As of Sunday morning, President Donald Trump remains in Walter Reed Medical Center following his positive Coronavirus test results. Accounts of his condition have varied, and at times, these accounts have veered into possible cover-up territory — at a Friday press conference, for example, White House physician Dr. Sean Conley adamantly refused to answer the basic question of whether the president had ever been on supplemental oxygen during his illness. During a Sunday morning edition of ABC’s This Week, host George Stephanopoulos pressured top Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller over the Trump team’s past reluctance to even wear masks.
Incredibly, Miller claimed that the Trump team has actually taken the issue “very seriously,” which he attempted to contrast with the Biden approach, insinuating that the Democratic presidential nominee has been hiding out in his basement. This basement claim, which the president himself has made multiple times, is utterly ridiculous. Joe Biden is not and has not been “hiding in his basement.” Suggesting that Biden somehow wants Americans to just become paralyzed with fear rather than confront the disease head-on is just unequivocally untruthful.
Stephanopoulos posed the question:
‘We’ve all seen the rallies without the masks. The Rose Garden event without the masks. The president’s family refused to wear masks at the debate and the president seem pretty proud of that… will it change going forward?’
The Rose Garden event that he references is a recent event held for the formal rollout of Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. Two Republican Senators who were at the event have since tested positive for the virus, although it’s unclear where precisely they may have contracted the disease.
Miller replied:
‘It hasn’t been cavalier at all. We take it very seriously; that’s why we give everyone coming to rallies or events… a mask. We check their temperature. I’d say that with regard to Joe Biden, I think that too often he’s used the mask as a prop. A mask is very important, but he could be 20, 30 feet away from the nearest person and still have the mask on — that’s not gonna change anything that’s out there. But also, we’ve seen with Joe Biden, we can’t all just stay in our basement for the rest of our lives. We have to get out there and live our lives and take this on, develop the vaccine, develop more therapeutics, and defeat it. Americans… want to get life back to normal… You can’t just stay hidden in your basement the entire time.’
Watch his comments below:
.@GStephanopoulos presses Jason Miller: “We’ve all seen the rallies without the masks. The Rose Garden event without the masks. (Trump’s) family refused to wear masks at the debate and the president seem pretty proud of that…will it change going forward?” https://t.co/E3g9lsHTnr pic.twitter.com/JmYggIzdpW
— ABC News (@ABC) October 4, 2020
Miller is not even correct about masks. Biden leaving on a mask could help keep surfaces from becoming unnecessarily contaminated, even if a person isn’t right next to him.
Also — again, the insinuation that Biden has simply hiding in his basement is a lie, no matter the fact that the Trump team has repeated it ad nauseum at this point. Joe Biden also wants America to get back to “normal” — obviously! The problem is that returning to normalcy is not a matter of merely rhetorically snapping your fingers.
