Trump’s Covid, Exceptionalism, and (the) Election

You would have thought that when Donald Trump came down with Coronavirus, it would have caused a shift by this maskless president who discounts the advice and knowledge of scientists. You would also have thought his supporters, who ridicule mask wearing and flaunt their freedom to resist guidelines to social distance, would now see the consequences of recklessness and recognize the seriousness of Covid-19, which is clearly not a hoax. But no. Instead, only a few days after the president was diagnosed and hospitalized, news reports confirm that the political divisions in the U.S. remain the same or have intensified.

Trump supporters are still ardent. Like the president, they don’t want to admit they were wrong. Rather than acknowledging Trump was foolish to deny the severity of the virus and to refuse to wear a mask, they accept and declare that it’s everywhere and can’t be avoided. He is still their “savior,” or as right wing white evangelicals say, the “chosen one,” like America itself, favored by God. Redemption hasn’t happened, and neither has the Second Coming, but as in past centuries when messianic fervor struck (and God knows, we really do need redemption in America), Trump’s followers remain faithful, their hopes of salvation just pushed into the future.

So what will happen this November 3rd, now less than a month away? As Joe Biden says, “the soul of America” is at stake. I believe Democracy is at stake, as well as “American Exceptionalism,” a term that now seems heavily ironic. Yes, we are exceptional. We’ve had more deaths from Covid-19 than any other country. Exceptionalism and election are two ideas that actually intertwine. For exceptionalism has been the belief since the first settlers that America is God’s chosen or elect country with its people and lands blessed. With the American Revolution and her Declaration of Independence from the authority of an overbearing monarch in Britain, America was supposed to be a beacon of light to the world—a concept evoking the words of the prophet Isaiah who in chapter 60 described Jerusalem restored, the people redeemed, in the “end days.”

This notion of America’s exceptionalism as a light to the world--revived by former President Ronald Reagan—has been a core principle of Trump’s, Make America Great Again, aka MAGA. And because of its biblical foundation, even if Trump wasn’t aware of it, the president’s touting of American exceptionalism has been embraced by his evangelical core, a position even ultra-conservative Catholics can join. And that’s because the devotion to their “Savior” and the president is often indistinguishable from one another. No wonder his rallies resemble megachurch revivals wherever they occur.

We are exceptional alright. These days it feels like we’re losing our image of that shining beacon the world used to look up to and consider an example to emulate. The president’s friends are autocrats and dictators instead of leaders of democratic countries. Rather than welcoming immigrants and refugees, as the Statue of Liberty promises (a statue given to America by France on the anniversary of the American Revolution), under Trump immigrants seeking refuge have been “detained,” resulting in family separations, children put in cages and women given unconsented and unexplained “gynecological procedures” that sterilized them. Trump is limiting immigration while expressing the hope that we get immigrants from “Nordic countries.” This all sounds frighteningly familiar to me. Moreover, under Trump and his cohorts in government, we have a policy of isolation, much as America did in the 1930’s, a time when America restricted immigration, particularly from undesirable countries and populations. We have also withdrawn from the Paris Climate Accord, as if there is the belief that America will be exceptional and unaffected by the devastation of the climate, just as the president assumed he would be unaffected by Covid-19. But there are no borders to these disasters, no walls that can keep them away, or any assurance they’ll only affect your enemies.

Now the United States is severly diminished in the eyes of the world. Other nations no longer admire us and have closed their borders to Americans to keep out the plague.

In 1783, in the aftermath of the American Revolution and a time of hope, Reverend Ezra Stiles, one of a long line of Protestant ministers who became President of Yale, preached a lenghy sermon that was soon printed. The United States elevated to glory and honor. Stiles declared that Moses’s words to biblical Israel in Deuteronomy 26:10 (“And to make thee high above all nations which he hath made, in praise, and in name, and in honour; and that thou mayest be an holy people unto the Lord thy God, as he hath spoken.”) were not about Jewish Israel but about “God’s American Israel.”  America was fulfilling the prophecy, and Stiles envisions a glorious future for the new nation. “This great American Revolution, this recent political phenomenon of a new sovereignty” will be “contemplated by all nations” (463). Not only its model of polity but its practice of “toleration” “religious liberty,” and “benevolence” will spread to other nations. Stiles’s rapturous sermon gave Enlightenment ideals of liberty and toleration an Old Testament foundation, but had a Protestant religious purpose, for he envisions reformed (Protestant) Christianity spreading around the world. This biblically based American Exceptionalism is still quite alive today.

But it seems as if we are more like the English people John Milton described in early 1660, the people who were about to bring back their king, once England’s experiment in republicanism had failed. Milton too, earlier in his career had written of England as God’s special nation, but now he compared the English to the biblical Israelites who wanted to return to Egypt. They had been delivered from slavery but found the work of liberty too hard. Milton predicted that if they supported the king and “put their necks under kingship,” their actions would make them “a scorn and derision to all our neighbors.” This was the phrase that sadly came to my mind as I watched the presidential debate knowing that the rest of the world was also watching.

We will see what the election will bring. Everything is at stake. God help us.