The Case of the President’s Virus

COVID, craziness, and common sense

The President of the United States is sick, afflicted with a case of COVID-19.

Or he was sick, if his macho, mask-removin’, chest-thumpin’, helicopter-salutin’ return to the White House on Monday evening is to be believed. He saluted the chopper that dropped him on his well-groomed lawn for almost as long as a now-famous house-fly hung out on Mike Pence’s closely-cropped hair on Wednesday night during the vice-presidential debate.

The fly was a Democratic spy, some have said — sent by operatives to divine what, if anything, was going on in the Vice-President’s head. I doubt that’s true: deploying robotic intelligence-gathering houseflies seems well outside the Dems’ skill-set. Consider that after regarding “devil-incarnate” Trump for years with horror and disgust, the best the Democrats could produce as opposition standard-bearer was the affable but doddering Joe Biden.

The fly, I suspect, in keeping with the tenor of the times (even insects aren’t immune), was simply making a statement: Black Flies Matter.

Perhaps the conspiracy theorists are correct: perhaps Donald Trump was never actually sick — that it was all a diabolical political ploy on the part of the president to stick-handle his way to re-election. Americans, it must be said, are…