S.E. Cupp: If Trump is serious, it’s very, very good news
It is much, much easier to measure weakness, smallness and failure. And in the case of President Donald Trump, we can tragically measure his failure in American lives lost during this pandemic. The cost of Trump’s pathological insecurity, his overweening ego and his rank incompetence is a failure to provide the national leadership that could have prevented at least some of the roughly 140,000 Covid-19 deaths in the US.
That’s because it took that many people — and months of talk — for the President to finally, publicly and unequivocally promote the lifesaving practice of wearing a mask in public places.
Monday night he tweeted — as if he’d just heard about the idea over golf — and seemingly without any irony: “We are United in our effort to defeat the Invisible China Virus, and many people say that it is Patriotic to wear a face mask when you can’t socially distance. There is nobody more Patriotic than me, your favorite President!” The black-and-white photo accompanying the tweet showed Trump wearing a face mask with the presidential seal in the corner.
Instead, we watched him constantly and petulantly resist doctors’ orders — even his own — to wear a mask in public, refusing while touring businesses big and small, while holding press conferences, while meeting veterans, while speaking to hundreds of people at his rallies.
He even went so far as to discourage mask-wearing, calling them “double-edged swords” and mocking former Vice President Joe Biden for wearing one, because real men get their friends, family and co-workers sick, I suppose.
Now, suddenly, Trump is suggesting that wearing a mask means caring about the country — something Biden, Democrats and most congressional Republicans have known for months.
Still, as lame and late as Trump’s attempt at lifting his standing in the polls is, Monday’s tweet and the gesture are much more than just empty symbolism.
If he’s now behind wearing a mask and that encourages voters to wear them in states like Texas, Florida and Georgia, where the virus is spiking, this is very, very good news for the rest of us.
Because he was ultimately responsible for turning mask-wearing into a culture war, and one of the dumbest, counterproductive, downright embarrassing ones of our lifetimes, he’s ultimately the only one who can break that fever and knock some sense back into the mask-refusers.
I, for one hope, he tweets it every hour of every day. I hope he pimps that mask, with its gaudy presidential seal, all over the airwaves. I hope he sells branded masks at every rally and at the GOP convention. Because, finally, though it took far too long, he can do something to help save lives.
