Donald Trump’s greatest fear is coming true
A discharge against medical advice (DAMA) is a term used in healthcare institutions when a patient leaves a hospital against the advice of their attending doctor. When the self-discharging person is a danger to themselves or others, sometimes remedies are available in law preventing them from doing so, up to and including involuntary committal.
When the self-discharging person is the president of the United States, there are no legal remedies — apart from the exercise of the 25th Amendment. Up until now it was generally hoped and reasonably expected that an American President would behave responsibly under such circumstances. As is so often the case with this outlaw president, not only do the rules not apply to Donald Trump, but neither does the reasonable expectation that he will sacrifice his own needs in favor of the health and safety of the people he has sworn to serve.
Monday night Trump hosted another super spreader event in Florida. The only nod to safety was that it was held outdoors. Other than that, few masks were in evidence, and people were crammed together even closer than usual.
“I feel so powerful,” Trump crowed to his cheering supporters, less than two weeks after announcing he was infected with coronavirus. “I’ll walk into that audience. I’ll walk in there, I’ll kiss everyone in that audience. I’ll kiss the guys and the beautiful women – everybody.” Trump was clearly unwell, apart from the bizarre message that he wanted to kiss everyone, his voice was also unmistakably hoarse. He’s obviously still sick with coronavirus and possibly high on steroids, and it is a near certainty that he is still contagious and that he gave the disease to members of his audience. Many of them will spread it to others and many will die as a direct result. Donald Trump has once again committed murder.
Many in the audience were seniors, and, as such, are the most vulnerable to contracting the disease and dying from it. Clearly, Monday night’s rally was another way of Trump deliberately downplaying the disease, just as he privately told Bob Woodward on tape that he often did.
By contrast, Joe Biden held a much different campaign event Monday. Biden addressed a spare and socially distanced crowd in Cincinnati. Excoriating Trump’s negligent response to the pandemic, the Democratic nominee asked his audience rhetorically, “How many empty chairs are there around the dinner table because of his negligence?”
The real tragedy is some of the people who will die will be innocent people who didn’t even attend Trump’s latest Nuremberg-style rally, but will be incidentally infected by someone who was there. Deadly pathogens are not like conventional weapons. They kill indiscriminately.
As I write this, 220,011 Americans are dead from coronavirus. There are now 8,037,789 cases of the disease and that number is climbing at the rate of a million a week. Clearly the president of the United States, who is an unregenerate monster, couldn’t care less.
In his book “Disloyal: A Memoir: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump,” Michael Cohen writes that the one thing Donald Trump fears more than anything else is going to prison. Let’s all help Trump realize his greatest fear, vote him out of office and make him as vulnerable to prison as he makes his audiences vulnerable to death and disease.
There are a million reasons why Donald Trump is unfit to be president of the United States, this has been another one. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.