When Donald Trump was first elected president, in the long chill hours of the following day, I didn’t wonder how many people would die as a result of whatever idiocy Trump unloosed. Clearly it would be plenty. But I did wonder who they’d be.

You and me perhaps, as it turns out.

At the time, the best assumption was soldiers. It seemed implausible that Trump wouldn’t start a war of some kind — at the time I was thinking short war in Asia or the Middle East, worst case nuclear — but that was just too easy. Every Donald has his inner Gen. Westmoreland or is it Gen. MacArthur? Anyone who recommends the 1939 movie “Gone with the Wind,” as Trump did recently, is not living in our time frame.

A man of his era who skips Vietnam doesn’t yearn for jungle warfare, he yearns for tanks and manful uniforms, in other words, the Second World War. At some level he thinks the only real wars involve armies of white men.

Again, an easy prediction. I did not think there would be peace in the Middle East nor will there be. I thought something horrible would happen, and it did, at the southern border where little children were taken away from their parents and put in cages.

I was a bit wrong about that one because I assumed families would be kept together for special mistreatment. Yes, that was my level of naiveté at the time.

I knew that Trump’s Bad Thing would hack into my savings sooner rather than later, but it didn’t worry me because Calvinistically, I had never felt entitled to those previous big profits in a rising market. I hadn’t earned them. No one had. Fair’s fair.

But I did not think pandemic. As I keep reminding readers, American journalist Michael Lewis did suggest last fall that only a pandemic might turn Americans against Trump, Lewis had just published “The Fifth Risk” about Trump’s destruction of actual government structures that would be needed both in crisis and not, but presumably he’s too busy taking notes to gloat.

The idea did not arise because the U.S. is so polarized, racist and socially unequal that I assumed poor people of colour would be hit hardest. It didn’t spring to mind that a Republican administration would permit what Lewis suggested, a catastrophe that hit everyone equally.

Rich whites do not suffer, end of story. Didn’t Mitt Romney (“corporations are people, my friend”) say as much? The American dream isn’t just wealth, it’s that wealth lifts an American to a higher spiritual realm, untouched by the sweat, dust, dirt and minute-by-minute fretfulness of the poor, their bad news layered on bad news, their wariness, the flesh-and-hair reality of their lives.

The richer you are, the less you have to think. Staff do it for you. I always wondered if the drive to make everyday tools and tasks touch-free — hand dryers, waste paper bin lids, soap dispensers, Siri, Alexa, Amazon — was driven not so much be ease as by the idea of technological servants for the middle class. This was their consolation prize. All shall have household staff.

But the coronavirus is hitting the rich and powerful too. I have lost count of how many men have shaken hands or been photographed with Trump only to be told later to self-isolate. Trump may be rich, but he isn’t healthy, young or immune. He’s vulnerable, as are we all.

Yes, the rich are taking more flights by private aircraft but pilots and staff get COVID-19 too, as do American movie stars, national medical officers, politicians and other people who seemed to live a more rarefied life.

It is possible that Trump, who considers only himself, has not registered the idea of his own illness. It is also likely that the coronavirus crashing the stock market pains him more than the possible decimation of the American population.

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When he thinks of his legacy, does he wonder if he’ll be the Herbert Hoover of this century, the man who eventually figured it out but too late?

Just like all of us then, who never thought for a moment that Trump’s pinnacle of destruction would come from bats and pangolins in a distant land he despised.

Heather Mallick is a columnist based in Toronto covering current affairs. Follow her on Twitter: is a columnist based in Toronto covering current affairs. Follow her on Twitter: @HeatherMallick

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