It’s impossible to escape the sense that history, which supposedly ended several decades ago, is once again unfolding and with alarming speed. In the span of less than a week, the two men vying for four more years in the White House have both been touched by fate. On 13 July, at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, a 20-year-old gunman took aim and came within centimetres of assassinating Donald Trump. Four days later in Las Vegas, Joe Biden’s team announced that the president had Covid, potentially a disaster for an already frail 81-year-old, and that they were cancelling his immediate campaign events. Violence and disease – a plague on both houses of the American political spectrum.
For millions of Americans violence and disease are no longer extraordinary occurrences, but depressingly commonplace. In recent years, life expectancy in the US has precipitously dropped, falling from 78.8 years in 2019 to 76.1 years in 2021 – the biggest drop since the Second World War. It’s not just that people in the US are dying at a younger age than residents in any other wealthy nation, they’re also dying younger than those in Cuba and Lebanon.
The Covid pandemic clearly played a large part in that drop – even back in 2022, a majority of Americans said that they personally knew someone who had been hospitalised or killed by the virus – but it’s far from the only killer. Heart disease, opioid overdoses, cancer and car accidents have all worked together to cut American lives short.
And then there’s the guns. New research published earlier this month found that infants and children, a group rarely directly affected by Covid, are now dying at higher rates in the US than in other wealthy nations. Yet children are directly affected by gun violence – it is now the leading cause of death for American kids and teens. More than 50 people a day are killed by guns; an average of two mass shootings take place every day in the US. On 25 June, the US surgeon general declared gun violence a public health crisis. Less than three weeks later, someone opened fire at a Trump rally.
Both men have been touched by the nation’s grim epidemics. But it’s likely that the majority of Americans will prefer to see themselves in Trump, rather than Biden.
It was Trump, after all, who managed to escape a public and violent death due to sheer luck, inadvertently turning his head at just the right moment to avoid a bullet. Ever the showman, he responded immediately with defiance, raising a furious fist in the air even as blood dripped from his ear; walking away from death while shouting, “Fight, fight, fight!” Days later he appeared on stage at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, a bandage covering his ear, politically stronger than ever.
Biden, by contrast, is isolating at his house in Rehoboth, Delaware, while suffering from “mild symptoms”, including a runny nose, a non-productive cough and “general malaise”, according to the White House Press secretary. Shielded from public view, Americans can only imagine how the virus is affecting the 81-year-old president. This is a man who has in recent weeks appeared alarmingly feeble and confused in his public appearances. Between his disastrous debate with Trump in June, his rambling, incoherent answers in interviews with the press and introducing Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky as “President Putin” at the Nato summit, it’s become difficult to watch Biden campaign in recent weeks. More than one person has told me they now find listening to Biden unbearable. As he strains to finish a sentence, his answers drifting into nonsense, they are overwhelmed by intolerable feelings of pity and secondhand embarrassment.
It’s entirely possible that Biden will recover quickly from Covid and will not suffer any long-term symptoms, either physically or mentally. Then again, given how opaque Biden’s team has been about his health to this point – as they insist he’s as sharp as ever, despite clear evidence to the contrary – it’s hard to imagine an advertised full recovery would assuage any doubts.
The concern over Biden’s diminished acuity has been so significant that high-profile fundraisers and senior Democrats have pressured the president – publicly and privately – to drop out of the race, and make way for another candidate. So far, Biden has refused to listen to George Clooney, Chuck Shumer or Nancy Pelosi; could Covid make the case for them?
Reports suggest that Biden has become, at least somewhat, “more receptive” to the argument that he should stand down. In a pre-recorded interview that aired on 17 July, Biden also said that he might consider dropping out if “I had some medical condition that emerged, if somebody, if doctors came to me and said, you got this problem and that problem”. It’s entirely possible that Covid will provide him the opportunity to bow out gracefully and retire in comfort, his health once again a private matter, rather than a public crisis.
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