When word came out that Donald Trump had tested positive for Covid-19, his opponent — Joe Biden — responded in the right way: “We will continue to pray for the health and safety of the president and his family.” It’s the right way in human terms. (And it’s the right way politically, in that it demonstrates Biden’s basic decency— in contrast, for example, with how Trump responded to the death of John Lewis.)
(Biden also used Trump’s illness to underscore that this pandemic must be taken seriously --once again in contrast with Trump, but only implicitly so.)
Believing as I do in the spiritual wisdom of “Hate the sin, but love the sinner,” I can with some spiritual effort get myself to wish the President well. I don’t believe the suffering of the evil is in itself a good. And so just considering Trump as my fellow human being, I believe in wishing the man well, even if that’s not an easy place to get my heart into.
But of course, with a President of the United States who has acted as a wrecking ball on virtually every aspect of the nation and world we live in, that purely personal, human level is not the only one we should care about. And so while it’s right for Biden to make that public declaration of best wishes, the reality is that — with all the other “goods” at stake besides this one man’s well-being — the question of what we should actually be wishing for is not answered at all automatically.
The future of the United States, and indeed of the whole planet, will be impacted differently depending on whether
- Trump swiftly gets well, or
- he gets very sick but survives, or
- he dies of this virus.
(Plus all the other potential scenarios between “soon well” and “soon deceased.”)
Admittedly, all the possible scenarios are surrounded by considerable uncertainties.
(Just two name two:
- If Trump gets swiftly well and then gets trounced in a landslide for Biden, is that the best way of ridding the nation of the whole, grotesque Trumpian spirit?
- If he dies before the election, might the abominable Trump Party benefit from a wave of voters who would have voted Democratic because of their revulsion against Trump instead, with Trump out of the picture, voting Republican?)
Despite the uncertainties, I find myself concluding that the best thing for the nation, and for the world, would be for this particular — and particularly destructive — actor to depart altogether from the scene.
- It is not impossible that he would win the election— and it is reasonably believed by many insightful and knowledgeable people, that a second Trump term would lead to the outright death of American democracy.
- Though the American people will probably choose to remove him from office, Trump has given every indication that he will do everything he can to sabotage the election, demolishing that cornerstone of our constitutional order — as he has so many others of its components — in order to keep himself in power.
- And it seems probable that even if he is defeated, and even if — despite Trump’s worst efforts —the powers of the presidency are transferred to Joe Biden, Trump will continue to inflict damage on the nation, having weaponized a substantial component of his base (Proud Boys and the like) quite possibly to launch a violent insurgency in protest against a legitimate Trump defeat misrepresented as a “stolen” election.
In other words, Trump being in the picture seems to threaten America’s political health as far as the eye can see.
So, it is right for the doctors to do all they can to heal Trump— that’s what their oath requires. It is right for leaders like Biden to enact publicly the kind of basic human decency that we’d like to see characterize our politics again (to the degree that it did in an earlier era).
But at the same time, it seems probable that the best thing for our nation — and for this planet whose destabilization Trump is augmenting — would be for the doctors to fail, and for those “best wishes” Biden extended not to be granted.
It’s not that anyone should act to bring that about. It is simply a matter of what people — wanting what’s best for our world — might wisely hope for.
Any person’s life is of value. But hundreds of thousands of Americans have given up their lives, over the generations, fighting to protect the very things that this President has seemed bent on destroying.