President Donald Trump walks to board Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington while traveling to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center after testing positive the coronavirus, Oct. 2, 2020.
“Risk plays a part in everything we do,” he advised in one of his pre-presidential how-to books. “I could get hit by a bus while I am crossing the street. Things happen.” In business, he has transcended consistent misfires with the risk-cushioning assistance of tax-avoidance schemes, bankruptcy court, his father’s riches and a manicured vision of televised success on “The Apprentice.”
The message was a functional extension of what supporters see as his swashbuckling political brand: a perpetual appeal to America’s inner dice-roller — “What do you have to lose?” he has long asked his audiences — requesting another four-year turn at the tables. “He believes that he is such a winner that there just isn’t any way this could have felled him,” Gwenda Blair, a biographer of the Trump family, said of the president’s maskless nonchalance in recent months. “He wasn’t, in his mind, running a risk because he’s pushed all the risk off onto other people — and the blame, if anything goes wrong.”
He did not care for masks, so he did not usually wear masks, saying in May that he was “very far away from everyone,” so he would probably be OK. More often than not, at least before the pandemic, the lesson for Trump seemed to have been that nothing particularly terrible would happen if he followed his gut. For as long as he has been a politician, it has felt, to supporters and opponents, as if he were getting away with something — saying what you shouldn’t say, doing what you shouldn’t do — and defying the template for political risk management.
“This is America,” Trump said in his video over the weekend, never quite completing his point. “This is the United States.” It is far from clear that Trump’s own view of pandemic-era risks and rewards will change now that he is among the afflicted, especially given his drive-by outing Sunday.