If Joe Biden does win decisively tomorrow and is able to take office, historians will record that the pivotal moment when the election began trending relentlessly toward the Democrats was Trump’s catching the virus. This was of course the logical consequence of his recklessness toward himself and the rest of the citizenry.

Though Trump recovered, and tried to use his ordeal to proclaim himself as bionic and COVID as no big deal, the fatal political damage was done. The picture of the president sickened by his own arrogance and ineptitude, and heedless of the harm to others, summed up everything appalling about his presidency.

And it perfectly captured the impact on ordinary people otherwise inclined to cut Trump some slack. Far from making America great, Trump has made America sick. You can deny the science of climate change; you can’t deny over 200,000 deaths and 100,000 new cases a day.

No matter how Trump tries to waltz around the numbers, or keeps insisting that COVID is no worse than flu, or blames Biden for deaths that never happened in the case of H1N1 swine flu, or tries to rebrand COVID as the Chinese Virus, this pandemic is irrevocably Trump’s. It’s the Trump Virus.

Since Trump’s recovery, the pandemic has only intensified—repeatedly giving the lie to his preposterous claims, while keeping the surge of COVID cases page-one news, with Trump as the personification. This is poetic justice. But what is absolutely chilling is the fact that were it not for COVID, Trump might well have had a path to re-election.

The timing of COVID was a fortuitous accident. The symbol and substance of COVID as everything wrong with Trump is no accident.