In the Rose Garden on Tuesday afternoon, President Donald Trump announced an executive order designed to make police more accountable to the communities they serve. He did so without a mask on. And by the look of a video the White House sent out on Twitter shortly afterward, almost no one in attendance wore a mask either. In Iowa on Tuesday, Vice President Mike Pence stopped at a diner named "Sally's Restaurant" to greet people. He did not wear a mask. Later, Pence toured a Winnebago factory -- again without wearing a mask. (Pence also published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal insisting that we are not on the verge of a second wave of the coronavirus). In Washington, DC, Monday night, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and former White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney were spotted having dinner on the outdoor patio of a restaurant near the White House. Neither man wore a mask. Those three moments come against this backdrop: Coronavirus cases are increasing in 18 states, and a new projection by one respected model suggests that a total of more than 200,000 Americans could be dead from Covid-19 by October 1. They also come less than 24 hours after Trump asserted bizarrely that "if we stop testing right now, we'd have very few cases, if any." And less than 12 hours after The New York Times first reported that Pence, on a call with governors, had insisted, contrary to established facts, that they should tell constituents that the reason for the increase in coronavirus cases was due to an increase in testing across the country. And all of this is happening just five days from Trump's planned return to the campaign trail in Tulsa, Oklahoma -- at an indoor arena that fits 19,000 people and where mask wearing is not mandatory. It's a remarkable disconnect. On the one hand, Trump, his allies and his supporters seem absolutely intent on behaving as though coronavirus is something of the past, something that the United States -- thanks to this President -- has crushed. "I just want to say we've done incredibly well," Trump said in his remarks Tuesday afternoon. "We're doing well. Things are happening that nobody can even believe. Our country is opening up. And it's opening up rapidly." Source
