Some parts of the Republican Party might appear to have
suffered only mild cases of Trumpism, emphasizing the traditional conservative
parts of his program while staying away from his racism, cruelty, and constant
lying. Yet even these seemingly
asymptomatic carriers exhibit signs of continuing damage that manifests in
surprising ways.
Consider the Wall Street Journal’s recent decision to
publish a piece
by a psychiatry resident, expatiating on an unfounded theory that there is
really no such thing as “long Covid,” the widespread phenomenon in which
Covid-19 patients keep experiencing terrible symptoms for months. All of these patients, the writer claims, are
merely imagining their symptoms: they need psychiatric care, not medical
treatment.
There is, as it happens, no scientific basis for the claim,
which is easily
debunked. Yet the infection that
really needs explaining here is the continuing damage that has been done to the
editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.
It has always been a respectable voice of American conservatism, careful
to get its facts right. It has been appropriately
contemptuous
of claims that vaccines cause autism, or quacks
who offer juice supplements as cancer cures.
Yet a barely-qualified psychiatrist gets one of America’s
most prominent journalistic platforms to peddle this junk science. How could that happen?
An obvious answer is Trump’s bizarre decision, early in
the epidemic, to minimize the significance of the disease, attack measures to
control its spread, lie about the dangers (which, we now know, he
understood perfectly well), and discourage mask-wearing. That made Covid a partisan issue. If you take the disease seriously, you’re a
lefty. If it bothers you that more than
half a million Americans are dead, you’re one of those Chardonnay-sipping
socialists. Denial is a way to signal
Republican loyalty. The long-Covid denying psychiatrist is a Canadian who
probably wants nothing to do with Trump, but that does not change the fact that
his ill-informed opinion has been exploited for political purposes in the U.S.
The Wall Street Journal piece is evidence that the
infection has spread to surprising places, and survives Trump’s
presidency. Long Covid is terrible. But long Trumpism may be even worse.