The pandemic means President Donald Trump has people where he wants them: at home watching him on television as a captive audience. His likely opponent, Joe Biden, is confined and chained in a virtual political dungeon — his Delaware basement.

Count on Trump to pounce on the COVID-19 crisis for a path to victory in November. The cunning deed is almost done. The noise of American democracy is silenced while his volume has been turned up.

City dwellers in the book-learning, HBO-watching brunch set: You scoff at the president at our peril. We should know by now Trump is lethal, not laughable. Americans are dying by the thousands, and we can't change the channel.

Politics is now a one-man show in the spring of a presidential election year. All the world's a screen, with an inescapable solo player.

Don't think he's not enjoying this Shakespearean tragedy.

For days without end, Trump's the title character speaking his lines, looming large in our emptied lives. The body politic — that's us — is a patient with weak vital signs and a faint heartbeat.

If Trump's mission to destroy the post office succeeds, the body's circulation will be practically paralyzed. Voting by mail would vanish in the shadow of a public health crisis. Clever scheme.

Trump appealed to angry right-wing protestors to "liberate" Michigan, Virginia and Pennsylvania, defying governors' stay-at-home orders. That's an extraordinary act for an American president, but perhaps it's a hint of things to come.

Daily news briefings are not brief and hold little news. They relentlessly remind us who's boss. The president has "absolute authority." As always, Trump addresses his half of the American people, sure he can conquer the divide.

Trump uses the ample free media time to brandish political weapons and messages, to lump China, Biden and the coronavirus together, vilifying them all as one.

If I heard him right, he muttered, "You wouldn't have a country left," if Biden was elected. (He did.) He berates the press if a question cuts too close. Then he "lets" the expert doctors speak to a desperate nation.

The 2020 campaign was meant to be a fight to the finish. But the vale of death, sickness and fear changed the horizon.

Normally, much depends upon debates, demonstrations, rallies, speeches, handshakes and selfies. The best way Biden can compete with a sitting president who's raised tons of money is highlighting himself as a man of the people.

Biden, known for the personal touch, can't connect with voters from a distance of six feet. Coming from tiny Delaware, he's soft, not battle-hardened for a Civil War rematch.

It matters not that Trump failed in preparedness for a public health crisis. Reason and science are not coins of his realm.

Remember the 1960s saying, "The medium is the message"? Trump grasps that truth, by Marshall McLuhan, deeper than anyone in the crowd at a Harvard-Yale game. He lives it every day.

The man's the center of attention, seen by millions at the podium; that's the big money shot. It doesn't matter if he talks gibberish, if he's read the Constitution, if he spins contradictions and lies from that power platform.

What matters is that we see Trump controlling the show — the medium — on the attack. His tweet-bombing amounts to the same shrewd strategy. Call it monopoly. Presidential scholars are confounded.

As we quarantine at home and wear masks in public, the robust American gift for gab, gathering and arguing with one another is gone with the spring wind. So goes invigorating voter participation, as we know it, in the open air.

If the presidential campaign is stripped bare of its public nature, the American way of democracy may as well go home.

One Democrat giving Trump a run for his money is another master of the television medium, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. In the Capitol, the House floor, a well of dissent, is dark and locked.

Screen spaces surely create a sense of coming together, yet they are viewed in private — or solitary — spheres. In this dark time, the screen lights the virtual public square, its discourse a monologue full of sound and fury.

It's nothing like the real thing.

Jamie Stiehm can be reached at JamieStiehm.com. To read her weekly column and find out more about Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, please visit creators.com.

Photo credit: Free-Photos at Pixabay