Get well soon: Don’t be a Trump about Trump

By now, every news watcher on the planet must know that US President Donald Trump has contracted the coronavirus. And many of us will have received the news with a fair amount of schadenfreude.

However, we have to ask ourselves a serious question. Is that joy that we feel at the infection of Mr Trump, who has decried Covid-19 as a Democrat hoax, who has refused to implement thorough national health and safety protocols, and possibly caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans… Is that not an extremely Trumpian attitude?

This was brought home to me when I saw the anger that greeted the statement by black American director Ava Duvernay that she hoped Mr Trump gets well. The minute she tweeted that, she was greeted by an avalanche of critique.

How dare she send good wishes to someone who had caused the deaths of so many people? Someone whose pompous ignorance, lack of compassion and inhumane materialism has infected US society with xenophobia, chauvinism and racist violence?

To her credit, Ms Duvernay, director of classic works such as A Wrinkle In Time and When They See Us, stuck to her guns. She called Trump a racist and a xenophobe, but she hoped he recovered from his illness.

It is a brave stand.

In trying to explain this stance to other people, I found myself sucked into the vortex. There, I met someone who proudly proclaimed, “I hope he dies!”

While I don’t find it impossible to relate to that sentiment, I found myself thinking, “What a Donald Trump thing to say!”

After all, is Mr Trump not the most insensitive, heartless, cold-blooded person on the planet? Quite possibly. So when we hear he has contracted Covid and we say we hope he dies, we are expressing precisely the same heartless sentiments that we profess to hate him for.

When we do that, Trump wins. His entire point of view, from the minute he embarked on his career as a billionaire scion and a politician has been that money is all that matters. People are meaningless. They are a means to an end, either with us or against us, to be used or destroyed.

This is pretty close to what fascism is all about. Rule through absolute power and force.

This is not the kind of world we want.

We need to work to build a world that is more compassionate, caring and people-centred. We must uplift the weak, the powerless and the oppressed. Introduce policies that support the marginalised. We need to change the capitalist obsession with exploitation – of people, resources and the environment.

If we believe that, and we’re going to make it real, we cannot adopt Donald Trump’s fascist principles. We cannot become heartless and inhumane – even towards Donald Trump himself.

The era that follows Trump and his ilk must be one of mutual respect and social upliftment, instead of brutal, winner-take-all economic exploitation and oppression. It is indeed possible to succeed together, and not at one another’s expense.

At the heart of that is a fundamental acknowledgement of each other as human beings. I can hate everything you do and stand for, but still respect your right to life. If I do not respect my fellow humans, then however much I say I despise Mr Trump, I am in fact becoming like him.

And whatever happens, I’m not going out like that.

So to Mr Trump, get well soon, enjoy the love of your friends and family, and may you go down in blazing flames in the forthcoming election. Let that resounding defeat of you and your corrupted political party usher in a new era of dignity and progress for all of us.

Hagen Engler. Picture: Supplied

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