Trump Team Swoons After Their Boss Finally Dons Face Mask Months After Everybody Else

The president was visiting Walter Reed Medical Center, which requires face masks when social distancing isn't possible.
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You’d think President Donald Trump had just discovered a medical cure the way his campaign team figuratively fainted at his feet on Saturday. But no, he was just finally wearing a face mask during a visit to the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center — months after just about everybody else in the world.

Walter Reed requires visitors to wear masks when social distancing isn’t possible.

Jason Miller, Trump campaign senior adviser, crowed in a tweet that Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is now “finished,” alongside a photo of the masked president.

It wasn’t clear why; Biden has been wearing a mask pretty much all along.

Other Twitter users found the tweet bizarre:

In an echo of Miller, Boris Epshteyn, “strategic adviser for coalition” to the Trump campaign, piped up: “Goodnight, Joe Biden.”

Campaign manager Brad Parscale wrote, inexplicably, “America First” and posted a closeup of the same Trump photo.

Trump campaign Communications Director Erin Perrine weighed in, too. She retweeted a comment about Trump looking “badass” in a mask from a New York Post reporter.

In her own tweet, Perrine said: “Rocking a mask like a boss.”

The Trump team tweets may have been part of a strategy to give the president lots of positive feedback to encourage him to wear a mask again. Aides and Republican lawmakers reportedly have been pleading with Trump to wear a mask for weeks, as COVID-19 cases have skyrocketed across the country, leaving nearly 135,000 people dead.

In May, voters were ordered to remove their masks before a roundtable in Iowa with Vice President Mike Pence — just hours after Pence had been exposed to an aide who had just tested positive for COVID-19.

Three weeks after Trump invited thousands of supporters to an indoor campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the number of new single-day coronavirus cases broke records in the state twice last week. At the rally, Trump did not wear a mask, nor did he encourage others to do so.


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