JOE GRINS . . . AND BARES IT
Flouts mask mandate in clothing shop
President Biden, who has repeatedly urged Americans to mask up, was captured flouting face-covering rules on Nantucket on Saturday.
Photos show a smiling Biden wearing a black mask around his neck, leaving his mouth and nose exposed, inside Murray’s Toggery Shop on the Massachusetts island — despite a large sign on the store’s door that read, “REQUIRED FACE COVERING.”
He left the clothing and souvenir shop at about 4:45 p.m. with a beverage in hand, according to photos and reports.
The policy set by the store on Nantucket’s Main Street is in line with the island’s mask mandate, which the local Board of Health reimposed earlier this month due to an increase in the level of coronavirus detected in the sewer system.
The store outing came after Biden spent Thanksgiving with his family at the home of a private-equity billionaire David Rubinstein on Nantucket, where he attended a tree-lighting ceremony and his motorcade got a middle finger from a man on a porch.
The president, who received a COVID-19 booster shot in September, had called in August for a three-month nationwide mask mandate, and earlier this year stressed that face-covering would be necessary through 2021.
“You know that wearing this mask through the next year here can save lives — a significant number of lives,” he said in February.
Biden’s Thanksgiving weekend shop tour wasn’t the first time he had recently broken mask-wearing rules.
In October, he violated Washington, DC’s indoor face-covering mandate at the Fiola Mare restaurant in Georgetown, where he carried a blue surgical mask in his hands while not eating.
The White House did not immediately respond to a Post request for comment on his lack of a mask on Nantucket.