Donald Trump’s latest attack on mask-wearing may be his worst yet
HA HA HA. Man did he zing Biden! That wimp wears a mask! What a rube!
In that same presser, Trump asked a reporter to take off his mask so he could be heard. The reporter said he could talk louder instead to which the President responded: “Oh OK, you want to be politically correct.”
And it all followed on months and months of Trump raising questions about the necessity and efficacy of mask-wearing even as doctors and infectious disease experts became more and more convinced that something as simple as wearing a mask significantly slowed the rate of transmission for Covid-19.
“I don’t think I’m going to be doing it,” Trump said of wearing a mask in the April press conference in which he announced the new CDC guidelines making clear people should wear masks when social distancing was not an option. “Wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens — I just don’t see it.”
The continued politicization of mask-wearing by President Trump is, in a word, unforgivable. Masks didn’t have to be political. This is a matter of public health not partisanship. In his continued attempts to equate mask-wearing with wimpiness (and Democrats), what Trump is doing, in a very real sense, is encouraging his most ardent supporters to engage in behaviors that make them more likely to contract the coronavirus. A virus, I will remind you, that is projected to kill more than 400,000 Americans by the end of this year.
CNN’s Allison Gordon contributed to this report.
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