Great.
A perfect populist moment, inasmuch as populism has never been about leveling the playing field for the little guy so much as making sure that populist heroes get to break the rules with the same impunity as the old guard did. In fact, reading the quote here from Giuliani, I had the same thought Greg Sargent did. It really is a pandemic-era version of “When you’re a star, they let you do it.” I don’t begrudge Trump for having received special medication (i.e. Regeneron’s experimental antibody treatment) and his own suite of doctors when he came down with COVID. He’s the duly elected president, head of state, and commander-in-chief. The country has an interest in protecting his health. I don’t know what the excuse is for Giuliani getting priority over some random person’s grandpa, though. If you’ve ranted and raved about A-holes like Gavin Newsom cutting themselves special breaks from the pandemic misery the rest of us are forced to cope with every day, make sure you save some bile for Rudy too. Ben Carson, Chris Christie and Donald J. Trump are not the sturdiest candidates to conquer the coronavirus: older, in some cases overweight, male and not particularly fit. Yet all seem to have gotten through Covid-19, and all have gotten an antibody treatment in such short supply that some hospitals and states are doling it out by lottery. Now Rudolph W. Giuliani, the latest member of President Trump’s inner circle to contract Covid-19, has acknowledged that he received at least two of the same drugs the president received. He even conceded that his “celebrity” status had given him access to care that others did not have. “If it wasn’t me, I wouldn’t have been put in a hospital frankly,” Mr. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, told WABC radio in New York. “Sometimes when you’re a celebrity, they’re worried if something happens to you they’re going to examine it more carefully, and do everything right.” It’s not all that different from Trump granting pardons to cronies. In one case powerful strings are being pulled to spare people from prison, in the other those strings are being pulled to spare them from death.
