The Other Virus- the one that causes TRUVID-16

Many years ago, I attended the same church as a well-known conservative journalist and commentator whose work I had always admired. I do not know her well, but I've admired her writing over the years and she has had kind things to say about this blog.

Trump-skeptical at first, she is now a prominent and outspoken supporter of Donald Fredovich. She is no longer responding to my tweets or answering my emails and tells me that I lack charity toward those (including her) with whom I differ politically.

The reason? My repeated suggestion that when conservatives who as a matter of principle support free trade suddenly support protectionism and tariffs; when conservatives who as a matter of principle support the muscular and assertive protection of American interests in foreign policy suddenly defend isolationism; when conservatives who, as a matter of principle, believe in fiscal restraint suddenly begin supporting a president in spending like a drunken sailor and drastically increasing the deficit; when conservatives who support the Constitution and the rule of law suddenly defend an authoritarian president's utter and absolute refusal to be accountable and who speak and act in ways contemptuous of both; and when principled people who have always celebrated political courage and the claims of the individual conscience become cowed into lockstep conformity by the pronouncements- however absurd- of a party leader and become complicit in an ethos of narrow, coerced conformity to the pronouncements and whims of a national leader no matter how absurd or unethical, they have compromised their principles.

Add to that now the newest bit of pseudo-conservative Trumpian ideology: the notion that if a few old and sickly people die because we open things up again before the coronavirus is under control that's ok if it mitigates the damage the pandemic is doing to the economy, well, you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.  The sanctity of life, it seems, has gone the way of free trade and internationalism and financial responsibility and the rule of law and the accountability of public officials and the individual conscience.

A virus is a very simple biological entity that thrives and propagates itself by insinuating itself into the cells of a host organism and hijacking its RNA, which it then uses for its own interests and against the interests of the host. It's what COVID-19 does to our lungs, and it's what Donald Trump has done to conservatism and the Republican Party. In area after area, it's taken core conservative ideals and turned them on their heads. And the pseudo-cons, as I've come to call them on occasion, meekly nod their heads and go along.

COVID-19 is short for COronaVIrus Disease, originating in 2019. Perhaps it would be apt to say that conservatism has been infected by a serious case- and as regards the Republican Party, almost certainly a terminal case- of TRUmpVIrus Disease, originating in 2016, or TRUVID-16, the result of its very cells being taken over by a wholly alien invader which has changed their very essence and turned them into something very different from what it was before.

And in its latest iteration- the notion that while the lives of the unborn are sacred despite whatever economic hardships their births may inflict on their mothers, the nation's frail and elderly are expendable if it helps the economy to let them die- is only the most grotesque and alien of the ways Donald Trump has perverted the very essence of the conservative movement and the Republican Party and made them into ugly, grotesque caricatures of the noble things they once were.