THE SWAMP: The Entire Presidency Is a Superspreading Event

Down in the polls, high on steroids, and clinging to good health while endangering everyone else’s.

- OLIVIA NUZZI

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 previous day, at 12:54 a.m., he had announced that he and the First Lady, Melania, had tested positive for covid-19 in an outbreak that would sideline dozens across the West Wing, the East Wing, the highest levels of the federal government, the military ranks, Trump’s 2020 campaign team, and prominent supporters in the religious community. 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.