It’s Trump’s progressive foes who are dangerously unwell

Donald Trump appears in a video message from Walter Reed hospital where he is receiving treatment after testing positive for COVID-19. Picture: Twitter

Four weeks ahead of the US election, President Donald Trump is under quarantine and will remain there for at least the recommended isolation period of 10 days. The news is another shock in a presidential term marked by chaos, but has been celebrated by Chinese Communist Party loyalists, members of the US Democrats and self-declared progressives.

In better times, there might be a stay of hostilities while the President was recovering from ill-health. But we are living in an age liberated from conservative restraint where foul intent is given every licence and people ape primal behaviour because they believe, ironically, that incivility is the path to progress.

Within hours of Trump falling ill, members of the American left had joined communist media to denounce him and craft morbid jokes about his death. They resurrected a cartoon meme showing Trump in a coffin. Hillary Clinton’s Muslim affairs spokeswoman from 2016, Zara Rahim, said she wanted the American President to die. If a white Republican staffer called for Barack Obama to die, the media would denounce it as white supremacy. Will Rahim be denounced as a black supremacist?

The offending tweet by Zaea Rahim.

Before knowing where or how the President contracted the virus, some media declared him guilty. Prominent public figures joined Chinese state media to depict Trump as wholly responsible for being sick because he did not wear a face mask at all times. Hu Xijin, the editor of Chinese Communist Party paper Global Times, tweeted: “President Trump and the first lady have paid the price for his gamble to play down the COVID-19.” As though the first blush of communist sympathy were not enough for the world to turn red, Hu made a sporting bet on Trump’s illness, saying it could cruel his chances of re-election.

Back in the land of the free, the tinfoil hatters were not convinced a virus had taken their President down. From his permanent posting in far left field, filmmaker Michael Moore smelled a conspiracy.

In a bizarre post on Facebook, he suggested the President could be lying about the COVID-19 diagnosis. Actress Bette Midler went one better by saying the timing was “interesting” and “convenient”. Another actress and Joe Biden supporter, Mia Farrow, tweeted that Trump could be lying for political advantage. He was hospitalised on Friday evening.

Could he be making this up because he’s faced with losing & this is a way of bailing out while saving face

— Mia Farrow (@MiaFarrow) October 3, 2020

Leftists who believed Trump had fallen ill enjoyed some schadenfreude and it is difficult to deny he had blowback coming. More than once, he has mocked Democrats for wearing face masks.

During the presidential debate, Biden accused him of being careless for not wearing a mask often enough. Trump responded that he was regularly tested and observed social distancing. But he couldn’t resist sending Biden up: “I wear masks. I don’t wear masks like him. Every time you see him, he’s got a mask. He could be speaking 200 feet away from me, and he shows up with the biggest mask I’ve ever seen.”

It was one of the lighter moments during a dreary debate where both contenders dodged important questions about the economy, health and social policy. Instead of discussing in depth the economy, education, foreign relations and trade, the future of the free world and Pax Americana, the debate descended into a tiff about face masks, crowd control, which COVID-19 or climate expert was more right on everything and race relations. In retrospect, the President might have been ill, but that is a generous assumption.

One of the most offensive parts of the debate was the joint effort by Biden and moderator Chris Wallace to smear Trump in a game of guilt by absurd association. They wanted him to denounce a group accused of white supremacy. I am not familiar with the Proud Boys, but it does seem improbable that the group is a hotbed of white supremacy given its chairman is a black Cuban man, Enrique Tarrio.

Politically correct censorship has developed into forced speech, where the left demands that dissenters denounce those accused of incorrect behaviour, as though denunciation proves the innocence of conservatives who are otherwise presumed guilty. The President would not play the game. As a result, the left media accused him of being racist. The term is now used whenever progs meet an argument they cannot win. It reduces public discourse to the lowest common denominator so that people do not have to think about weightier matters of state.

After Trump was smeared as a white supremacist for not denouncing the Proud Boys, Tarrio spoke to WSVN media saying the group denounced white supremacy, anti-Semitism, racism, fascism, communism “and any other ‘-ism’ that is prejudice towards people because of their race, religion, culture, tone of skin”. Nowhere in the virtual interrogation did Biden address his own history of racism, including a statement in May that black people had to vote Democrat or they were not really black. Apparently, a white guy lecturing black people how to think was racist in the 19th century, but it is the essence of progressive politics two centuries later.

Biden and Wallace also failed to raise the problem of violence in cases where perpetrators use anti-racism as a defence. Almost 500 New York City police have been injured during the supposedly peaceful protests for race equality since May. In a recent case, the organiser of a rally against racism was charged with attempted murder after driving her car into a group of Trump supporters and running over a woman’s head.

Trump won the last election by defending Americans against globalism and a political media class hostile to people born with white skin, male genitalia, heterosexual inclination, and those who profess Christian faith. If the American left continues down the rabbit hole of PC bigotry, it will lose.