Atlas Coughed

So the man understood, intimately, the threat of the virus; he chose not to wear a mask anyway. And he subjected everyone around him to the same logic. This is another way the Trump administration has eroded norms; the norm in this case is community itself. Notions of shared responsibility, of common fates, of mutual compassion all crumple under the weight of a mask that has been weaponized.

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You can see that erosion, as well, in many people’s insistent gendering of masks—as objects that are symbolic, allegedly, of the assorted weaknesses of femininity. (“Might as well carry a purse with that mask, Joe,” the conservative commentator Tomi Lahren scoffed earlier this week, in response to a video the Democratic presidential candidate shared of himself wearing a mask.) You can see it in messaging that treats Donald Trump’s catching of the virus not as the result of profound recklessness, but instead as an excuse for an embattled president to prove his mettle on the field. Trump is “a true warrior,” Eric Trump tweeted, after his father was diagnosed with COVID-19. “You are a warrior and will beat this,” Ivanka Trump agreed. Kelly Loeffler, the senator from Georgia, tweeted a manipulated clip from a World Wrestling Entertainment publicity video of Donald Trump tackling the WWE chair, Vince McMahon, in 2007: Superimposed over McMahon’s face is an image of the coronavirus. The Fox News contributor Greg Gutfeld found the ultimate twist of the logic: Trump, he suggested, got sick as a brave and selfless sacrifice for the rest of us—a leader leaping off his steed to do his fighting on the ground. “He didn’t want America to hide from the virus,” Gutfeld said. “He was going to do the same thing; he was going to walk out there on that battlefield with you.”

The effect of it all is to obscure the selfish recklessness that caused the president of the United States to contract the virus in the first place. War, as rhetoric, emphasizes the clash rather than the cause. If you can move the conversation toward the war itself, you might give people permission to forget why the battle is being waged in the first place. And you might be able to shift the terms of the discussion away from the sweeping failures of the federal government and toward the familiar reductions of the culture war. You can erode the matter down to the basics of “personal responsibility” versus “governmental intrusion.” You can break the rules, openly, and justify doing so under the logic that the rules do not apply to your side of the war. “I will put a mask on when I think I need it,” the president said during his in-person debate with Biden, when he might well have been carrying the virus. The American president was very possibly putting his opponent, and the many others in that room, in mortal danger. He was playing politics with people’s lives.