President Trump was photographed wearing a mask last Saturday, and the internet went wild.
He was visiting Walter Reed National Military Medical Center when the media captured the history-making moment. It didn’t take long for the derision to kick in.
Some online wags were pleased the mask shielded the public from the president’s weirdly-shaped mouth. Others cheered because they said he looked defeated and deflated.
I don’t know about that. In a rare move for me, I’m going to applaud the president for having the courage — just this once — to lead positively by example.
Of course, we can’t discount the possibility that his decision was politically motivated. Trump’s calculus about such matters is as shrewd as it is often accurate: Like a wounded animal with its paw caught in a trap, he knows when it serves him to act in a certain way, whether to endear himself to his base, to own the libs, or both.
So the mask may be an act of political expediency. Or not. It doesn’t matter.
What does matter is that, by wearing it, he paves the way for the typical Trump supporter to do the same, to reverse course and put on a mask even after long, drawn-out Facebook rants about how our rights are being compromised by a piece of cloth over our mouths and noses.
Who knows how many lives Trump will save and how much illness he will prevent by the simple choice to wear that mask, even if only for a few minutes, even if in his secret heart of hearts, he still believes a cocktail of hydroxychloroquine and bleach works better.
Less publicized but just as significant, Trump told CBS News a few days after the hospital visit that Americans should listen to the CDC. “If it’s necessary, I would urge them to wear a mask and I would say follow the guidelines,” he told reporter Catherine Herridge.
While this is hardly a ringing endorsement for the efficacy of masks, it’s another step in the right direction. How exhausting it must be for Trump’s handlers to nurture anything like empathy in the man. Almost as exhausting as it is for the public to watch him slowly evolve into somebody with an iota of compassion — a case of one step forward, two dozen steps back.
Let’s face it, Trump needs some wins where the coronavirus is concerned. His administration’s handling of the pandemic has been horribly uneven, which is a euphemistic way of saying it has been a near-total disaster leading to more illness, fatalities and economic disruptions than necessary.
The national shutdown last spring, intended to give the country time to ramp up COVID testing and contact tracing, was instead so squandered that some experts now speculate a second shuttering of non-essential businesses and activities may be needed. By advocating for the nation to reopen too quickly, in defiance of his own administration’s plan to wait until 14 days of declining numbers, Trump presided over a Titanic-level catastrophe and spawned a Frankenstein-monster patchwork of state and local regulations festooned with red tape and contradictions. Meanwhile, President Nero waded into the culture wars, crowed about his ratings and pouted over his rally attendance.
His most definitive COVID action, announcing travel restrictions to and from China at the end of January (they went into effect on Feb. 2), could be seen as merely an extension of his usual America-first nationalism. In other words, he used COVID as a cover story.
Another bold action with a similar not-so-hidden agenda was a recent attempt to ship foreign college students back to their countries of origin if their courses were entirely online in the fall. His administration walked that back recently after threats of litigation and, one assumes, realization that these students subsidize many American students’ bills.
But timeout. I came to praise Trump, not to bury him, or however that line goes.
So ...
At least he’s wearing a mask and advising others to do the same. That’s a start. And while it would undoubtedly have been better had this realization hit him two months earlier, his detractors — if they truly desire best-case outcomes where the virus and the country are concerned — should encourage the better angels of Trump’s nature to unfurl their wings a little more often.
If that means admiring the emperor’s new mask, so be it.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
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