Well! That passage certainly has taken on new resonance in light of current events. We are looking at a paragraph from Thomas Mann's Death in Venice (in the 2004 Michael Henry Heim translation). Mann's protagonist, Aschenbach, is here learning the truth about a rampant cholera epidemic in the city, which Venetian authorities have conspired to hush up out of fear it might disrupt the tourist trade—and all the enterprises that depend upon it. They are like Ron DeSantis telling people to get back in the bars and the Orlando theme parks in the middle of COVID-19 because he has an eye on the tax revenue.
The role this catastrophe plays in Mann's novella is to set the quasi-apocalyptic stage that Aschenbach needs in order to descend into obsession, madness, and the collapse of moral restraint. But we readership in America in 2020 cannot help—even if we turned to Mann for an afternoon precisely in order to stop thinking about Trump—thinking about Trump when we see it.
The Venetian authorities have adopted a decidedly Trumpian approach to their public health crisis. They appear to have even gone the whole hog and pushed out their version of Fauci.
A short while thereafter, Mann refers to "the tenacious solidarity" among the Venetian merchant and political classes "in their attempt to ward off panic" that might put a damper on business (Heim trans.). Words that call to mind Trump's notorious confession to Bob Woodward: namely, that he knew about the severity of the virus and the likely consequences of a pandemic back in February, but that he sat on this information and publicly denied it for months out of a desire not to "create a panic."
With Trump and the Venetian authorities alike, most of us assume that the activating force behind their actions is the profit motive. For GOP governors and some Republican Congresspeople, the more generous interpretation of their shutdowns in response to COVID-19 is that they are trying to balance the economic interests of their constituents against their health needs: a situation in which (I am more willing to admit than are many on the left) there are real costs on both sides. People need livelihoods as well as their lungs, though they shouldn't be forced to choose between them in the first place.
Trump has been more transparently cynical still than the other members of his party, however. Looking at his behavior, it appeared to most of us that what he was really concerned about in the early months of the pandemic was the health of the stock market, which he regarded as a personal referendum on his presidency.
It seems to me now, however, that even this interpretation represents a failure of imagination. We still have not looked low enough to fathom the selfish motives at the heart of Trump's COVID policies.
As we watch Trump radicalize and flail about in the wake of his electoral defeat last week—as we see him adopt the tactics of dictators and demagogues, refusing to concede and hurling false accusations of fraud, while he is backed up all the time by Republic Congresspeople who are proving to be even more craven and indifferent to the country's future than we ever thought possible—as Trump does all of this, I say, we realize that there is in fact nothing he cares about, nothing at all, apart from his own most crass material interests.
Even now, he seems to be terrified of leaving office precisely because a large tax bill and personal debt will suddenly come due. And he is using his lame duck session so far—while a pandemic still rages, while the country and humanity enter another phase of mass mortality and economic hurt—not to advance any particular policy agenda, however abhorrent, but to try to declassify information about the CIA and FBI's intelligence probes that he imagines would prove he had no compromised involvement with the Russians; in short, to settle personal scores.
No, Trump does not give a damn, not about such abstract things as the stock market and public opinion. Even if the stock market does affect his own interests and political fortunes, I still think it is one or two steps too far removed from his own bank account—requires too much of a sense of the concentric circles in which human interests, even crass material ones, interweave with one another and extend to other individuals—to be what is really on Trump's mind.
What occurs to me is that Trump is instead exactly like the Venetian hotel owners that Mann describes. Indeed, he is a hotel owner. Trump's failed business ventures are nearly all in the hospitality industry: golf courses, resorts, hotels, etc. And if he is going to have any hope of refinancing the enormous loans that are coming due as soon as he leaves office, he will have to be able to present a rosy picture of the future of the tourist trade in America.
So that is my new theory as to the origin of Trump's effort to deny the severity of the COVID pandemic. We have all been forced to live inside the pitch meeting of a hotel/resort developer. We have been subjected to mass death and economic destruction because someone whose interests lie in failing casinos and golf courses is desperately trying to underplay the threat that faces his own industry from a horrible disease.
We are living in Mann's Venice, in short—and here, as there, depravity and death have been the result.
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