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Trump gives in to the mask but takes new risks with schools

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President Donald Trump finally wore a mask in public during a visit to wounded service members at Walter Reed. But he continues to sow confusion by minimizing the impact of the coronavirus and pushing for the reopening of schools.
President Donald Trump on Saturday finally did the one thing that public health experts and even his own aides have begged him to do to save lives. He wore a mask in public during a visit to wounded service members at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.
Given his intransigence for so many months, it was a small but significant gesture at a time when coronavirus cases are surging in the US and the President has failed to grasp the depth of the crisis or offer any coherent strategy to control the spread of the virus.
While he was willing to wear the mask to protect US service members, Trump made it clear this week that he viewed the hospital setting as a unique one — clinging to his insistence that there is a “time and place” for masks amid a raging pandemic that has claimed the lives of at least 134,815 Americans.
His concern about safety does not apparently extend to schools, which he’s pressuring to reopen, potentially putting millions of Americans at risk. His delusional view of the virus — mainly that it’s “harmless” — serves his political agenda of getting the economy moving and the country back to “normal” ahead of the fall election. But if he’s going to win back any of the suburban moms the Republican Party lost so badly in the 2018 midterms, he may want to reconsider using America’s children as chips in his political games.
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He continues to jeopardize American lives — including that of his own supporters — on the campaign trail, too. The President had planned to continue flouting the guidelines of his public health experts by holding a campaign rally for his supporters in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on Saturday night — which was postponed due to weather — where the campaign said it would encourage but not mandate attendees to wear masks, and there likely would have been little adherence to guidance regarding large gatherings (other than the move outdoors, which can help reduce the rate of spread).
‘This should not be a lead story in the news’
Underscoring the divide between Trump and the public health experts he doesn’t listen to, the President and the nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, have not spoken for weeks. And Fauci has been relegated to podcast and print interviews, likely because he has corrected the President’s misinformation campaign about the virus.
While Trump has recently said that the US is in a “good place” when it comes to the coronavirus and has touted the current mortality rate in the United States (an indicator that generally lags behind rising case numbers), Fauci has delivered the blunt, unsettling facts about the direction of the pandemic.
“As a country, when you compare us to other countries, I don’t think you can say we’re doing great. I mean, we’re just not,” Fauci said last week on the FiveThirtyEight podcast.
Fauci also said recently that he “would not be surprised if we go up to 100,000 (new infections) a day if this does not turn around.” Given that prediction of a frightening increase in cases in the coming weeks, public health experts said Saturday that they were glad the President had finally worn a mask, but as Dr.

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