By William Rivers Pitt, Truthout

Donald Trump played host to what can only be described as a deliberate COVID super-spreader event in Nevada on Sunday. It is journalistically perilous to bandy words like “deliberate” and “super-spreader,” but I watched every galling second of his rally at the Xtreme Manufacturing plant in Henderson, and those words deserve to share the same space as “water” and “wet” in the context of what went down in the desert yesterday.

A thousand of Trump’s most avid devotees came from miles around to stuff themselves into an enclosed indoor space, where they stood packed like cattle in a high-density field, maskless almost to a person, screaming and sweating all over each other in an orgiastic celebration of the death of reason.

I picture a COVID-19 virion, its crowns bristling red, feet up and reclined on its Barcalounger after a hard day at work killing people, looking serenely over that mob of reckless idolators before leaning to a virion friend and saying, “Hold my beer.” We will be hearing about the medical consequences from Sunday evening’s event before the calendar page turns, if the pattern holds, which it has with nearly unfailing consistency since this dismal year began.

Trump’s speech was an abomination of lies, distortions, exhortations and puling complaints. In other words, it was every speech he has given at every rally since he came down the golden escalator five years ago. It was a triumph of the mundane, proof itself of the banality of evil, so boring after endless repetition that none of the networks, not even C-SPAN, bothered to broadcast it. I had to work to find the thing.

As I let the bilge tide of Trump’s gibberish wash over me, however, I found myself encased in a rare moment of clarity. It is difficult to think straight when the president is ruining your country in real time at the top of his voice and right in your face. That, of course, is the entire point of the exercise. “For those who have been beaten down by the Trumpian disaster porn,” writes Tim Miller for The Bulwark, “rallies such as this don’t really make a mark any longer.”

As I watched this latest one, though, Trump seemed to me to be receding down a long hallway. I could hear him fine, but the mind-scrambling impact of his weaponized nonsense faded, and I found myself, for the first time in months, actually listening to what he was saying.

It came to me suddenly in a burst of inner light: Every accusation this man makes, every lie he tells, very nearly every word he speaks, is a public confession of his own corruption and venality. It is far beyond the Karl Rove tactic of using your opponent’s best strength against them. With Trump, it is a bending of the light itself, of reality, a transference of personal responsibility so comprehensive as to be virtually seamless. It is difficult to think straight when the president is ruining your country in real time at the top of his voice and right in your face. That, of course, is the entire point of the exercise.

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