Coronavirus may have sickened the President, but the corporate media’s coverage of his illness sickened me.
First was reporters’ craven kowtowing to medical “experts” as if they, not the patient nor his wife, knew best for the First Couple. The mainstream press presupposes that all men, even those as confident and able as Trump, will and should submit to doctors’ coddling.
Whatever happened to the masculinity that ignores or makes light of serious afflictions, let alone the flu? And to the admiration such stoicism once evoked?
Then there was the scolding and ridicule of The Donald any time he showed the least courage or spirit:
Infected and contagious, President Donald Trump briefly ventured out in a motorcade on Sunday to salute cheering supporters, a move that disregarded precautions meant to contain the deadly virus that has forced his hospitalization and killed more than 209,000 Americans.
Did we live in a doughtier era, Americans would have applauded a man for refusing to play the invalid. Instead, the media berates him:
…Trump insisted he understood the gravity of the moment. But his actions …by leaving the hospital and sitting inside the SUV with others, suggested otherwise.
“This is insanity,” [said] Dr. James P. Phillips, an attending physician at Walter Reed who is a critic of Trump and his handling of the pandemic.
Hmmm. How long and diligently did the Associated Press search for such a twit? And why exactly should we listen to him? Why aren’t we also reading quotes from “attending physicians” who diverge from the COVIDCon and who don’t obsessively hate Trump?
But I interrupted ol’ James P.:
“Every single person in the vehicle during that completely unnecessary presidential ‘drive-by’ just now has to be quarantined for 14 days. They might get sick. They may die.”
Oh, gimme a break. To hear this coward tell it, we take our lives in our hands every time we cross the street.
“For political theater,” the doctor added. “Commanded by Trump to put their lives at risk for theater.”
No, to thank his supporters and to show the world that some men are still worthy of the name. But equanimity is too heroic for Jabbering Jimmy to comprehend.
Even before Trump’s motorcade outing on Sunday, some Secret Service agents have expressed concern about the lackadaisical attitude toward masks and social distancing inside the White House…
Seriously? Has the wussification of American men penetrated even the Secret Service until it trembles at a virus so feeble it kills less than 1/3 of 1% of those it infects?
And of course all this chiding of a virile man spurning the sickroom came atop the media’s usual editorializing instead of reporting and its damning of all things Trump.
Ours is a sick, sick age—and not from COVID.
9:03 pm on October 6, 2020
