On Friday, the Associated Press reported that ex-President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach — where he’s been staying since leaving the White House — partly closed because of an outbreak of COVID-19. While vaccination efforts are well underway and making notable progress across the nation, there are still months to go until optimal vaccination levels are reached — and in the meantime, the virus remains a serious threat, no matter any ignorant equivocating from certain Republicans.
Breaking AP: Mar-a-Lago has been partially closed because of a COVID outbreak. https://t.co/DW8ambCpKs
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) March 19, 2021
The Associated Press based their report on accounts from “several people familiar with the situation, including a club member who received a phone call about the closure Friday.” According to the outlet, a Mar-a-Lago receptionist confirmed that the club was at least partly shut down, but the staffer didn’t provide any other details. According to a source, Mar-a-Lago partly closed a portion of the premises “for a short period of time,” and the outbreak appears to have been connected to staffers, because an unspecified number of the club’s workers went into quarantine, the source added.
The Associated Press noted that “the extent of the outbreak” was not immediately clear. Although he did not publicize it at the time, the ex-president himself has received a COVID-19 vaccination, which he got this January, months after contracting the virus and briefly staying at Walter Reed Medical Center.
His own bout with the virus did not temper his ambivalence towards the seriousness of the situation. He carried on with such a gross dereliction of duty that the never even consistently promoted mask-wearing at any point of his presidency once the fact that the pandemic would stretch well beyond March 2020 became clear. The utter detachment from basic competence that was required to fail according to that basic metric is staggering. He didn’t even regularly promote masks, which are so basic.
Trump has left open the option of running for the presidency again in 2024, although he still refuses to acknowledge the reality that he was the loser of the 2020 presidential election. Some Republicans are going along with his delusions — in Indian River County, Florida, which is on the state’s east coast just north of Palm Beach, the county GOP has recently been referring to Trump as the current president of the United States on its website. County GOP Chairman Jay Kramer, a former local mayor, said that it’s “important to make a statement,” reiterating that the reference to Trump’s supposed ongoing presidency was not an accident. They live in a fantasyworld.
