Trump’s cover-up
President submits to calls to lead by example as coronavirus continues to rampage across country
DONALD TRUMP finally bowed to mounting public pressure over the weekend and wore a face mask for the first time in public as coronavirus continued to cut a swathe across the US.
The President at last gave in to pleas from Anthony Fauci, his increasingly marginalised top health adviser, although their last conversation is reported to have been several weeks ago.
After Mr Trump’s move, Jerome Adams, the US surgeon general, said the country could reverse the Covid surge in two to three weeks if people followed basic hygiene guidelines.
According to statistics collated by Johns Hopkins University, nearly 3.28 million coronavirus cases have been confirmed in the US, claiming 135,000 lives, the highest death toll anywhere in the world.
The split between Mr Trump and Mr Fauci has played out across the country with governors and mayors increasingly at odds over how to counter the spread of the virus.
Mr Trump donned a mask – complete with presidential seal – when he met wounded veterans at the Walter Reed military hospital outside Washington DC on Saturday. The president had faced calls from several senior Republican senators to set an example.
Face coverings have become a political and cultural issue in the US, with opponents – including some of Mr
Trump’s most loyal supporters – dismissing them as “muzzles” and an infringement of personal freedom.
Having previously mocked Joe Biden, his Democrat election opponent in November, for wearing a mask, Mr Trump softened his stance.
“I’m all for masks,” he told the Fox Business Network last week.
As he prepared to leave for his visit to Walter Reed, the president added: “I think when you’re in a hospital, especially in that particular setting, where you’re talking to a lot of soldiers and people that, in some cases, just got off the operating tables, I think it’s a great thing to wear a mask.”
Dr Adams said yesterday on CBS’S
Face the Nation: “Just as we’ve seen cases skyrocket, we can turn this thing around in two to three weeks if we can get a critical mass of people wearing face coverings, practising at least six feet of social distance, doing the things we know are effective.”
Mr Fauci, the 79-year-old director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has been a vocal advocate for masks for months.
“If you say ‘it doesn’t matter whether you put it on or take it off ’, you’re giving a wrong, mixed signal,” he said last week. “The message should be, ‘Wear a mask, period.’”
He is believed to have annoyed Mr Trump with his pessimistic view of how the US has coped with the virus, triggering reports that he has become marginalised by the White House.
“As a country, when you compare us to other countries, I don’t think you can say we’re doing great. I mean, we’re just not,” Dr Fauci said in a podcast interview with Fivethirtyeight, a website run by political analyst Nate Silver.
Mr Trump expressed his annoyance in several interviews with the conservative TV station, Fox News. Dr Fauci was a nice man, he told Sean Hannity, “but he has made a lot of mistakes”.
According to reports in The Washington Post, Dr Fauci has not spoken to Mr Trump since the first week in June.
Meanwhile, the coronavirus surge in the South has put governors at odds with local mayors over how to respond.
In Georgia, Keisha Lance Bottoms, Atlanta’s mayor, reinstated an order for residents to stay home except for essential trips.
The move was condemned by Brian Kemp, Georgia’s Republican governor, who said it was legally unenforceable.
In Florida, Ron Desantis, the Republican governor, has refused to reverse the reopening of the state or make mask wearing compulsory. But, last week, Carlos Gimenez, the mayor of Miami-dade County, issued an emergency order restoring restrictions.
Roger Stone, whose jail term was commuted by Mr Trump, remains a “convicted felon and rightly so”, according to Robert Mueller, the former special counsel.
Mr Mueller, whose investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election triggered the attempted impeachment of the president, broke his nearly year-long silence in a Washington Post editorial in which he also said: “Because his sentence has been commuted, he will not go to prison. But his conviction stands.”
‘We can turn this thing around in two to three weeks if we can get a critical mass of people wearing face