#Trump’s COVID masculinity and other commentary

The left is “in a frenzy of Schadenfreude” over President Trump coming down with COVID-19, notes Heather Mac Donald at City Journal. New York Times columnist Frank Bruni says the diagnosis proves the country has been lax and it’s time “to be safer.” Huh? “The United States has wiped out decades of hard-won prosperity by following the spirit-crushing injunction to ‘stay safe.’ ” And “Trump’s infection” is neither a “vindication nor a refutation” of any policy. “Lockdown proponents” hope Trump will close the economy, but a policy’s “impact on any given policymaker should not determine that judgment.” When Trump tweeted, “Don’t be afraid of COVID,” the media “blew its top.” But “Trump is now modeling masculine leadership at its best: upbeat, rational and unbowed.”

Conservative: A Blackout on Antifa Coverage

The “continuing plague of violence” in US cities “has virtually disappeared from” most media in the face of “wall-to-wall” coverage of President Trump’s COVID-19 status, observes Byron York at the Washington Examiner. Yet the chaos continues, with Portland still seeing regular assaults on its courthouse district. Early Sunday, “a Portland officer was doing paperwork in his car when a rioter smashed a window and filled the car with pepper spray.” The perp’s car held “window punch tools, pepper spray, throwing knives, a laser pointer, a slingshot, rocks and more,” police said. Yet he was rapidly released, like so many others. This violence, like also-underreported weekend flare-ups in DC and Seattle, “is clearly the work of the violent extremist organization Antifa.” Joe Biden claimed last week that “Antifa is an idea and not an organization.” Argues York: “Perhaps if the violence were covered more in the media, Biden would be forced to defend his indefensible claim.”

Foreign desk: Why Armenia Fights

“Americans have other crises on their minds,” writes Mark Movsesian at First Things, “but it’s important to understand what is happening” between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Last week, the “petro-flush” Azeri government launched an offensive against Nagorno-Karabakh, an ethnic Armenian-Christian territory lodged inside Muslim Azerbaijan. “Thirty years ago, in response to discriminatory treatment and outright pogroms against Armenians” — and against the backdrop of the Armenian genocide during World War I — “the region declared independence.” With Armenian backing, it prevailed over the Azeris, but the latter, with help from Turkey, are bent on retaking it. Armenians are willing to reach a negotiated settlement, but for them, “the Karabakh conflict is part of a long, existential struggle. . . . They remember the genocide and fear what would happen to Christian Armenians if they agreed to evacuate and return Karabakh to Azerbaijan. Given past history, foreign assurances of protection ring hollow.”

Culture critic: Agatha Christie’s Century

When Laura Thompson began her Agatha Christie biography, she ­relates at The Times Literary Supplement, “the received opinion was that her novels were suspended in a never-never land wherein change did not penetrate.” But as Christie’s delightful spinster Miss Marple says, “the essence of life is going forward,” and “Christie was not fossilized within an interwar drawing room.” She “is a dealer in realism,” and her “wise” works “covered the century in which she lived and wrote.” As she aged, “she addressed change more and more. An attack on extremist ideology in ‘Destination Unknown’ (1954); a multicultural student hostel in ‘Hickory, Dickory, Dock’ (1955).” “Endless Night,” from 1967, was “prescient in its exposition of the creed of self-worship, which ran counter to every principle inculcated into the young Agatha Miller of late Victorian Torquay.”

From the right: Mean Girls Against ACB

Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett is “the living embodiment of the things that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg spent her career fighting for,” but left-wing feminists can’t “issue even the mildest form of praise” for her, charges Jennifer C. Braceras at The Detroit News. Progressives are “blinded” by “an extreme ideology that demands political commitments from nominees to the federal bench.” The “attacks are personal, baseless and speculative”; the left should abandon its “mean-girls campaign to tear this exemplar down.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board