New York, Dec 21 Sometime around March 2020, as we retreated into our socially distanced bubbles, television screens and its mobile versions became bigger in our lives. On it, we watched images from places we stopped going to and many of 2020s indelible moments came from the centre of those glowing rectangles in our pockets or our living rooms.
The day when a second vaccine in the US (Moderna/NIH) is on the cusp of approval seems like a good time to turn the clock back. In a tumultuous year, outgoing US President Donald Trump, a former reality TV star who gets a kick out of tying politics to a prime time television schedule, delivered one of the year's defining visual moments on the evening of Friday, October 2.
Hours earlier, Trump revealed on Twitter (of course) that he was infected with Covid-19. After months of his battering ram act against masks and public health guidelines, the virus had infiltrated Trump's security sheath - arguably the world's mightiest protective armour around a single human being, funded by taxpayers' money.
Trump emerged from the White House on Friday evening wearing a black mask and flashing a thumbs-up to reporters before boarding Marine One. The pilots and Secret Service agents all masked up to protect themselves from the man who promised more than 300 million Americans that the "China virus" would go away like a "miracle".
Instead, as the sun went down on Washington, a forest green coloured Marine One helicopter lifted into the ochre sky and news television cameras followed its seven minute flight to Walter Reed Military Medical Centre in Bethesda, Maryland, over tree tops that shrouded cityscapes slammed by a microscopic virus.
In that seven minute spectacle, Trump's alternative Covid-19 bubble exploded. The former reality TV star, who spent months tweeting, in all caps, that schools must reopen and masks were optional, would soon be hooked up to IV fluids, remdesivir and experimental antibody cocktail Regeneron. Not bleach, not some souped up version of ultraviolet light and not hydroxychloroquine - quack cures Trump sold to his die-hard fandom from his bully pulpit.
Trump's personal medical emergency became political - he had to cancel all his immediate campaign events and his next debate with Democrat Joe Biden.
The election was barely a month away. Trump was in totally new terrain, hooked up to therapeutics that were a product of years of scientific research. Driven to the opposite end of his own claims, Trump remained combative, relying on the White House video production crew to deliver heady visuals of his muscularity. They certainly tried. Trump doodling his name with a Sharpie on plain white paper is the best they could come up with.
About 35 days later, a cartoonish presidency would come to an end.
( With inputs from IANS )
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