'His Majesty's health has never been better." This is the closing line of the bulletin of the Grand Armée of Napoleon Bonaparte, dispatched, on its catastrophic retreat from Moscow, on December 3rd, 1812.
It reached Paris 15 days later and only two days ahead of the arrival of the emperor himself. Napoleon had led the largest army then assembled in Europe to its destruction. He had presided over the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. But his health had never been better.
As the sardonic François-René de Chateaubriand put it, “Families, dry your tears: Napoleon is feeling fine.”
When it comes to the appropriation of images he does not believe in, Trump's strength is his utter shamelessness
In the ever more bizarre US presidential election, one side is essentially pinning its hopes on this new slogan: “Dry your tears; Trump is feeling fine.” As he left hospital on October 5th after contracting Covid-19, Trump declared: “I feel better than I did 20 years ago!” His campaign now consists primarily of showing himself to his people and inviting them to bask in the wonder of his resurrection.
His desperate gamble is that voters, instead of blaming him for presiding over hundreds of thousands of deaths, will see his personal return to health after coronavirus as a token of their own salvation. They will feel better about everything just for knowing that he is well.
To those still devoted to rational thinking, this may seem demented. But demented does not necessarily mean doomed – we know only too well that irrational structures of feeling can overwhelm the most basic calculations of political self-interest. Why otherwise, would so many older, sicker Americans have voted in 2016 for a president who promised to deprive them of health insurance?
Playing the health card when you’ve maliciously and knowingly allowed a deadly virus to rip through your population may be insane. But Trump still thinks it is the wild card that will allow him to scoop the pot on November 3rd. And only a fool would underestimate his instinct for the outrageous wager. So often in the past, his jokers have turned out to be aces.
Thus the idea that the virus that did not kill Trump has made him stronger has to be taken seriously, and to do that we have to consider the metaphors Trump is drawing on. There are two of them. What is intriguing is that they come from quite different mental worlds – one is religious, the other scientific.
The religious metaphor is obvious enough, both in its origins and in its appeal: Trump as Jesus. It should never be forgotten just how utterly saturated the mainstream US is in Christian imagery. It is ironic that Trump, arguably the most irreligious man ever to occupy the Oval Office, has played on that imagery so brazenly and so blasphemously.
Asked in 2015 to name a single verse in his self-declared “favourite book”, the Bible, Trump couldn’t manage to think of even one. But that did not stop an assault on peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters in Washington this summer, just so he could wave a Bible outside a church. When it comes to the appropriation of images he does not believe in, Trump’s strength is his utter shamelessness.
In this regard, catching the virus has actually been good for Trump. Even his most ardent supporters have been aware of a certain strain in their projection onto him of God’s plan for the world. But his bout with the virus has given it a weird kind of substance.
Trump has presented what happened to him, not as a consequence of his narcissistic recklessness, but as heroic self-sacrifice – he caught the virus in the line of duty, taking it on himself. And the rest then fits the biblical narrative. Trump “died”, was in the “tomb” of Walter Reed hospital for three days and then rose again to walk among the faithful before ascending into immortality and a second term.
Implicit in this grotesque parody of the Christian story is the promise of salvation. Christ endured pain and death, not for his own sake, but to save humankind. Trump’s resurrection is also the revitalisation of his failing political project. It makes America great again – again.
There are secular underpinnings to this story: the Comeback Kid is a favourite American trope and Trump has turned it to good use before, in transforming his multiple bankruptcies into a tale of resilience and restoration. Not for nothing is one of his best-sellers called The Art of the Comeback.
These resonances suit Trump, too, because they restore him figuratively to the position he so relished in 2016 – the underdog, the man “they” kept writing off. This helps his voters to forget that he is actually an incumbent with a real and mostly miserable record.
The other metaphor he is using draws on medicine. The irony is redoubled: just as the blasphemer uses the Christian story, the hater of science deploys a scientific image – immunity.
“I’m immune – I could come down and start kissing everybody,” he told the crowd at a rally in the swing state of Pennsylvania last week. The image he is calling up is that of contagion turned on its head. Trump didn’t contract the virus, he contracted immunity. He does not spread the virus, he spreads resistance.
This is a quite some mutant strain of thought. Its point is not that Trump has created a vaccine – he is the vaccine. He is now invulnerable, and he can somehow transfer that safety to his people.
This may be off-the-wall but is it is also par for the course in authoritarian systems. The leader is the embodiment of the people, so if his body is fine, so is theirs. His health is the health of the nation.
In the metaphorical arms race against Joe Biden, this warhead packs a lot of megatons. Biden is the nice old family doctor with the comforting bedside manner, who can heal America through calm reason. Trump is the shaman who gone out into the woods and fought the demons that bring sickness.
But there is just one problem. To be willing to drink the heady cocktail of Trump-as-Jesus and Trump-as-vaccine, you have to actually believe in Trump in the first place. For those who already invested in the idea of Trump as God’s chosen one and as the embodiment of America, there is joy in what is now the essential message of his campaign: I’m alive!
But the same cannot be said for 220,000 Americans who have died so far from Covid-19 on his watch. There are just too many families for whom the news that his majesty has never felt better fails to lift their hearts. It makes them think, rather, of the disaster the emperor has led them to.