Change will never come without political participation - SHARE THIS ARTICLE!

Despite CDC guidance that Americans should wear face masks in public to avoid spreading Covid-19, President Donald Trump mocked a man for wearing one at the White House on Tuesday and Vice President Mike Pence refused to wear one while meeting doctors and patients at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota.

Trump’s comment came during an event designed to portray the federal government’s aid program for small businesses, known as the Paycheck Protection Program, as wildly successful. While the small business owners who attended the event in the White House East Room were asked to sit six feet apart, none of them wore masks, and neither did the president, his daughter, the treasure secretary or the small business administrator.

Although many small businesses have been unable to gets loans — which are forgiven if used to pay workers for at least eight weeks — because millions of dollars have gone to large, politically connected firms, ten beneficiaries of the program were invited to the stage by the president, and thanked him profusely.

Sponsored Link Video Source: The Lincoln Project, holding accountable those who would violate their oaths to the Constitution and would put others before Americans. JUSTICE – UNITY – PROGRESSIVES

At one point, as Trump asked the vice president of a family contracting company from Pennsylvania to speak, he invited a man who accompanied her to join her on stage, and joked about the fact that the man had been wearing a mask earlier. “Put that mask on, the way you had it,” Trump said to the man . As the president shook his head and smiled, some in the room laughed.

After the event ended, the business owners and officials left their seats and mingled at close quarters, including the president’s economic adviser Larry Kudlow, who approached one of the business owners, an optometrist from West Virginia, to speak with him about his glasses.

Sponsored Link

The optometrist, Chris Stansbury, was described simply as a small business owner, but he is also a Republican candidate for the West Virginia House of Delegates. Despite his politics, Stansbury has been urging his clients to take the CDC recommendations on mask-wearing seriously. In a YouTube video recorded two weeks ago, he said, “if you do have to be out and about, if you do have essential travel, please go ahead and wear a mask.” “Even if you feel fine, you could be a carrier of the disease,” Stansbury explained. “Studies have shown that up to 40 percent of people could be carrying this and not even realize it. They could be asymptomatic carriers of the disease. So if you have to go out and about into a public space, please, go ahead and put a mask on.”

The hastily organized White House event, which a limited number of reporters were allowed to attend, also seemed to be part of a new media strategy, intended to give the president an opportunity to cast his response to the crisis as a roaring success without too much scrutiny from the media.

This Piece Originally Appeared in theintercept.com

Change will never come without political participation - SHARE THIS ARTICLE!