What does Trump’s Covid diagnosis mean for his election chances?

The president has downplayed the pandemic for months, writes Sean O’Grady – but having contracted the virus, how will it affect his chances of staying in the Oval Office?

The US president on his motorcade drive to thank supporters on Sunday (AP)

It is possible to imagine a kinder, gentler Donald Trump emerging from the Walter Reed Medical Centre, though it requires some imagination. After all, when Boris Johnson, himself a bit of a political rascal, survived his bout of Covid in the spring, many detected some change in his demeanour. The intimation of his own mortality seemed to move him to tears during a subsequent interview with The Sun. President Trump’s initially much-reduced Twitter output was less aggressive and abusive and even now his renewed sloganising is unobjectionable, if oddly all now in capitals. Trump’s surprise appearance to thank his “patriot” supporters was reckless, but at least he has taken to wearing a mask. He even called the coronavirus by its correct name rather than “the China virus”.  

Radical long-term personality change, however, is not a recognised consequence of Covid, and Trump has never suffered from an overabundance of humility. Indeed, it has apparently been something of a Trump family tradition to view physical illness as merely a sign of personal weakness. In that context, Trump would brandish his survival, at his age and weight, as proof of his superhuman constitution. Not even “the China virus” can defeat Donald Trump will be the message.  

If so, leaving aside the clinical truth about such matters, Trump will do himself few favours. In what has been a disastrous few days for his re-election campaign, he has shown himself to be increasingly out of touch with the mass of the American people. During the debate with Joe Biden and more graphically in contracting the disease, he has merely reminded the voters of his calamitous complacency about the virus, which has cost 200,000 American lives. He said it was a political hoax, milked by the Democrats, and we know it was not. He derided masks, yet he now has to wear one. He dispensed with them and social distancing at his rallies, and now big-name Republicans are testing positive. He downplayed the pandemic to no useful purpose. He suggested bleach as a treatment. Thinking aloud, he wondered if one day the virus might just disappear. Only now does he say he is jesting about the disease. He got everything wrong, in other words, but cannot admit it because to do so would confirm his poor judgement and concede responsibility for unnecessary deaths.  

In the last week, even though all people of goodwill wish him a swift recovery, Trump has been made to look foolish. His only chance of swinging the needed support his way is to move the national debate away from the coronavirus and its human and economic impact and back to “culture war” battlefields instead. Hence so many tweets about law and order, bringing the troops home, and “poll watching” on 3 November. But the very blanket, minutely examined details of his own illness, and indeed the escalating second-wave infection rate, will make it impossible to change the terms of the debate and the arrival of a mask-wearing President Biden.