President Donald Trump on Monday seemed to give mask-wearing his strongest endorsement yet after months of wavering over whether people should don a face covering in public to curtail the spread of COVID-19.
“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,” Trump tweeted. “There is nobody more Patriotic than me, your favorite President!”
Trump’s tweet comes more than three months after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended masks in public settings to help stop coronavirus spread. For much of that time, the president pushed back on the idea of wearing masks as the practice became an increasingly political issue.
Even recently, the president’s mask message has been muddled. In an interview with Fox News host Chris Wallace that aired Sunday, Trump said he would not consider a national mask order mandating that people wear masks in public because “I want people to have a certain freedom, and I don’t believe in that.”
“No, and I don’t agree with the statement that if everybody wears a mask, everything disappears,” he said, adding, “masks cause problems too.”
“With that being said, I’m a believer in masks. I think masks are good,” he continued. “But I leave it up to the governors. Many of the governors are changing. They’re more mask into — they like the concept of masks, but some of them don’t agree.”
Earlier this month, following weeks of refusal to be seen publicly wearing a mask, Trump wore a black face-covering during a visit to Walter Reed Medical Center. He had worn a mask during a May visit to a Ford plant in Michigan, but did not wear it while in front of cameras because he did not “want to give the press the pleasure of seeing it,” he said.
In an interview with Fox Business after his trip to Walter Reed, Trump sounded more upbeat about masks because he “sort of like the way I looked.”
“It looked like the Lone Ranger,” he said. “I have no problem with that, and if people feel good about it, they should do it.”
The tweet came hours after Trump announced he will resume regular coronavirus briefings starting Tuesday as polling shows the public’s view of the administration’s pandemic response worsening.
“We had very successful briefings, I was doing them, and we had a lot of people watching — record numbers watching in the history of cable television,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office of the March and April briefings, which came to an end soon after the president mused about whether injecting disinfectants could be used to combat the coronavirus.
Trump’s shifted posture comes as more than 3.7 million cases have been confirmed in the U.S., with more than 141,000 deaths, according to an NBC News tracker. Cases are spiking in large parts of the U.S., particularly throughout the south, in recent weeks.
It also follows former Vice President Joe Biden jumping out to a nearly 9-point lead over Trump in the RealClearPolitics polling average, with the presumptive 2020 Democratic presidential nominee also taking a lead in key swing states. Last month, Biden said he would require people nationwide to wear masks in public if elected president.
Trump previously promoted a tweet mocking Biden for wearing a mask.
