October 5, 2020

Trump Says Don’t Be Afraid of COVID. Please Ignore Him.

The infected president tells the nation that a deadly, incurable virus that’s still spreading is no big deal.

Trump

© Gripas Yuri/Abaca via ZUMA Press

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President Donald Trump announced via Twitter on Monday afternoon that he would soon be released from Walter Reed Army Medical Center. The president was taken to the hospital by helicopter on Friday after his case of COVID-19 worsened. Doctors told reporters over the weekend that he had been given supplemental oxygen and an assortment of treatments generally reserved for serious to severe cases.

Health shocks like this can sometimes change a person. They can give a new sense of perspective, bring to mind what really matters, or maybe convey the urgency of a threat previously blown off. Donald Trump is not an ordinary person, though. Here is what he tweeted:

Even by his standards, this is repulsive. Trump’s takeaway from being airlifted to a hospital and at the center of an outbreak that has given his wife, close advisors, senators, and White House residence staff a potentially deadly virus is that COVID actually isn’t that bad. After all, he—a man with access to the best doctors in the world and treatments that are unavailable to many others—only needed to spend three full days in a hospital. This message is especially dangerous at a time when cases are once again on the rise in the United States, and places like New York City are enacting new restrictions to slow the spread.

Be afraid of COVID. Be afraid of getting it, be afraid of giving it to others, be terribly afraid of people you care about contracting it. Be afraid of what an pandemic—even if it doesn’t seem to affect you personally—means for your neighbors. (It’s good to care about other people, despite what the callous behavior of the Trump White House over the last week would suggest.) Be afraid of COVID even if you’re a ghoul and a sociopath and none of those things matter, because when people don’t properly fear COVID, everything shuts down and people get laid off and no one can pay their bills or buy food and there are many ways  for people to suffer without ever getting infected. Be afraid of COVID! It sucks. It can do plenty of terrible things to you even if you survive it—even if you’re literally in your twenties. It has killed well more than 200,000 people in the United States, and counting. It killed a thousand people just last weekend, and both those figures should be viewed as simply the minimum known number. It is killing people right now.

Be afraid! Because if everyone took the virus seriously, we’d all have a lot less to fear.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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