Trump Willingly Wears Coronavirus Mask in Public for Only 3rd Time for RBG Memorial After Months of Mocking Masks
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President Donald Trump was willingly photographed wearing a coronavirus mask for only the third time when he attended a memorial for the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — not 48 hours after mocking Joe Biden for following the same precaution.
Trump got a lot of attention from the crowd when he appeared Thursday morning at a memorial for RBG outside the Supreme Court building, where he was promptly booed. Also noteworthy, though, was the fact that Trump — despite being outdoors and nowhere near anyone other than First Lady Melania Trump — sported the same sort of face covering that he has spent months mocking and undermining.
It was only the third time Trump has willingly been photographed wearing a mask.
In May, Trump was photographed on the sly wearing a mask while touring a Ford plant, but took it off when he knew the press would be around.
Then in July, Trump briefly flirted with making masks happen by wearing one to Walter Reed Hospital, then tweeting a photo of himself with the caption “We are United in our effort to defeat the Invisible China Virus, and many people say that it is Patriotic to wear a face mask when you can’t socially distance. There is nobody more Patriotic than me, your favorite President!”
About a week later, he was again photographed in a mask as he visited a vaccine lab in North Carolina.
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But over those same months, Trump has far more frequently undermined the wearing of masks by questioning their effectiveness and mocking others for wearing masks — including during a campaign rally in front of a mostly-maskless crowd of Pittsburgh area supporters. And just yesterday, Trump complained to a reporter that he couldn’t hear a question because of the mask — another frequent occurrence.
Why the mask today? That’s for Trump to know, but time will tell whether he’s turned another corner on masks, and for how long.
A key predictive model used by the White House coronavirus task force — The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation — projects that “universal mask use” could save hundreds of thousands of lives by the end of the year.
