This isn’t intended as a serious thought about God. I don’t claim to know anything about God, though it’s a matter I’ve given a lot of thought to, especially lately.
(And a propos of the fantasy contained in the title, it should be observed that the Bible depicts God as sending a Flood to destroy almost every human alive, destroying two cities with fire raining from the sky, and drowning the Egyptian army en masse as the Red Sea closed upon them.)
Rather, the title I offer here is intended as a way of highlighting a disturbing, but it would seem inescapable conclusion: If there had been no pandemic, Trump would have won a second term!
(And for such a second Trump term the word “disastrous” would probably have proved way too mild.)
It seems clear that the pandemic cost Trump substantial public support. (It was either Kos or Nate Silver — I can’t recall which — who estimated the cost as 3%.)
Or, more particularly, it was not the pandemic itself but Trump’s incredible mishandling of it. (The pandemic actually bolstered the political fortunes of leaders who handled it well— like Prime Minister Ardern of New Zealand.)
And while Biden has won by a fairly substantial margin in the popular vote, and even a decent margin in the Electoral College vote— his victory in the latter, which is what determines the victor, was achieved with rather slim margins (percentagewise) in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and presumably also Georgia and Arizona. Change those percentages just a bit, and the winner would be Donald Trump.
I find it sobering — no, I’ll go further and say downright frightening — to find the conclusion inescapable that with no pandemic, Trump would have won and American democracy would quite likely have been thrown onto that “ash heap of history” (to which Reagan once wanted to consign the Soviet Union).
That thought came together in my mind with a famous line from the 19th Century German leader, Otto von Bismarck — “God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America” — to generate the fantasy represented in the title here.
Hence my fantasy of God looking down upon our benighted nation -- a nation in which a President, who has displayed all the profound defects that Trump has shown the nation on a daily basis, might be supported by so many millions of our countrymen — and, in order to save the righteousness so dear to His heart, sending this terrible pandemic to out land in order to shift just enough of the citizenry against this destructive monster that we Americans and all humankind would be sparedan intensification and prolongation of this Trumpian nightmare.