Learn to Behave from One Who Does Not

Presidential aide and speech-writer Stephen Miller became the 11th member of Trump’s White House to have tested positive for COVID since the “super-spreader” event held in the Rose Garden. As widely reported, this was a largely partisan gathering in which few wore masks or practiced social distancing.

Wearing a mask and social distancing aren’t radically liberal, expensive, or complicatedly high-tech. You don’t need a privileged status to employ them. You don’t need your own helicopter and a dozen doctors monitoring your every breath, nor a cocktail of experimental drugs that are not widely available to anyone else, in order to protect against the ravages of COVID. Even poorer, densely populated countries employing these simple practices — like a disciplined herd under competent leadership — had managed to control the virus’s spread far better than the United States.

It was the partisan nature of the crowd in the Rose Garden — its “herd mentality” following incompetent leadership — that was to prove so lethal in the U.S. And the term “herd mentality” bears further reflection.

For it’s a term that Trump — and apparently his followers — now confuse with “herd immunity.” And herd immunity — that is, allowing a population to become so infected by a virus that those who survive it might acquire immunity — was also Great Britain’s initial strategy toward COVID. And it turned out to be a failed and deadly policy. One that had also left its leader — Boris Johnson — infected.

Yet in lieu of better leadership, this is the strategy the Republican Party has gravitated toward now: Isolate the more elderly — as if this were doable — and allow younger people to get the virus, and hopefully thus gain herd immunity (until a vaccine becomes available — though even once such a vaccine has been adequately tested and approved, it could still take another year before its roll-out fully unfolds).

Clearly, 7.5 million Americans infected by COVID (with over 212,000 now dead) hasn’t yet led to herd immunity. But a year down the road, if we just stay the course, and quadruple those infected, we might just get there. Then the virus might just go away — like a miracle! As the president has been telling us all along.

But the survivors would have all manner of pre-existing conditions that could lead them to lose their health care. (This is about to be decided by the Supreme Court.) So, if we can just pack the court with another conservative judge, we might get rid of Roe vs. Wade as well … What could possibly be wrong with any of this?

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Meanwhile, it would be premature to refer to the above-mentioned members of Trump’s White House as “The Rose Garden 11.” For daily now, the number needs to be changed. But to put the above number into perspective — 11 new cases in the White House in a single week is more new weekly cases of COVID than in the following countries: Taiwan had 8, Vietnam and Cambodia even fewer.

This is a pandemic, a global problem — no single nation is responsible for it, but the United States didn’t have to follow such an irresponsible course — such that a nation with 4% of the world population, a nation with some of best-trained doctors in the world, now has 20% of the world’s COVID-caused fatalities, with its White House now become the pandemic’s epicenter, and the most infected house on the face of the earth.

Dr. Jonathan Reiner — Dick Cheney’s former cardiologist, a CNN medical analyst, tells us that in all likelihood Trump was already infected by the time of his first debate with Biden. Yet the rules of the debate required both candidates — and all of their attendees — to submit tests documenting they’d been tested within the past 72 hours.

Reiner says there’s no chance that happened. And that the reason the White House has refused the offer by the CDC to conduct contact tracing, and review every case of those who came down with the virus after the Rose Garden event — is their concern that the “patient zero” might be the President of the United States.

After returning from the hospital, Trump remained as impulsive. grandiose, and reckless as ever — posing in a triumphant series of salutes toward no one but those videoing him — and reminiscent of him holding a Bible up for the video op a few weeks earlier. Such pathetic buffoonery ought to be institutionalized, not re-elected.

Yet the good news here is that 21% of Americans are now more likely to wear a mask after the president’s positive diagnosis. Inadvertently, this has been Trump’s most singular contribution to limiting the spread of the virus.

It also echoes a famous Sufi saying: Learn to behave from one who does not.

President Donald J. Trump and First Lady Melania Trump arrive at a reception in honor of Gold Star families Sunday, Sept. 27, 2020, in the East Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Andrea Hanks). Notice who’s wearing a mask — and who isn’t.