From gloating to weeping, US confronts Trump’s Covid-19 illness amid mounting crises

Some suspect the president’s diagnosis was a lie to minimise the pandemic and to manipulate the battle around the election

For others, Trump’s infection brought a sharp sense of irony, because they believed he lacked empathy as the virus raged around the world

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Published: 10:50pm, 3 Oct 2020Updated: 10:50pm, 3 Oct 2020

The news broke late at night, and by Friday morning a nation confronting a pandemic, economic crisis, racial divisions and plummeting stature in the world awoke to another trauma: president Donald Trump, who had long scoffed at a disease that has killed more than 208,000 Americans, had contracted Covid-19.

It was startling. But it fit the surreal narrative of this conflicted country. Some wept; others gloated. A helicopter lifted the president from the White House to a hospital. Another blow – as quick and brash as a tweet – had landed in the midst of an upcoming election thrown into turmoil like so much else in this numbing, baffling, maddening year.

In health and in sickness, Trump has laid bare our divisions.

In downtown Atlanta, property appraiser Leslie Sublett cried as she discussed the president’s diagnosis with coworkers, suspicious that it was a lie to minimise the pandemic and to manipulate the battle around the election and the US Supreme Court. She took a walk after lunch to relax, but Sublett, a 50-year-old Democrat, couldn’t shake the feeling that the US was collapsing.

“I’ve had it up to here,” she said, raising her hand above her head. “If we can’t depend on the basic tenets of our democracy, we’re Rome in the end stages. We will cease to be. Gosh, it sounds so dark and terrible, but that’s what I’m crying over.”

In Lake Charles, Louisiana, Republican Kevin Lavergne was anxious too – not about the pandemic, which he still believes is exaggerated, but about election security, the US Postal Service and the economy, especially since Hurricane Laura devastated his town in August.

From gloating to weeping, US confronts Trump’s Covid-19 illness amid mounting crises

Some suspect the president’s diagnosis was a lie to minimise the pandemic and to manipulate the battle around the election For others, Trump’s infection brought a sharp sense of irony, because they believed he lacked empathy as the virus raged around the world

Some suspect the president’s diagnosis was a lie to minimise the pandemic and to manipulate the battle around the election

For others, Trump’s infection brought a sharp sense of irony, because they believed he lacked empathy as the virus raged around the world