Waiting for the Stab

A brief update on the dictator’s medico-political status.

After yesterday’s “publicity stunt” wherein he had two Secret Service agents drive him around the block, thereby exposing them and God knows how many others to the coronavirus, he had himself discharged from the hospital today. While it is possible that his condition is not very serious and he only received an unprecedented range of real, experimental, and quack ameliorative treatments because he insisted on them, we have the sense that his condition is in fact very serious to grave and his emergency return to the hospital only a matter of days away, unless he croaks inside the White House.

As we discussed before, this event will have serious but unpredictable effects on his “cultish” followers. Large numbers of them have worked themselves into the delusion that this 74-year-old man with his saturnine face, refusal to exercise, and bad diet is a virile superman who will beat the virus with ease–a delusion he has seized on because of his family history of treating all illness as contemptible weakness. He desires nothing more than to proclaim that he has beaten the virus and that this proves he was right all along to deem the pandemic no worse than the flu, if not an outright hoax cooked up by the opposition to ruin him. This attitude will doubtless encourage his followers to continue to treat the pandemic as a hoax, leading directly to countless more preventable deaths among themselves and others.

But what will happen when COVID-19 takes his life? After funeral hysterics that may rival those for Stalin and Khomeini, when dozens were trampled to death, there will be a reckoning. Since he is the Nietzschean Superman, it cannot be that the virus has laid him low, and the mourners’ thoughts will immediately turn to treasonous assassination conspiracies. We can be certain that anyone Asian-looking in America will face a risk of violent threats and even fatal attacks, since COVID-19 was the “Chinese flu” in the Leader’s eyes and may well have been deliberately created by the Chinese government, as many of them are already speculating. Never mind that COVID-19 would be the worst biological weapon imaginable; these people long ago passed well beyond the outer limits of reason. The real danger will arise if one conspiratorial story line with a well-defined scapegoat coalesces, either spontaneously or by deliberate propaganda. We are thinking here of the “Dolchstosslegende,” the myth created in Germany after that country lost World War I to explain how this hitherto inconceivable event had occurred. It wasn’t military defeat, it was internal traitors, the story ran; and we know who the Nazis eventually made into the scapegoat.

Such a myth may also arise in Trumpian circles in the event that they are forced to accept a defeat at the polls on November 3, although the dictator and the Trump Party, formerly known as the GOP, are of course doing their best to ensure that no such eventuality can possibly occur. But at this point, we believe the dictator’s life hangs in the balance, and events are about to spiral beyond his or anyone’s control.