Other than if President Trump were to die, the worst thing to come out of him testing positive for the coronavirus is the insistence by liberals that there’s some lesson to gain about “getting serious” on the pandemic.
CNN’s Jake Tapper put on his sternest anchorman voice Sunday and looked daringly into the camera to say, “Mr. President, you have become a symbol of your own failures.” (Any time a TV journalist says, “Mr. President,” you know what follows is going to be incredibly corny.)
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote Saturday, “Let’s learn from the president’s infection.”
The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank on Friday called Trump’s diagnosis “one heck of a teachable moment.”
It’s all so tiresome but more to the point, there is literally nothing to learn from Trump happening to catch a new and highly contagious virus, no more than there is anything to learn from reading another stale lecture from Tapper.
We’re in a pandemic. The president got sick. That’s all there is to it. (Trump’s physicians said Sunday that he has shown positive signs of recovery and that he could be discharged from Walter Reed hospital as soon as the next day.)
Democrats and goofy liberals in the media like to pretend that if everyone wore masks and stayed 6 feet apart, we’d see no infections, but that’s false. The Democratic mayor of Washington, D.C., where I live, mandates that everyone right now wear masks, even outside. And yet, the city reported 46 new cases of the virus on Saturday. Two people died.
It happens. That’s how pathogens work. They spread. They infect. People, by and large, recover. Next.
That the president caught the virus out of China doesn’t mean everyone should shut down, paralyzed in fear. It’s not a “reminder” of anything.
Everyone knows by now that the coronavirus is real, that it’s airborne and that specific groups of people face a greater risk than the overwhelming majority of others when they’re exposed to it. Normal people understand that. But what the rest in the media haven’t figured out is that our lives and our country have to move on.
More shutdowns, restrictions, and disruptions over a virus with a mortality rate of something less than 1% are not the answer.
We know there’s a risk of getting infected by the coronavirus each time we step outside our homes, just like we know there’s risk involved each time we drive on the highway.
The reality that we might get in a car crash driving 70 mph doesn’t deter people from commuting to work. The reality that we might catch a bug isn’t any different, other than that the medical field is making quick progress on treating coronavirus. (The same can’t necessarily be said for people who fly out of their windshield.)
Trump resumed his life, and, yes, it was a risk. Unfortunately, he got infected.
There’s nothing to learn from that. It’s what happens during a pandemic.
