Donald Trump is famous for being a germaphobe. He even has so described himself. Yet here he is in the hospital, with a virus that is life-threatening, after behaving for months in ways that make one wonder not “How did he get it?” so much as “How did it take him so long to get infected?”
I am not a germaphobe. I try to take care of myself, but I have not gone through life with any great anxiety about catching one thing or another. But since the pandemic began, I’ve followed the recommended protocols pretty scrupulously: I figured that, with the stakes as high as they are, better to err in the direction of taking unnecessary precautions than in the direction of failing to take precautions that prove necessary.
Why would a non-germaphobe like me be so much more cautious, in the face of this dangerous germ, than this germaphobic President, who from the outset of this pandemic has behaved so differently from how one would expect a germaphobe to behave? (That’s quite aside from how he’s dealt with the nation he leads, and that he so terribly failed to protect.)
Which raises the psychological question: how is that contradiction to be explained?
Was his need to deny the reality of a pandemic that upset his plans so great that it overrode his life-long fear of infection?
Did his preoccupation with displaying his macho image somehow persuade himself that he was invincible?
Did his carelessness in gambling with the coronavirus manifest some unconscious death wish, or at least some unconscious self-destructive impulse? Ideas?