Last Monday evening, President Donald Trump made a video appearance on the White House’s Truman Balcony, solid as a statue, his jaw jutting, his heavyset figure framed by American flags. He had just returned from the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where he had been treated for a case of COVID-19. In a dramatic gesture made for the cameras, he ripped off his mask and stuffed it in his pocket, a scowl flitting across his face. He remained silent throughout the photo op, but the words he had tweeted a few hours prior set the tone: “Feeling really good! Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life. . . . I feel better than I did 20 years ago!”
The gratuitous theatricality of the balcony scene led many commenters to liken the President to Eva Perón, or to the Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who had a penchant for grand displays of machismo—especially making speeches from balconies, with throngs of supporters gazing from below. Yet, as a scholar of authoritarian regimes, I was left most queasy by Trump’s framing of himself as a heroic individual who had contracted COVID-19 in the line of duty, and overcame it quickly because of his uncommon will and indomitable physicality. “As your leader, I had to do that,” he told Americans, spinning his decision to flout virus precautions as an act of selflessness. “I knew there’s danger to it, but I had to do it. I stood out front, I led. . . . and now I’m better, and maybe I’m immune.” On social media, Trump’s supporters circulated a favorite meme of the President as an Arnold Schwarzenegger-type “Trumpinator,” always back for the next round. To fans of the President, it hardly seemed to matter that when his mask came off he appeared to be struggling for breath.
What defines a strongman ruler is not just his willingness to trample democratic norms but his ability to cultivate an appearance of omnipotence. For a hundred years, authoritarian leaders have touted their virility to legitimize their politics. Some make claims of outstanding sexual vigor: “I can love four women at the same time,” Rodrigo Duterte, of the Philippines, has said. Others publicize their physical fitness—think of Vladimir Putin baring his pectorals for the cameras—to demonstrate a forceful and efficient approach to governance. These displays are essential to the strongman because, unlike democratic leaders, he does not merely represent the will of the people but claims to embody their highest aspirations. The aura of specialness around his person is why, for his followers, he is destined to triumph over political “witch hunts” (a phrase used by Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as well as Trump), assassination attempts (Adolf Hitler survived more than twenty), or other trials that ordinary men could not endure.
Illnesses can jeopardize the carefully maintained veneer of invincibility. Certainly, democratic countries have often misrepresented the physical or mental-health conditions of their leaders. In 1919, the White House covered up Woodrow Wilson’s strokes and influenza; the Reagan Administration downplayed the severity of the President’s injury after he was shot, in 1981, and, near the end of his Presidency, may have attempted to conceal his dementia. But a leader’s illness can be particularly destabilizing in Administrations, such as Trump’s, that depend upon the charisma or authority of one individual, which is why most old-school dictatorships went to special lengths to keep leaders’ ailments a secret. The Soviets, for example, were masters of medical obfuscation: they hid Yuri Andropov’s kidney failure and Leonid Brezhnev’s litany of health problems—aneurysm, leukemia, circulatory disorders, episodes of mental confusion. During Brezhnev’s final years in office, as his health declined, government testimonies of his incredible health and vitality increased. Like so many other despots, Brezhnev chose to believe the propaganda about his condition, noting in his diary that doctors had found him so “strong and healthy” that he should be “envied and congratulated.”
Still, some leaders have been open about their medical crises in order to manipulate public sympathies. Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right President of Brazil, turned his recovery from a severe injury into part of his political origin story: in September, 2018, as he was campaigning for the Brazilian Presidency, he was stabbed in the stomach as he attended a rally. Photographs of the moments before the attack depict the then sixty-three-year-old, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, being carried on the shoulders of his young male supporters, who appreciated his praise for Brazil’s military dictatorship, of 1964 to 1985, and his promises to “clean up” the left. As soon as his condition stabilized, Bolsonaro recorded a video from his hospital room, pale and hooked up to monitors. Far from hurting his macho image, the video bolstered his reputation as an authentic and frank politician. Although he was unable to resume in-person campaigning, he won the election.
Throughout his Presidency, Bolsonaro’s periodic maladies—and his ability to recover from them promptly—have reinforced his popularity. In February, 2019, when he fell ill with pneumonia (part of the lingering health effects of the stabbing), he made another hospital video, with his gown folded back to reveal electrodes attached to his chest. In 2020, when he contracted COVID-19 (after dismissing it as a mere “little flu” and firing his health minister, Luiz Henrique Mandetta, for recommending social distancing), he filmed himself taking hydroxychloroquine, which he, like Trump, has touted as a cure, against medical evidence. Between June and October, 2020, even as Brazil’s coronavirus infections increased—the country is now second only to the U.S. in deaths—Bolsonaro’s approval rating rose by around eight per cent.
There are other strongmen who have opted for medical transparency. When Silvio Berlusconi, the former Prime Minister of Italy, contracted gastroenteritis at a 2002 Council of Europe meeting, he disclosed the medicines he took and gave regular updates on his bowel movements. He drew attention to his ailments to establish an emotional connection with voters and retain popular sympathy as he faced one corruption charge after another. But anyone familiar with the ways of Trump—his neuroses around germs and hospitals, his allergy to empathy or vulnerability—could have guessed that a candid accounting of his illness was not in the cards. Instead, the President’s diagnosis arrived in a fog of concealment and willfully misplaced optimism. In a press briefing last Saturday, the White House doctor, Sean Conley, dodged questions about whether the President had received oxygen in the hospital, only to be undermined by Mark Meadows, the chief of staff, who minutes later told reporters that Trump’s vitals were “very concerning.” “I didn’t want to give any information that might steer the course of illness in another direction,” Conley explained the next day, as though the illness would move in tandem with the White House’s messaging.
Among supporters and detractors alike, Trump’s physical form has loomed in the public consciousness since he first campaigned for the Presidency. Some critics have mocked his eating habits and strange ideas about exercise; observers in the press have openly speculated about his mental stability, picking apart video clips for signs of infirmity. Though Trump has managed to keep much of his medical information private, the public fixation on the President’s body is partially his own doing—throughout his tenure, he has supplied a seemingly endless stream of offensive commentary about the bodies of women, disabled people, and anyone else he deems to be inferior. Despite his advanced age and his dislike for physical activity, Trump has cajoled medical professionals to testify to his health. During the last Presidential campaign, his personal doctor, Harold Bornstein, released a bizarre statement claiming that he would be “the healthiest individual ever elected” to the office. (It was later revealed that Trump had dictated the letter to Bornstein.) “I would put POTUS in the 20-49 [age] category due to his strength and stamina,” the former Fox News medical consultant David Samadi tweeted shortly after Trump’s coronavirus infection was announced. These obsequious statements recall the testimony of Berlusconi’s personal doctor, who called the former Prime Minister “technically immortal.” (“Once again, I got away with it!” Berlusconi, now eighty-four, told reporters this September, as he left the hospital after treatment for COVID-19.)
Even before his own infection, Trump’s disdain for weakness, or what he understands to be weakness, has been a defining feature of his Administration’s catastrophic response to the coronavirus. Trump has been not only negligent about containing the coronavirus but openly callous about the scale of its devastation. “It is what it is,” he said in September, when asked about the fact that a thousand Americans were dying each day from the virus. One wonders if he would say the same of the current outbreak in the White House, which has seen the First Lady, several top staffers, and multiple Republican associates test positive for the virus. What this debacle lays bare are the dangers, for Trump’s closest collaborators, of his authoritarian style of governance—those who enable and amplify his prolific lies do so quite literally at their own peril. This is no accident: the strongman persona functions to produce political subjects willing to sacrifice their health, or their lives, for their leader. “I would wade through a sea of COVID infested water to vote for President Trump on November 3rd,” one supporter wrote on Twitter. “Thank you Heather!” the President wrote back.
Following his diagnosis, the President staged a nearly daily progression of stunts to reassure his supporters, from the balcony scene to posed photos of him appearing to work in a hospital conference room. (In one, he seemed to be signing his name to a blank piece of paper.) Last Sunday, his doctors and aides indulged his craving for public adulation with a drive-by visit to his fans outside the hospital. By last Wednesday, he was touting an experimental drug that he received as a “cure” for the virus, and promising to distribute it and another drug to hundreds of thousands of people. An interview last Friday with the Fox News medical contributor Dr. Marc Siegel, which had been billed as a televised “medical examination,” merely supported the President’s claim that he had made a miraculous recovery. According to the Times, he had even, at one point, considered an appearance that involved tearing open his button-down to reveal a Superman T-shirt underneath. His healthy appearance may quell the public’s fears about his condition, but his resolve to treat his coronavirus infection as a triumph (a “blessing from God,” he called it) may yet backfire, for it is reminiscent of what political scientists call a “gamble for resurrection”—a decision, usually by a leader losing his grip on power, to continue fighting a losing war.
Almost all autocrats ultimately lose the wager. Mussolini was one of them. By 1939, the threat of war and grinding poverty was affecting his popularity. When he visited Turin that year, rural housewives had to be brought to the city to insure the presence of a cheering crowd. But the increased hostility only cemented Mussolini’s resolve to achieve glory. Against the advice of his generals, he entered the Second World War, which would ultimately lead to Italian defeat and his own removal from office, in 1943. Although he had a second act as the head of the Republic of Salò, a Nazi client state, his days at the balcony were over. As bombs destroyed Italy, an ulcer and other ailments left Mussolini gaunt, and he was rarely seen in public, fuelling rumors that he was sick or dead. Decades later, Italo Calvino, recalling the period, wrote of how Il Duce’s “stomach ulcer intensified, along with the inevitability of the catastrophe.” In the face of impending defeat, Calvino added, the military’s continued displays of might left a different impression: “the choreography of the parades revealed their vanity even to those who had not had eyes to notice it before.”
