“I Hope He Gets It

When a rich person or a landlord or a boss or a celebrity asks us to risk our lives to enrich them at no risk to themselves, “I hope he gets it” is the easy response. It is equal parts a desire for punishment and community. Fuck them, but also, they should live like us. They should share our pain. We are all in this together.

Except we are obviously not, hence, “I hope he gets it.”

Trump is murdering people and that is not in dispute. But I do not hope he gets it, and neither should you. I’m not talking about some kind of moral high ground, an-eye-for-an-eye-leaves-everybody-blind-turn-the-other-cheek stuff; from a purely pragmatic standpoint, I desperately hope Trump doesn’t get it.

If Trump gets a disease that his most ardent, fanatical, and fucking violent supporters think is a fucking bioweapon released by god damn China, or — or also — that it’s an attack on Trump by the Deep State orchestrated to put Hillary Clinton into the presidency, then we are well and truly fucked. I cannot even imagine what those gun-brandishing batfuckers might do.

It is not outside the realm of possibility to say that the continued existence of the United States is dependent entirely upon Trump not getting Covid19.

An even greater reason for me, though, is that I want him to face justice. I don’t want him to get sick, I want him to go to the Hague and be tried and punished for his crimes against humanity. I want him stripped of his presidency, his businesses, his money, his everything. I want him shunned daily and endlessly. And I want still more than that, the scope of his crimes are so disgusting.

But I am not the guy who should decide that, for, I hope, obvious reasons. More than anything, I want this to be done justly. I don’t want him to get a fucking disease; he isn’t worthy of our shared suffering.

So if I say, “I hope he gets it,” I hope what you will get is that I am using shorthand for what I actually believe, which is that I really, really hope he doesn’t get sick or hurt or in any way attacked but that he should be punished in accordance with his crimes and it should be adjudicated by someone who is not me because I want his punishment to be beyond the ken of mortals and that kinda makes me biased.