President Donald Trump seems to have slightly changed his opinion on face masks, which help stop the spread of the Coronavirus that has been surging across the country recently. In an interview on Wednesday with Fox Business, Trump suggested that he looked like the Lone Ranger when he himself was wearing a mask, which is a change in tone from his previous mockery of mask-wearing and refusal to follow his own administration’s guidelines outlining the need for the face coverings. Trump’s comparison of himself to the Lone Ranger — the fictional star of a 1950s television show — is staggeringly delusional nonsense. The Lone Ranger didn’t even wear a mask on his mouth; he wore one over his eyes.
Besides insisting that he would “absolutely” wear a mask if he was in a “tight situation with people,” in the Fox Business interview, Trump said:
‘I’m all for masks. I think masks are good. People have seen me wearing one… had a mask on. I sort of liked the way I looked. Okay. I thought it was okay. It was a dark black mask, and I thought it looked okay. It looked like the Lone Ranger. I have no problem with that, and if people feel good about it, they should do it.’
That is just… wild.
I report, you decide pic.twitter.com/0LRndOQOg3
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 2, 2020
Trump is only publicly known to have worn a mask on one occasion; when he toured a Ford facility in Michigan in May, he wore a mask for at least part of the behind-the-scenes component of the tour. Although an image has emerged of him in the mask at the facility, when he appeared before the press at the time, he was no longer wearing one. At the time, he said that he “didn’t want to give the press the pleasure of seeing” him in a mask, as if wearing one or not is all some kind of game to him. People are dying, and these are his priorities.
During his Fox Business interview, Trump revealed that he still seems to fail to grasp the seriousness of the situation. He said:
‘I think we are going to be very good with the coronavirus. I think that, at some point, that’s going to sort of just disappear, I hope.’
There’s no evidence that the Coronavirus is going to “just disappear.” Just this week, the U.S. is yet again hitting records for the number of new Coronavirus cases reported in a single day.
Trump seems to think that those concerned about the situation are just trying to make him look bad, although well over 125,000 Americans are dead.
Trump said:
‘I think the Democrats would like to see the country stay closed as long as possible because they figure that’s probably good for the election, because it would be bad a little bit for jobs, and maybe a lot for jobs.’
There is no evidence for this conspiracy theory.
Trump just evidently prefers to play politics rather than take the situation more seriously, even though Americans’ lives are very much at stake.
