Trump’s family members and Trump’s chief of staff did not and, according to the debate’s moderator, Chris Wallace, waved away an official from the Cleveland Clinic who offered masks to them. Wallace recounted that situation on “Fox News Sunday,” asking a Trump adviser if they think that “rules for everybody else” don’t apply to them.
Great question. With an obvious answer. They are trapped by their own denialism, which demands that they model the lack of concern that they push on voters, and they elevate looking undaunted over being smart, confidence over prudence, because that’s the administration’s way.
Besides, masks would have incensed Trump, who, based on his debate performance, needed to be cooled down, not fired up. As Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman reported in The Times, he created a “top-down culture of fear” about exhibiting any worry about infection. “If you wanted to make the boss happy,” Karni and Haberman wrote, “you left the mask at home.”
That’s a metaphor for a whole lot more. If you want to make the boss happy, you tell him that his inauguration drew many more people than it did. You tell him bad news is fake. You tell him the polls are off. You tell him Robert Mueller’s investigation is a hoax. You tell him that President Obama spied on his campaign.
You become Attorney General Bill Barr, a one-man factory of exonerations and excuses. You abet his existence in an alternate reality, where the sun is always shining and will magically zap an inconvenient virus into oblivion.
President Trump’s aides abetted him all the way to Walter Reed, supplemental oxygen, steroids and remdesivir. In the course of making the boss happy, they helped make him sick.
A president’s diagnosis with a serious illness should be a moment of at least temporary conciliation, unity and healing, when political adversaries put away their weapons, journalists muffle their alarms and Americans say a public prayer for a speedy recovery.