Political positioning everywhere tells us physical health is strength, and by extension, that physical illness is weakness
It was important to US president Donald Trump to beat Covid-19. Not to recover from it, or to be successfully treated for it, but to beat it, as you would a wrestling enemy with the back of a chair. Already he has begun reframing his hospital discharge as a sign of strength. On Monday, campaign adviser Mercedes Schlapp told Fox News: “We’re going to defeat this virus. We’re not going to surrender to it like Joe Biden would surrender,” deliberately leaving open the interpretation that the relevant “surrender” was getting sick and dying. The president retweeted columnist Miranda Devine’s characterisation of him as an “invincible hero, who not only survived every dirty trick the Democrats threw at him, but the Chinese virus as well”.
It is the latest instalment in a long history of the conflation between physical fitness and fitness for office, as though facts about a person’s character can be deduced from whether they get sick.
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