I have been waiting for the 50+ years since I studied Hamlet in Freshman English to use that headline. No, I’m not going to laugh at the President or celebrate his illness. However, I must say that for a man who has repeatedly minimized the severity of the virus and ridiculed people who wore masks, there is a certain irony in the fact that he and so many others from his entourage have come down with it. (Irony is another word from Freshman English, but the English teachers among you would probably say I’m not using it correctly here.)

If you know me at all, you know I despise Donald Trump. I believe he was elected in a backlash against Hillary Clinton, largely manipulated by someone or multiple someones (whether it was the alt-right or the Russians or someone else, or some bizarre combination of them all, smarter people than I have been unable to determine). It makes me very sad that the first serious female candidate for president was not an electable one. Certainly some of that was her fault, but much of it is the innate sexism in American society, which holds a female candidate to a completely different set of standards than a male. But that is a discussion for another day.

My point is this: I don’t like Trump. I don’t like his tax cuts, which funnel more benefits to the 1 percent and hurt the people who voted for him. I don’t like his environmental policies, which are contributing to the damage from climate change and are risking the loss of hard won improvements in air and water quality over the last 50 years. I don’t like his treatment of immigrants, which in spite of the fact it may be strictly legal is clearly inhumane. I don’t like his attitude toward women, which focuses on their attractiveness and objects to their intelligence and assertiveness and is particularly vitrolic to anyone who disagrees with him. I don’t like hearing how he is such a wonderful Christian, when neither his words nor his actions seem to be led by a desire to follow “What Would Jesus Do.” I don’t like his perspective on social problems, including such things as educational equity, LGBTQ issues, women’s rights, health care, institutional racism, and hunger. I don’t like the way he calls press coverage with which he disagrees “fake news” and seems to encourage violence against reporters. I especially don’t like the way he has handled the current Pandemic, which included outright lies as well as misrepresentations about the severity of the virus, how to best curtail its spread, and the likelihood of an effective treatment or a vaccine in the immediate future.*

I don’t hate Trump. I don’t want him to be incapacitated, although more than 7 million people in the U.S. have had COVID19 (so far) and many of those who survived will suffer lifelong health consequences, some debilitating, as a result. I don’t want him to suffer unnecessarily, although it appears others have suffered unnecessarily as a result of his inaction. I don’t want his family members to experience the loss of a loved one, even though some experts think half or more of the nearly 210,000 deaths in the US (so far) could have been prevented by faster, more decisive action. I don’t want him to die as a result of COVID19, either prior to or after November 3.

All this being said, I will pray for Trump. Not the prayer of a Republican paraclete, but the prayer of an American who loves this country and doesn’t want to see it go through the trauma of the death or incapacitation through illness of a president, especially during the election season. I pray that he will learn through this experience and return to the Oval Office willing to admit he made a mistake. I pray that for the few months remaining in his presidency (OK, prayer of a Democrat as well as an American), he will strive to be the president of all the people, not just his supporters. I pray that he will use his bully pulpit to encourage people to wear masks and practice social distancing to slow the spread of the virus. I pray that he will recognize that his recovery is due at least in part to the quality of health care available to him as President, health care that should be available to all citizens regardless of income or employment status.

I pray that Trump recovers to be defeated through a fair election process. My prayer is that democracy wins, not the coronavirus.

*I am willing to concede this is my interpretation of current events and people I know and respect have reached the opposite conclusion. They are wrong, of course. But that is also my interpretation.