Throughout the Coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump has refused to take the situation seriously to the point that it took him until this week to even post on Twitter that Americans should wear face masks, which help thwart the spread of the virus. Previously, he’d spent months insisting that masks were a matter of personal choice, which was in complete ignorance of the basic science underlying their usage. At a Tuesday press conference, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany claimed that Trump has been “consistent” on masks throughout the pandemic, which is just laughably untrue. CNN’s Jim Acosta promptly trolled McEnany on Twitter over the lie.
In response to a video of McEnany claiming that Trump has been consistent on masks, Acosta tweeted:
‘Fact check: False.’
Fact check: False. https://t.co/XWEQevUuzt
— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) July 21, 2020
Acosta is, of course, correct. When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued guidelines earlier this year stating that all Americans should wear masks, Trump said:
‘I don’t think I’m going to be doing it. Wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens — I just don’t see it.’
At another point, he delusionally suggested that mask-wearing was a sign of political disapproval of his administration.
Although he’s conducted a slew of public events throughout recent weeks, Trump only appeared in public with a mask for the very first time just recently. He wore one when visiting wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Medical Center. Previously, the only occasion on which he’d been known to have worn a mask was during a visit to a Ford plant in Michigan. At the time, he only wore one during the behind-the-scenes portion of the tour, and when asked why he took it off, he specifically said that he didn’t want to let journalists see him with one, as if it’s all some kind of game to him. It’s definitely not — people’s lives are at stake.
Check out Twitter’s response to Acosta below:
