What have the Gods done now? Donald Trump is in the hospital. I very much want to feel more than I do.

Is this the end of Trump as our President, or will he pop out of a cake in a week or two, wave his hands around on the White House lawn, fly off in his big green chopper, summon his Greek chorus, the press corps, and ridicule all the saps and sissies who thought the virus might be bigger than him?

You know, those Mask Wimps?

Donald Trump will always be the big story, even as his world collapses around him, in life, sickness, even death. It is always about him, rarely about those dead and abandoned people.

I am not sure if he is seriously ill or really not, if he is at risk of dying, or has found yet another way to be the biggest and only story on the planet for days and days on end, drowning out his competitors and critics once more.

The odds are with him, and he has always beaten the odds.

President Trump is getting the best care in the world, he’s already received the expensive and experimental anti-bodies and medicines that most of the people who died of the virus can not afford are not widely available.

They know a lot more now about how to treat this disease, and he will benefit from every bit of that knowledge.

I can’t help but think of all those many thousands of people who died alone in their hospital rooms all over the country, or who died in their houses and apartments because they had no health care or feared being deported if they went to a hospital.

Or who believes all of his lies about the virus. In our world, when a President speaks, people believe him. He will never outlive that stain.

I don’t wish death on anyone, but Trump will have many ghosts in his fine, guarded, and luxurious hospital suite to keep him company, including a lot of bus drivers, nurses, doctors, and health aides.

If he has a conscience, it will be a hard time of accountability and regret. I don’t believe he has a conscience.

He will be back. But he will never be the same.

Neither will we. He has turned himself into a real-life Orwellian Big Brother, always on the wall. How curious, that this greedy and slimy real estate developer is turning out to be one of our most consequential presidents.

Donald Trump believes he is infallible and heroic; he would undoubtedly expect to survive and dream of his first rally upon recovering. I guess we’re about to find out.

One part of me knows this cynical idea can’t be possible; another part says, why not?

If I take this crass thinking all the way, I can even imagine him coming back from his grave to sneer at the elites and jump onto one of those big fishing boats for a triumphal ride down to the Potomac.

He is the little kid giving the finger to the principal. We are all principals now.

Trump is a magician like the world has never seen, as he would say. Now you see him, then you see him again. And again. His legacy is that he is close to turning all of us into differing versions of him.

He is embedded in our heads, like a buffalo on the nickel.

With one hand, he terrifies millions of people; with another, he seduces them, he dismantles our carefully crafted democracy with one toe, with another he fools tens of millions of angry and unhappy people into thinking he is the Messiah come to lead them out of the wilderness.

With a wink, he gets his TV puppets and senators to all dance up and down at once. Battle-scarred journalists dance for him. We are all his yo-yo’s, bouncing up, then down at his whim and mercy. Except there is no mercy, he is simply wearing us out.

A friend told me “I don’t care anymore if he wins or not. I just want him to shut up.” Are we reduced to that?

President Trump is the Olympic hero of endurance. Until today, it seemed he could outlast all of us. Now, I’m not so sure. Since we’re not so sure about the courts these days, the Gods will have to step in.

I think they have, one way or another.

The left and the right have done what the Nazis couldn’t come close to doing: they’ve paralyzed our minds and stolen the truth. The critic Alan Bloom called it the Closing Of The American Mind. 

By now, I am convinced there is something supernatural about our stricken leader, the goddesses – once all called Moira –    created him to shock us out of our slumber and face what is sick and wrong about our world.

Clotho, the Roman goddess who spins the threads of human destiny, took Ruth Ginsburg away and then struck Donald Trump down, at least for a few days.

Take that, foolish people—time for some humbling.

The world’s most powerful brat, Trump, has turned all of us into Archie’s stuff pot principal Mr. Weatherbee, huffing and puffing and scolding,  helpless to get his rebellious student to behave.

I can only speak for myself. Since the debate, I realized that President Trump sucking up my humanity like a five-year-old sucking on a popsicle. He is chipping away at my determination to remain human in the face of a true onslaught of the spirit.

It says a lot that the very first thought I had when I heard the news Friday morning was, “what is he up to now? I am embarrassed to say one of my second thoughts was, “Boy, was he asking for it.”

I am angry at anyone who brings that part of me up to the surface. I am angry at a man who can blow off 180,000 deaths as being nothing significant. I am finding it difficult to feel for him, even though I want to and know I should.

A woman I don’t know sent me this message today:

I have had a feeling for a long time that Trump’s only possible exit out of the nightmare he has created for himself was death. The unbelievable risks he has been taking with his health are his subconscious way of killing himself.  I can’t see him sitting in a jail cell ever. It’s his only way out. Perhaps his ego is ready to forfeit life to protect its own view of itself.
So here we go…”

I read Leslie’s message and didn’t delete it or laugh at it. See what he has done to me? I thought, in shame. How silly an idea. But still…Would he rather die than fail?

Leslie reminded me that a few weeks ago I wrote that I thought that somehow, the virus had some sort of evil consciousness. I thought it was coming after Donald Trump.

I do think that, and I can’t really justify it or explain it. It was just a feeling. I have it today.

I’m not so arrogant as to think I was really prescient about what happened, I am no mystic, yet there is something Biblical about the virus finding him, perhaps even at one of his Dark Knight rallies or maybe one of his golf courses.

Could this really be the end for Donald Trump?   Maybe, but I don’t think so. Atropos is the goddess who spins the thread of human fate and decides when to cut it, not me.

And he is perhaps too important for her to snip away.

At this point, I admit that nothing would surprise me; I can’t explain the world, only try to keep up with it.

When the Gods decide Donald Trump’s time is up, it will be the biggest and loudest and most outrageous death in the history of deaths.

It will take all three of the Fates to pull it together. It will be the story that never leaves the screens. Think of the shrines, perhaps replacing some of those Confederate statues.

I have a confession to make.

I am quite religious, but not in a conventional way. This morning, I told Maria after reading the news that I believed in the fates and destiny. I thought they must have had a hand in this.

She scoffed at this, sneering something about science. She was having none of it, this mystic who talks to trees. It was up to science, she said as if President Trump was beneath a little goddess mojo.

I disagree. But science, as precise and rational as it is, could never have brought us a Trump. Science is too much about truth and precision.

I had this idea that the Gods, watching in horror as human beings trashed life on the earth, had had enough, and stepped in. They decided to bring us a kind of fateful balance.

One week, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the goddess of the left, dies at a fateful time. For many, the earth had tilted off its axis.

A few weeks later, Donald Trump, the god of the far-right, tests positive just hours after he once against dismissed the virus as trivial and nearly gone.

His legions are also in shock.

First, one half is in grief and shock, then the other. Perhaps the idea is to remind us that we are all humans, pathetic and vulnerable and foolish. We might as well stick together.

We should stick together. His greatest legacy, whenever he dies, is that he pulled us apart, as often and as far as he could.

You can’t tell me that higher powers are not at work here, taking something away, giving something back. Nothing else makes sense.

Moira, usually known all by herself as the Fates, stands for the idea of destiny, the Fates take control of us. They are in charge of shaping and controlling destiny and people’s lives in all important ways, from their birth until they died.

It was destiny for Ruth Ginsburg to die just before so important an election for Americans and the world, and it was destiny for President Chaos to despoil our almost noble experiment – democracy – and be humbled.

He can be humbled momentarily, it seems – perhaps it’s his way of recharging all that venom.

I can’t say whether Donald Trump will get very sick and die; I can’t see it. I imagine him soon to be tweeting about mail-in ballots and how much good he has done for people.

He will say the virus is not that big of a deal, go back to work and open up the schools and bars and movie theaters. But I still have that feeling about the virus. Don’t diss the virus, or patronize it or take it lightly. It might be listening.

It has a habit of going where it wants to go.

I’m sure it isn’t lost on many Americans that if the most protected human on the earth could get the virus, Joe Lunchbox could surely get it.

Maybe those fools with their machine guns protesting masks will get one for the sake of their grandma or mom.

But let’s not forget the bottom line.

Still, and as certain as anything is these days, this election is over. The man who thought he could hustle a pandemic is getting a lesson he will never forget.

The conspiracy theorists and extremists and toadies and white nationalists have met their march in Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos.

For a while at least, they will slime back into their holes.

They may never again find a friend in that big White House.

It is not the President’s destiny to go quietly into the night but to go screaming and spewing more venom.

The world tilts one way, and then the other. We are not different nations, but the same one, each pretending to be better than the other.

The goddesses might also be sending Donald Trump a message – beware, only we can play God. Aristotle said there is no quicker way to piss of a God than to pretend to be one.

When life piles up, I sometimes leave things to the Greek or Roman goddesses of human destinies; I can’t figure things out all by myself, not this year. Let them take some of the load.

I’m in over my head. I feel like a reckless child hanging on to a tall roller coaster without fastening my seat belt.

That’s what I felt when I happened to go online at 4:30 which is when I usually wake up and learned that Donald Trump had tested positive. It was shocking in one sense, quite predictable in another.

Of course, he tested positive. I’m a writer. I’ve written 26 books. Those old women can tell a story.

That would be my plot twist, for sure.

I am powerless in this world, and my goddesses are as good as your God or gods. Homer spoke of Fate (Moira) in the singular as an impersonal power and sometimes made the Fate’s functions interchangeable with those of the Olympian Gods.

From the time of the Poet Hesiod (8th-century b.c., the Fates were personified as three very older women who spin the threads of human destiny. Their names were Clotho (Spinner), Lachesis (Allotter), and Atropos (Inflexible).

Cloth spun the thread of human fate, Lachesis dispensed it, and Atropos decided the individual humans’ moment of death.

Anyone who claims to understand 2020 fully is faking it; the news has soared way past the pundit’s ability to make sense of it.

The words that keep popping up are “unprecedented.” One of the world’s most respected political observers was asked last night what would happen if Mr. Trump was truly sick. What effect would it have on the election?

“I have no idea,” he said, “this has never happened before.”

I expect historians are taking notes like mad. This is definitely a year for the books.

It will be easier to decipher from a distance. Trump will either be rising from his grave, or we all be in one.

I have great trust in science, which has saved my life more than once.

But I am also a lover of Greek Mythology – the Greeks were the true pundits, they predicted all of it –  and so I woke up this morning, stunned at the news and struggling to make sense of it.

Everyone who survives 2020 sane and intact should wear a commemorative medal, at least we could all come together on that.

HBO is streaming an important and beautiful  new series called “A World Of Calm.” We’ve been watching it just before bedtime.

Last night we traveled to a coral reef so beautiful it had Maria crying. I recommend the program. I thought I should be crying for Trump. No tears came. Did he do this to me, or am I no better than he is?

I watched a beautiful film about the coral reef last night, and I’m glad I did. As someone who recently underwent two different heart interventions, I need all the calm I can get.

It may take a lot more than the coronavirus to knock Trump down or shut him up. Perhaps his sickness will break him open, as trouble does sometimes to men who are hopelessly closed.

In this sense, he is truly heroic and not mortal. When I see those clips of Trump soaking up the roars and vengeance of his MAGA rallies, I think of those medieval portraits of evil and the Devil.

The Old Testament, Satan is not the opponent of God, but a challenger, an adversary. The devil’s most famous depiction was crafted not by prophets but by English poet John Milton in his 1667 masterpiece. Lucifer rebels against God and the Christian idea of good.

Hurld headlong flaming from th’Ethereal Skie

With hideous ruine and combustiondown

To bottomless perdition, there to dwell,

In Adamtne Chains and penal fire.

Trump is neither powerful or evil enough to be Satan. It would go too far to suggest he is the Devil.

But his rallies evoke all those medieval images of furious people, raging and aggrieved and hopelessly bitter and vengeful for all eternity. Their punishment is to hate.

It is all hatred; there is nothing else there.

Something is disturbing about those rallies, all of that rage unleashed and celebrated and manipulated and cheered on by the Master of Rage, our Fallen Star.

They are the fuel that feeds this machine. It is all hatred.

Politically, and in a literal sense, the election is over for him.

Trump’s whole campaign has been organized to make us forget the virus and look ahead to the wonderful year awaiting us, a fantastic time of health, riches, grateful Blacks, worshipful followers,  happiness, and no more immigrants or Democrats of any kind.

I don’t think even our fanatic and determined Republicans can turn this disaster around. In her letter to me, Leslie remembered my writing several weeks ago that I thought the virus would, in some way, find Donald Trump. He taunted the Gods by denying it and ridiculing those who gave it respect.

I don’t believe Donald Trump is capable of wanting to sacrifice himself; I don’t believe he can imagine defeat or punishment, since he can’t see himself guilty of any wrongdoing.

He believes he can squirm out of everything because he always has. Or someone comes to bail him out.

A sad truism about our world is that there is always someone like Trump to rape and use the system, and there are always people eager to enable them and help them do it.

These people usually don’t get elected President of the United States. With Trump shut down, at least for a while, the temperature might come down, the Chief Inciter will be housebound, even though it’s a pretty special house.

He might even be sick enough to have to shut his mouth for a bit. Once we get to that sacred place, there might be no turning back.

Aristotle, the father of the theater, wrote that the only way the Gods would forgive their arrogant and fallen Kings was if they acknowledged their flaws and mistakes and worked to be better.

I hope that is true, if it is, there is still time for Trump to save himself and his soul give us a better and more healing ending to this wrenching year.

Trump might well have gone too far,  pissed off the Fates with his cruelty and arrogance, and tempting the Gods by thinking he is one.

Aristotle said that really makes them angry.