Mask-less Trump tours repurposed Michigan Ford plant
Pandemic politics shadowed President Donald Trump’s trip to Michigan on Thursday as he highlighted lifesaving medical devices, with the president and officials from the electoral battleground state clashing over federal aid, mail-in ballots and face masks.
Trump visited Ypsilanti, outside Detroit, to tour a Ford Motor Co. factory that had been repurposed to manufacture ventilators, the medical breathing machines governors begged for during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
But his visit came amid a long-running feud with the state’s Democratic governor and a day after the president threatened to withhold federal funds over the state’s expanded voteby-mail effort. And, again, the president did not publicly wear a face covering despite a warning from the state’s top law enforcement officer that a refusal to do so might lead to a ban on his return.
All of the Ford executives giving Trump the tour were wearings masks, the president standing alone without one. At one point, he did take a White Housebranded mask from his pocket and told reporters he had worn it elsewhere on the tour, out of public view.
For a moment, he also teasingly held up a clear shield in front of his face. A statement from Ford said that Bill Ford, the company’s executive chairman, “encouraged President Trump to wear a mask when he arrived” and said the president wore it during “a private viewing of three Ford GTs from over the years” before removing it.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said that mask wearing isn’t just Ford’s policy but it’s also the law in a state that’s among those hardest hit by the virus. Nessel said that if Trump refused to wear a mask Thursday “he’s going to be asked not to return to any enclosed facilities inside our state“and “we’re going to have to take action” against any company that allows it in the future.
The Republican president and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer have clashed during the coronavirus outbreak over her criticism of the federal response to the state’s needs for medical equipment, like ventilators, and personal protective gear, such as gloves, masks and gowns. Trump on Thursday criticized Democratic governors, suggesting they were proceeding too slowly in reopening their states’ economies.
“You have a lot of, unfortunately, in this case Democrat governors [who] think it’s good politics to keep it closed,” Trump said. “I think they’re being forced to open, frankly, the people want to get out. You’ll break the country if you don’t.”
The day before, Trump threatened to withhold federal funds from Michigan after its secretary of state mailed absentee ballot applications to millions of voters. Trump first tweeted – falsely – that the Democratic state official had mailed absentee ballots to Michigan voters. He later sent a corrected tweet specifying that applications to request absentee ballots had been mailed and seemed to back off his funding threat.
Trump narrowly won Michigan in 2016. He insists mail-in voting is ripe for fraud, although there is scant evidence of wrongdoing.
“We don’t want them to do mail in ballots because it’s going to lead to total election fraud,” Trump said Thursday.
Earlier, Trump, at a roundtable with AfricanAmerican supporters in front of a sign with his slogan for reopening the economy, “Transition to Greatness,” noted low minority unemployment numbers before the pandemic and also pointed to his administration’s work on criminal justice reform.
Whitmer did not accompany Trump during the visit.
“We do not have plans to meet, but I did speak with him yesterday on the phone,” Whitmer told “CBS This Morning” on Thursday. “I made the case that, you know, we all have to be on the same page here. We’ve got to stop demonizing one another and, really, focus on the fact that the common enemy is the virus.”