We're Still Figuring Out How Bad This Political 'Virus' Could Become
In this column, I draw an analogy between how we came to understand COVID and how we should try to understand how Trumpism works. To do so, I need to take us back to the bad old days of the early 2020's.
In the years since COVID-19 turned the world on its head, I have heard people wonder aloud why we did some of the things that we did at the time, asking rhetorical questions along the lines of this popular example of the genre: "Remember when we were all microwaving the mail when it arrived? How ridiculous was that?" Although some permanently angry people bring that up now to claim that the entire response to the pandemic was too "woke," reasonable people are more or less bemused to think back on the ways in which we were all flailing our way through a suddenly changed world. The vibe is more or less a "Can you believe how ugly our hairstyles were in the 1980's?" kind of thing.
Although that latter group undeniably has the better of the two ex post reactions, I have rarely heard anyone even attempt to explain what was happening at the time as a way to understand why the reactions of public health officials and politicians early on made sense. And they truly did make sense. News articles repeatedly referred to that strain of coronavirus as "novel," which was of course true. But it was also a virus, with which we as a species -- and therefore the medical/public health system -- quite unfortunately have a great deal of experience.
We did not yet know what that virus's similarities and differences were in relation to other viruses. We did know that it was killing a lot of people very quickly and that it was filling up hospitals beyond capacity, creating the damaging side-effect of making even treatable illnesses and injuries more dangerous and needlessly deadly, because resources were being diverted and thus were no longer available to treat what should have been curable conditions. Most importantly, we did not know how COVID-19 was transmitted. Some viruses are transmitted through the air, others by direct touch, and still others only through especially intimate contact like sexual activity or subcutaneous injection.
During the time when none of those possible transmission mechanisms had yet been ruled out, the most sensible -- indeed, the only sensible -- response was to minimize exposure to every possibility. We laugh about microwaving mail now only because we subsequently learned that COVID is not a skin-contact-driven virus. If it had been, then we would now be saying how smart it was to be wearing gloves and bumping elbows instead of touching things and each other, and we would have put masks away a lot sooner. But it turned out to be airborne, which we could not possibly know ex ante.
Why take a walk down this unpleasant memory lane? As I previewed above, and as the title of this column -- "We're Still Figuring Out How Bad This Political 'Virus' Could Become" -- suggests, there is a useful analogy between the actual virus that causes COVID-19 and the hatred-fueled political virus that has swept through the US and the world over the last few years. When people ask whether we can accurately describe Donald Trump as a fascist, they are asking essentially the equivalent of where we are in figuring out the transmission mechanisms and the potential deadliness of a social malady that might follow any of a number of future paths: die off on its own, decrease to non-lethal levels but remain a danger, level off at its current deadly status, or get worse in any number of ways.
The most obvious place to begin with such an analogy is to ask who is at risk, and how badly they will be hurt if they are in the risk group. Back in 2020, some people were too quick to say, in essence, "Well, COVID's only hitting old people, so open everything back up!" without having enough evidence (or interest) to understand the public health implications and spillovers that would result from such a decision. Even so, it is certainly true that any new, threatening virus needs to be understood in part by knowing who is in the clear and who is not.
In the early months of Trump's second go in the White House, much like in the early months of the COVID pandemic, there was a lot of messy and incomplete evidence coming in on an hourly basis. We simply did not have enough data even to begin to sketch the contours of the danger zone, so the wise reaction was to say, "Well, we don't know who is in danger, but we do know that the danger is extreme (see, as only one of many horrific examples, the prison in El Salvador to which the US subcontracted out some of its torture of detainees)."
Moreover, we did not know in those very early days how to determine the risk factors that were common to those who were unlucky enough to be harmed. Watching videos of students being dragged away by unidentified agents, we wondered whether this would soon happen to college and university students in general, or only to non-US citizens on student visas. When scholars were also apparently targeted, we wondered whether professors in general were newly in danger, or only foreign academics trying to visit? Or maybe being connected to a university was coincidental to something else that was common to those who were arrested, deported, denied entry, and so on.
Because I was living outside the US at that time, it was relatively easy for me to take an approach that boiled down to assuming the worst: Anyone -- and certainly any academic -- in the US, especially when presenting themselves at a US border point, seemed to be at risk, so the safest strategy was not to put oneself in such a situation. Having moved out of the country in advance was looking to have been the right decision, so why not simply stay away?
As I spoke with other academics during that time, there were enormous differences in how people perceived their risks, which in turn led many people to view themselves as immune to the virus and thus to travel as if the world were unchanged. Over the course of the year, as those people remained untouched, it became possible to make more fully informed judgments about what was going on.
And this was true of everyone outside of the academy as well. It became more and more clear that the decision rules within the Trump Administration boiled down to a simple thing: "If they look non-White and speak English with an accent (or not at all), ICE will do its worst to them." (And the Supreme Court's conservatives, to their eternal shame, let it happen). That did not mean that the targeted oppression was in any way fair or even minimally rational, but it did seem to make the situation predictable to some degree.
I would describe that sense of growing clarification about what Trump's people were doing as something similar to where we were in late April or early May 2020 with regard to COVID. We were past the "It'll go away on its own by Easter" nonsense and understood that we were in for something very bad that could possibly take years to get under control absent a vaccine, but we also were no longer microwaving our personal mail.
As we were soon reminded, however, viruses can mutate quickly, and what seems to be sensible suddenly becomes dangerous. The Delta and Omicron variants set back plans to return to normal, even as the vaccines became widely available. Commentators sometimes talk about viruses as if they are sentient beings, with comments like "COVID decided to change its tactics." That is not, however, particularly rare, as we see in discussions about evolution and claims that humans, say, "needed" to develop one or another trait to survive, which wrongly implies that some intelligence responded to that need with a targeted adaptation. Whether or not we allow ourselves to use that misleading terminology, however, it is true that everything can evolve and interact in new ways when the facts of the world change.
In 2025 and 2026, the political virus has been changing very much because of human intention but perhaps not entirely so. I honestly have been surprised that there (seem to) have been no false-flag operations or Reichstag fires, which would have been the most obvious way for a would-be fascist regime to manufacture its own justification for existing.
Even without that, however, there are unplanned events that change the way the world works. The Delta and Omicron rough equivalents would be the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Those crimes seem to have happened ultimately because the conditions on the ground made it all but inevitable that things would start to go horribly wrong, at least randomly, without anyone at Trump HQ saying, "Go out and start killing some peaceful protesters." Not that some of Trump's advisors would be anything but thrilled to issue that order, but that does not seem to be what happened.
What has happened is that everyone has now seen confirmation of what we suspected all along, which is that there would be no accountability for anything that government agents did in carrying out their orders. More to the point of this post, however, it also demonstrated that the people need to update their sense of who is at risk, and what the worst-case scenarios are. It is true that the Administration slightly pulled back after the second murder of a White person, but we no longer can say with confidence that "this virus only attacks people with the following characteristics." It would be like finding out that Delta and Omicron were not merely variants in how they were transmitted and in their symptoms but also that they became as risky to younger and healthier people as the initial virus was to older and immunocompromised people.
Of course, it has never been the case that the lawless violence of this government was limited to non-White people. Just yesterday, The Guardian ran an article describing an Irish man who has been living in the US for years, is married to an American woman, started his own business, and basically lived the dream but who has been in one of the worst of the worst immigration prisons for five months. Based on the photo included in the article, this is a tall, good-looking, red-haired, very White man married to a blond American (whose name is Tiffany Smyth, for heavens' sake). He was nonetheless treated to the same nonsensical deprivations of due process that others have suffered.
True, that man was not specifically targeted: "While buying supplies at a hardware store on 9 September 2025 he was arrested in a random immigration sweep." In that sense, his continued detention supports the ironclad rule that the Trump people never admit error and never let people go if they can at all avoid it. Perhaps this is not new evidence of who is at risk in the same way that the Good and Pretti executions changed what we thought we knew, but it is at least a datum that should put more fear in the minds of people who might not have felt as fearful for themselves as for their non-White, non-English-fluent neighbors.
Back in the early part of Trump's first term, people were already debating whether he fit the definition of being a fascist. Dylan Matthews wrote on Vox that “Trump is not a fascist…. He’s a right-wing populist," although some critics disagreed with him strongly at the time. Back in 2017, Vox also published a "He's not a fascist, if you really understand fascism," piece by Barnard political scientist Sheri Berman, and four years later, Mathews was back with a piece carrying this thumbnail: "We should reserve the term 'fascism' for leaders or movements that are not merely authoritarian. Fascists were revolutionaries."
Although I am not a specialist in fascism, on another day I would likely directly engage with the arguments that Matthews and Berman offered in those essays. Part of the difficulty of any such conversation, were I to take up one side of it, would be to decide whether we can call someone a fascist only after they have done things that meet the entire checklist. For my money, that makes no sense either analytically or practically, because we can know in advance when someone is doing and saying things that promise fascist results, and especially because it would be crazy to, say, wait to see whether a person carrying a loaded high-powered rifle up to the top of a clock tower is "the kind of person" who would start firing on the people below.
Even beyond that background question of whether to distinguish evident intent from actions taken to date, I think that the Matthews/Berman approach to concluding that Trump is not a fascist are the logical equivalent of explaining away criminal behavior by pulling it apart and trivializing individual pieces. The defense in the case against the police who brutally beat Rodney King in 1991, where the trial the following year included frame-by-frame efforts to explain away the larger context, is perhaps the most famous example of that strategy.
I am, nonetheless, willing to set my objections aside to make a different point, which is that the virus has had nearly a decade to mutate, and pretty much everything that both of those authors used as "not really, not yet" arguments have subsequently been overrun by what Trump and his team have done. And even if Matthews, Berman, or anyone else were to disagree with me about that conclusion, they would have to admit that what initially might not have looked deadly has become so. The key questions are whether it will get even worse from here, and for whom.
We also once argued about whether COVID-19 was an epidemic, then whether it was a pandemic, and then whether the pandemic ever truly ended. What we do know for sure is that it required human intervention and aggressive actions based on necessarily incomplete and sometimes contradictory knowledge to get it under as much control as it is today.
On the question of what Trump and his movement are capable of doing, we have the advantage of hearing them articulate what they want to do, which means that we do not always have to force ourselves to sit and wait for the next mutation.
- Neil H. Buchanan