10/9/20
Donald Trump was on the phone, and he was talking about dying. It was Saturday, October 3, and while his doctor had told the outside world that the president’s symptoms were nothing to worry about, Trump, cocooned in his suite at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, was telling those close to him something very different. “I could be one of the diers,” he said. The person on the other end of the line couldn’t forget that unusual word the president used: dier. A seldom-said dictionary standard, it was a classic Trumpism, at once sinister and childlike. If being a loser was bad, being a dier was a lot worse. Losers can become winners again. Diers are losers forever. But aren’t we all diers in the end? Donald Trump, the least self-reflective man in America, was contemplating his own mortality. He said it again: “I could be one of the diers.” The virus had barreled into the very White House that allowed its spread throughout the United States, where 213,000 were dead and 7.6 million more were infected amid the biggest economic collapse since the Great Depression. As infections swelled nationwide, the virus made its way inside the president himself — an epic security failure with no modern analog. the story of Trump’s “mild symptoms” became less and less true as the hours ticked by. His fever crept up. His cough and congestion grew worse.
Doctors gave him oxygen and administered a high dose of an experimental antibody treatment unavailable to the ailing masses and made using fetal tissue, a practice his administration opposes, from the drug-maker Regeneron. Nine months into the pandemic and one month away from Election Day, the president considered for the first time that the disease killing him in the polls, threatening his political future, might just kill him, too. A little more than three weeks before the election, potentially contagious and freaking everybody out, Trump faces what looks like the end of his presidency. “He’s mishandled the coronavirus, he’s never been popular, and he’s gonna lose badly. I think it’s pretty simple,” a senior Republican official said. "It touches every American’s life every day in multiple different ways, and he’s handled it badly and people don’t forget that.” said ex–Trump adviser Sam Nunberg. “I think some of this is sad to watch,” Nunberg said. “It’s getting to the point where he’s almost turning into a laughingstock. What I’m worried about is whether he wants to completely self-destruct and take everything down with him vis-à-vis the election and the Republican Party.” He added, “This is a guy who’s not gonna lose joyfully.”
nymag.com
