| Just hours before the president tested positive for Covid-19, he was shaking hands and posing for photos with wealthy supporters at his New Jersey golf club. Fifty thousand got you in the door; $250,000 bought you a seat at a private roundtable and, now, a likely two-week quarantine after direct exposure to a virus that has so far killed more than 200,000 people in this country.
Mild panic is reportedly rippling through those attendees and the White House, which I guess feels kind of nice, in a cosmic sense. But as Jen wrote earlier today, the odds are on their side. Rich people have weathered the pandemic well because their wealth insulates them against the conditions it creates for others. Just as news of the president’s diagnosis was breaking, a report revealed that more than 19,000 workers at Amazon and Whole Foods contracted the virus in the same time period that Jeff Bezos’s fortune grew by 65 percent.
All of which leaves me with the feeling that Trump’s diagnosis changes a lot, but not nearly enough. Jonathan Rosa, a sociocultural and linguistic anthropologist at Stanford, characterized the news of the morning as “surface chaos, structural continuity.” That sounds right to me as I watch the circus unfold, so I guess I’ll leave it there.
—Katie McDonough, deputy editor | 