A quarter century ago, the nation was mesmerized as OJ Simpson led police on a slow-speed chase along a southern California highway in a white Bronco. Today, we watched a shorter version of this as the inpatient President of the United States sashayed around Walter Reed Medical Center in a black Suburban followed by a Secret Service motorcade.
Ninety-five million people watched CNN’s live coverage of Simpson’s Bronco escapade shortly after he was served arrest warrants for the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. In Bethesda, Trump’s armored ride drove by a low energy, small crowd of die-hards after the president was served eight months’ worth of actionable public health information that would have protected him if he read it and saved thousands of American lives if he cared.
It goes without saying that the president is careless. Just recall that OJ Simpson was pointing a gun to his own head while he was chased by police. Trump’s indubitably horrible debate performance last Tuesday was a fairly stark reminder that he, too, is under pressure from the New York Times’s recent expose of his lifelong tax-cheating lifestyle, the New York State Attorney General’s solid victories against him, and Joe Biden’s steady outpacing of him in the polls.
Which begs the question about his COVID-19 self-inflicted infection. In making multiple errors of judgment in 2020 alone, Donald Trump is a one-man Greek tragedy, but only if he accepts his coming shellacking four weeks from now. This is true because accepting one’s fall from grace is the essence of all Greek tragedy. If he doesn’t smarten up, Trump could well be remembered as an Elizabethan tragedy, where the protagonist usually dies at the end.
Edward Hoagland’s 1988 essay in Harper’s magazine entitled “The Urge for an End” reminded us that the highest suicide rate occurs among men over the age of 65. When the author asked a female friend why three times as many men kill themselves as women, she replied, “I’m not going to go into the self-indulgence of men.” This woman is every woman. And Trump may have an unconscious urge for an end, in spite of farcical jokes about extending his term beyond 2024. Of course, now the highest rate of suicide occurs among middle-aged white men, which Trump believes he is.
The best-selling “Everything Trump Touches Dies” seems eerily prescient when Trump has been hospitalized for COVID-19 as a direct result of his practically criminal, super-spreading Rose Garden melee to usher in a papist jurist. Or maybe it was his family entourage that traveled to Ohio for the debate. Or the retinue that went to the rally in Duluth. Or the flunkies who went to the fundraiser in Bedminster.
In 2020, everyone knows that OJ Simpson sees the real killer in his mirror everyday he wakes up. By the same token, Donald Trump’s black Suburban is the new white Bronco, whether he knows it or not.
