Now that we’re in the midst of the worst public health crisis in a century, though, it has to be asked: Who cares about swastika-wielding types when an invisible bit of genetic material can worm its way into your mucous membranes and hijack your lungs?
The truth is that, as the Trump administration fumbles its way through its coronavirus response, these shows’ sense of creeping dread and deepening anxiety have hit even harder. The virus comes with other contagions: panic, anger, grief, suspicion. Health care professionals use the language of wartime (they work on the “front lines”), donning masks and goggles as if they were in battle, which they are.
Trump has predictably embraced the bellicosity, seemingly hoping the simulation of leadership is enough to make Americans forget he failed to take the coronavirus seriously until it was far too late. The strongman act, perversely, makes Trump seem more harmless than ever; one is reminded of “Doonesbury” during the second Iraq War, when Garry Trudeau depicted Bush as an invisible man wearing a resplendent centurion helmet.
But if Trump is more negligent than methodical in his ideology, that does not make it any less an ideology of hate, like the ones we’re watching play out on scripted TV. Eager to distract from the administration’s failures in early testing, Trump called the coronavirus the “China Virus” or “Chinese Virus,” aggravating—and perhaps even encouraging—a wave of hate crimes against Asian Americans that began in late February. The Othering of an illness is a tactic as old as time, as Susan Sontag would have reminded us. The hoary, pathetic trick worked anyway. Victims described being yelled at, assaulted, and deliberately coughed on, explicitly blamed by white Americans for carrying the virus into their own communities.
In late March, Trump reined in his language, but it was quickly mirrored in another, even more populous virus hot spot: India, where Trump’s friend Narendra Modi is prime minister. The country, already plagued by internecine strife, has reportedly experienced an uptick in violence against Indians who have facial features resembling Han Chinese.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration and the GOP have relaxed pollution regulations, revoked a Massachusetts Indian reservation’s designation, and stuck a half-trillion-dollar slush fund in the economic stimulus bill. State leaders declared elective abortion a nonessential service and ordered clinics to close. (The issue is still being settled in court.) The coronavirus became a reason, or an excuse, for consolidating power—not unlike what the Nazis did after the Reichstag fire.
Trump has consistently misled the public about the dangers of the coronavirus, putting even more pressure on a failing health care system that already privileged the wealthy. To distract from that negative outcome, Trump’s surrogates in the media began to toy with the idea of rolling back measures to check the virus, effectively increasing its death toll, so that the country could “get back to work” faster. With staggering flippancy, former bank executives Lloyd Blankfein and Dick Kovacevich—in isolation themselves—called on workers to risk the danger of infection. Texas’s lieutenant governor argued that grandparents would be happy to sacrifice themselves for younger generations to enjoy a healthy economy. When public reaction to letting a couple million people die predictably backfired, Trump settled into a protracted bargaining process with beleaguered governors, forcing them to compete with each other—and to flatter him—for access to lifesaving federal resources.
Nazis would have been more organized about their methodology, but they would have appreciated the subtext: Some people deserve to live and others don’t. The Nazis targeted the disabled and sick; Trump, inelegantly, has targeted the same demographic. White supremacists prefer an ideology of race alone. Trump and his cronies are content with the ideology of money: Some people can afford to live. Others can’t. Shrug. What are you gonna do?
Albert Camus’s The Plague is a novel of epidemic, but it’s been consistently read as a metaphor for the Nazi occupation of France. In the Los Angeles Times, Stephen Metcalf asserts that the evil of disease and the evils of fascism were the same to Camus: “By writing about an infectious disease, Camus was emphasizing the relative unimportance, to him, of the motivations of the evil thing…. The Nazis were not evil because they occupied an extreme position on the political spectrum but because they were enemies of life itself. Such an enemy lies, like the microbe, beyond reason.”