Pitts: COVID-19 or not, the Trump show must go on

“Don’t be afraid of COVID,” tweeted Trump before leaving Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on Monday, almost certainly against the advice of his doctors. “Don’t let it dominate your life.”

Someone will likely die from that — on a ventilator, miserable and alone, gasping out the last of life, as loved ones can only watch via FaceTime or Skype.

For whatever it’s worth, it could yet be Trump himself. Because you may lie, deny and deflect to your heart’s content, but eventually, the piper presents the bill.

Of course, we all know how Trump treats creditors. So one is hardly shocked that, even after his diagnosis, with at least 14 people in his orbit — including his wife, his press secretary and former aide Kellyanne “alternative facts” Conway — also testing positive, Trump still acts as if COVID-19 is no big deal.

He is less concerned with being well than with seeming well, with depicting himself as unbowed and in charge.

So you get that aimless motorcade around the hospital — some poor Secret Service driver trapped with him as he waves at MAGA hats while breathing out disease inside the hermetically sealed presidential vehicle.

And you get that picture purporting to show the laziest president in recent history “working” at the hospital.

And you get that return to the White House where he stands on a balcony and makes a dramatic show of removing his mask, then strides his infected body into a building full of government workers.

A living facade

Trump is a living Hollywood facade — a front with nothing inside. So he resorts to photo-ops like those to make him appear rugged and tough, with powers and abilities beyond those of mortal men.

It’s all as fake as a Western street on a Universal Studios back lot. Yet he will go to great lengths to make it seem real.

Consider how Trump pressured his doctor, Sean Conley, to give a rosier assessment of his condition than was medically warranted. Conley even embraced his patient’s love of hyperbole, dubbing Trump a “phenomenal patient,” whatever in the world that might be.

It was a dubious performance that cost Conley professional respect; a colleague said he behaved like “a spin doctor, not a medical doctor.”

But never mind, so long as Trump got what he wanted.

And never mind the chef, the janitor, the journalist, the Secret Service agent. Never mind 210,000 Americans already dead. Never mind anything but the performer and his performance.

You know what they say in Hollywood: The show must go on.