There’s that hoary old chestnut that does the rounds at 60th birthday parties: that getting old is not for sissies.
While apt in normal times, when this often refers to slowing down as joints stiffen, vision blurs and hearing diminishes, this amplifies exponentially in pandemic time.
It has been widely reported by everyone from Johns Hopkins University (responsible for many American and global statistics), the World Health Organisation and the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that the largest number of people who have succumbed to Covid-19 have been those over 60. (By the by, October 1 was International Day for Older Persons.)
So you’d have thought that ageing, overweight US President Donald Trump would care about possible exposure to the coronavirus. Yet, he, and an alarmingly large number of people who serve at his pleasure at the White House, (including his wife Melania) have tested positive for the virus.
Trump has, since the beginning of this strange and deadly year, downplayed the killer nature of Covid-19, and has turned the wearing of masks into a political rather than a health safety issue.
In live television footage captured on the White House lawns we’ve see Trump and his team and guests at fundraisers and announcements unmasked, and flouting the social-distancing rules. Hand shaking, hugging and body contact are much in evidence. The White House, apparently is super spreader central.
The question we need to ask is why Trump is doing this.
After belittling Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden for wearing a mask (during their pre-election debate a week ago), was it poetic justice that Trump himself contracted the disease?
The doctors and gurus — who are not on Team Trump and therefore do not have to toe the party line — say he was infected because of his utterly intractable attitude towards, and disregard for, the protocols put in place to keep the virus at bay.
If Trump wasn’t such a narcissist, he’d probably be afraid when confronted by the horrific statistics that apply to being old in 2020. The CDC, in a case data surveillance survey conducted in September, report that between 65 and 74 (74 being Trump’s age) the chance of dying from Covid-19 is 90-times higher.
At 75-84 the chance of dying jumps to being 220-times higher. Add to that pre-existing co-morbidities and you’re a gonner.
There has not been a single moment (including before the start of the pandemic) that those of us watching have felt that Trump is capable of feeling or of human emotion
Never in the history of American presidents has the weight of the leader of the Free World been so intensely and publicly discussed — everywhere in the world. As he reacts to everything, Trump played the set-upon martyr, being fat-shamed by the fake-media news who want to make him look bad.
Then, after a few days in hospital, he checked himself out and missed what could have been his “doing” after a long and disgraceful undoing in his country. He could have used the moment for glorious redemption; it was the chance of a lifetime to reverse the bad press, to look and act in a human and humane fashion.
He didn’t. Instead, he defiantly, and stupidly, ripped off his mask as he stood before the media. This man, who it is suspected is still infectious with the coronavirus, endangered the lives of those around him, and the news photographers shooting him.
And so he missed the chance to hit the re-set button and show empathy for the tens of thousands of Americans who, like him, have been ill.
Curiously, a little compassion for those who have lost loved ones to the virus would have won him votes, or at the very least, earned him some respect. Instead, he chose to make light of this deadly disease declaring: “Don’t be afraid of Covid-19. Don’t let it dominate your life!”
Trump always makes announcements on social media; he used twitter to tell the world he’d tested positive for the virus. It was Trump-like, then, to post a video online, one in which he self-praised to the point of nausea: “We’re going back to work. We’re going out front. As your leader I had to do that. I knew there’s a danger to it, but I had to do it. I stood out front. I led. Nobody that’s a leader would not do what I did. I know there’s a risk, there’s a danger, but that’s OK. And now I’m better [his doctors say he’s not out of the woods yet] and maybe I’m immune, I don’t know. But don’t let it dominate your lives.”
And there you have it. A man lacking entirely in empathy, unable to feel human feeling, unable to feel, or even emptily mouth sympathy for the pain of those who have lost loved ones in this pandemic.
There has not been a single moment (including before the start of the pandemic) that those of us watching have felt that Trump is capable of feeling or of human emotion.
I went back to Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology and who is considered a critical thinker of the 19th century.
Jung, whose work was influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, and religious studies, famously wrote: “The gigantic catastrophes that threaten us today are not elemental happenings of a biological or physical order, but psychic events. To quite a terrifying degree, we are threatened by wars and revolutions that are nothing other than psychic epidemics. At any moment, several million human beings may be smitten with a new madness and then we shall have another world war or devastating revolution. Instead of being at the mercy of wild beasts, landslides, earthquakes and inundations, modern man is battered by the elemental forces of his own psyche.”
He could be talking about the president of the US, a narcissist if the definition of the word is considered: excessive interest in and admiration of oneself. In psychology, the term refers to selfishness, a sense of entitlement, a lack of empathy and a need for admiration.
In psychoanalysis, it includes self-centredness arising from failure to distinguish the self from external objects, either in very young babies or as a feature of mental disorder.
That founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, said: “Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.”
Trump does not love. His cousin Mary Trump in her book Too much and Never Enough: How my Family Created The World’s Most Dangerous Man tells how he was a spoilt child, a dishonest grown-up and a bully.
He has hung onto his narcissism and is aggrieved as he perceives that everyone is against him, or out to get him. If people disagree with him, they are not with him, and therefore they have bought into fake news.
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