadly shared pattern of grieving. For a long time, we were all in denial. We looked for ways to convince ourselves that this would not radically alter our lives or our society. And, in the vast majority of cases, it took the triggering event of actually knowing someone—if only at a second- or third-degree of removal from ourselves—who was directly impacted by the virus for us to become inwardly convinced that it really was the global catastrophe we had been warned it would be.

Except that there is one crucial difference. Trump, unlike the rest of us, has the single most powerful job on the planet. More than any other member of the human species right now, he has responsibility for whether or not we are ultimately able to contain this virus or whether it will end the lives of millions and devastate and overwhelm health systems around the world. Yet he is responding to all of this as if he were just barely following events, and had only now started to catch up and realize that we have a big problem on our hands.

Because he is just starting to wake up to it. Because he is a narcissistic man-child.

All of us, of course, have a tendency to approach abstract suffering with relative equanimity. When we are told that millions of people will die or sicken from something, we are not able to grasp in any fundamental way the meaning of that. We think: well, people die every day. As Trump previously argued, hundreds of thousands of people perish in car crashes each year, and yet we do not feel the need to socially distance ourselves from the presence of automobiles.

But once we know someone—a friend of a friend, say—who has actually died from COVID-19; or who has gotten so sick they had to be hooked up to a ventilator and put into an induced coma—then it is a different matter. We say: no, wait, look at this situation. This particular one. For this one person, this is the end of the world. This is catastrophe. Why do you not see?

We are like Conrad's Lord Jim, when he is arraigned at an inquiry about his desertion from a shipwreck, and he tries to get his listeners to understand that this was not just a shipwreck, an abstraction, but his shipwreck (or threatened shipwreck)— an event horrible and awesome in its singularity:

The facts those men were so eager to know had been visible, tangible, open to the senses, occupying their place in space and time, [...] they made a whole that had features, shades of expression, a complicated aspect that could be remembered by the eye [...] This had not been a common affair, everything in it had been of the utmost importance, and fortunately he remembered everything.

In his recent book on the art of Edvard Munch (a departure from his usual autobiographical obsessions? no, hardly, as you will find if you read the book), Karl Ove Knausgaard makes the point that all tragic art has this same effect of emphasizing the importance of something through showing it to us in its details —of taking the abstraction of universal human suffering and rendering it down into the particularity of an instant—of a single thing that happened to one person one time. Writing of Munch's heartrending portrait of his dying sister, The Sick Child, he argues:

Art resembles myth in the sense that it gives individual people and single events [...] exceptional weight, and in a similar way places them in a space beyond time [.... I]t tells us that every moment is really like that, that every relation is really like that, something in itself, with a significance of its own, which must be acknowledged and given space to exist within us. (Burkey trans.)

As the coronavirus has spread and claimed more lives, something of this sort has happened for each of us. We were —in some way—touched directly by the virus. And in this moment, we were confronted with the suffering caused by the disease in its particularity, not just in its abstract totality. We knew someone personally who was affected. And we say: but this! Look at this! This is horrible!

And then, very slowly, we can start to understand, through an outward stretching of empathy, that millions of events just like it—each just as painful in its specificity—are happening around the world. That every enormous statistic of the number of people infected or killed is just shorthand for so many searing individual instances of this kind. That for every person affected by the disease, their experience is equally horrific to themselves and the people around them.

In a rather mysterious way, Trump seems to have had a catalyzing incident of this sort earlier this week—an event in which he finally confronted the particularity of the virus. As Trump said of an unnamed friend who had apparently been put into an induced coma as a result of the disease, as quoted in the New York Times: "He’s a little older and he’s heavy. But he’s a tough person, and we went to the hospital and a day later he’s in a coma, [...] How is he doing? ‘Sir, he’s in a coma. He’s unconscious. He’s not doing well.’ The speed and the viciousness, especially if it gets the right person, it is horrible.”

It took Trump so long to get to that point, that of realizing that millions of other people will face exactly the fate of his friend, in the coming months. For most of us, such a delay would be excusable. We need time to process, and to move outward from our immediate experience to larger circles of concern. For someone who has put themselves forward for the most powerful position in the world, however, it is unforgivable. If you cannot understand the meaning of abstract things, if you cannot imaginatively reconstruct what they must mean to the people you serve in their terrible particularity, then you have no right to lead.

But so be it. Here we are. Trump is president of the United States. Is he capable of change? Now that he has had the horror of the virus thrust upon his awareness, will he be able to make the empathic leap to seeing what it means for others around the globe? Well, so far, he has used the pandemic as an excuse to issue new orders banning all asylum-seekers without due process and deporting people to countries that have so far seen far fewer confirmed cases of infection. So I'm guessing not.