How Donald Trump having coronavirus is really going to impact the election

| 2:01 pm EDT October 2, 2020
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Considering how badly Donald Trump is losing the election, and how badly he blew his last best hope of turning things around with a lousy debate performance, some folks think it’s a little too on-the-nose that Trump is now suddenly sick with coronavirus. After all, he just realized he’s almost certainly going to lose, and now the guy who always covers up his health issues is suddenly being transparent about it.

I wouldn’t put it past Trump to fake having coronavirus, but I don’t see any way that he could be orchestrating this – if only because people as far ranging as Senator Mike Lee are now reported to have caught the virus from Trump, and at some point it would simply be too wide of a conspiracy to be pulled off.

The more logical explanation would be that Trump really did catch coronavirus (it was going to happen sooner or later with his reckless, maskless behavior), and because he’s losing so badly, he’s decided to make it public because he has nothing left to lose. The question becomes whether he thinks that making it public can somehow magically turn the election around for him, or if this is simply going to be his excuse for losing (“I was too sick to even campaign”).

If Donald Trump is hoping to use his illness to his advantage, it’s difficult to see him pulling it off. If Trump develops severe symptoms between now and the election, too many voters will decide they can’t risk giving a second term to a guy who’s on his last legs. And if Trump’s symptoms remain mild and he quickly recovers, the narrative will then immediately shift to how irresponsibly he spread the virus after contracting it. In short, Trump is no Boris Johnson.

If Trump is planning to use his illness as an excuse because he expects to lose the election anyway, it still doesn’t mean we can let up. After all, Trump thought he was going to lose in 2016, and then the Comey letter came out of nowhere and handed it to him. The bottom line is that with the unpredictable nature of what’s about to happen with Trump’s health, the only thing we can control is our side of things.

That means working harder than ever on things like voter registration, voter turnout, phone banking, and volunteering, to make sure we run up the score enough to compensate for any uncertainty. Let’s not get caught up in the Trump-coronavirus news for the next month, to the point that we forget to put in the work required to win the election.