The decision on the masks that will haunt Trump's reelection

What are the excuses for not wearing face masks? 2:14

(CNN) –– As coronavirus cases in the United States rebound and governors begin to agitate for a national order on the use of masks, President Donald Trump shows little sign of giving in to an issue that has come to embody a response to the national pandemic rooted in denial and that now even threatens its political future.

Even the majority of Republicans-elect are openly advocating the use of face masks and have been photographed with their noses and mouths covered, in part to set an example for the country. However, Trump still refuses to wear a mask in public, and most of the guests at his two July 4 celebrations - on Mount Rushmore and in the South Lawn of the White House - were without any facial covering.

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"I think it should be a national requirement," New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy said Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press" show. Despite being a Democrat, Murphy has maintained a cordial relationship with Trump and dined with him in June at the President's Golf Course in Bedminster.

A day later, Trump's top aide indicated that the White House would likely never order the mandatory use of face masks for all Americans.

"When we review masks and their use, that is done based on location, when social distancing cannot be maintained," White House Secretary General Mark Meadows said on Fox News. "Certainly, a national mandate will not be ordered," he added.

Three months after reversing the guidelines and recommending the use of face masks - a move officials later admitted was confusing and uncomfortable - major Republicans and the president's allies so far are realizing that wearing masks will be an element essential to contain a pandemic that has yet to cease.

White House officials are discussing taking a more active role in encouraging the use of face masks, as they move toward a strategy of preparing Americans to live long-term with the virus. After a series of events without social distancing and in which the masks were scarce, the Trump campaign said Sunday that it would organize a rally in New Hampshire where attendees will receive "a facial mask that they are recommended to wear."

However, Trump's willingness to change his personal stance on the issue is far from clear. Although he was compared to the "lone ranger" on one of the few occasions that he wore a mask in private, the president has not resorted to powerful social media platforms to urge his followers to do the same. And in meetings with advisers, Trump has stated that a stronger call for facemasks could send the wrong message as he tries to get the country out of the virus.

The mask debate has come to encapsulate a federal effort marked by repeated reversals, conflicting recommendations, low supplies and competing internal interests leading to confusing messages and negative health outcomes.

The wrong answer has seriously damaged the president's political outlook, in which his reluctance to the masks only deepens the impression that Trump is not taking the pandemic seriously. Many of the president's closest allies now say privately that wearing a face mask in public could help him appear more attuned to the crisis. They fear that if he doesn't - and encourages his supporters to follow this example - he could threaten the economic recovery Trump is counting on to push for reelection, as new outbreaks could reverse the reopens he desperately needs to have an opportunity in November.

• MIRA: Trump refuses to lead as the pandemic worsens and his allies abandon him on the issue of wearing masks

The Trump administration's decision not to recommend wearing masks during the early days of the pandemic has emerged as a critical misstep in a widely criticized national response. Even when it was clear that the asymptomatic spread was rapidly and quietly spreading the virus, no concerted national effort was ever mounted to convince Americans that wearing masks could prevent the spread.

"I don't regret that," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, during his testimony before Congress last week. “At the time, there was a shortage of equipment that our healthcare providers needed, who put themselves at risk on a daily basis by caring for people who were sick. We did not want to divert their access to masks and personal protective equipment for people to use, "he explained.

Yet only now, months after a crisis that shows no signs of stopping, senior White House officials and the president's allies have begun to recognize that if more Americans start wearing face masks the outbreak could slow down.

White House officials say this week's messages will have a change aimed at convincing Americans that the virus will not diminish anytime soon, but that actions like wearing masks can help contain it as the country learns to live. with the.

"Although there are outbreaks and we are meeting the needs of those outbreaks, we have the infrastructure to deal with them," said an official, anticipating the new impulse in the messages.

Still, after months of refusing to wear face protection, denigrating his electoral rival for appearing in a mask in public, and fueling a cultural backlash against wearing it, it's unclear whether any attempt by the president to convince people to cover up. face will be effective.

On the afternoon of Friday, April 3, Trump announced that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was now urging people to wear a face mask when they left home. But, immediately, the president declared that he was not going to use it. Rather than encouraging Americans to heed this recommendation, he suggested doing what you think best.

"With the masks, it will be really voluntary," said the president. "You can do it. You do not have to do it. I am deciding not to, ”he completed.

His announcement came after days of heated meetings between the White House coronavirus task force, in which officials discussed whether to reverse the previous guideline and direct people to use facial coatings. In the Oval Office, Trump had expressed deep skepticism that any American would wear a face mask, and was concerned that advising them could cause panic.

• READ: The controversial meme about the use of masks that Trump's son shared

Minimize worries

In the early days of the pandemic, recommending masks to the general public was hardly a topic of conversation among White House officials.

An exception was Matt Pottinger, deputy national security adviser who has orchestrated the president's policy on Asia. A former China-based Wall Street Journal reporter , where he covered the SARS outbreak, Pottinger had lived in a country where wearing masks has been routine and where, when the coronavirus began to spread, it became ubiquitous.

According to officials and former government officials, Pottinger and some members of the National Security Council recommended to other members of the working group that the use of masks be one of the guidelines for Americans as the virus began to spread in the country.

Presenting data from South Korea and Japan, which suggested that widespread use of face masks could help curb the spread of the disease, Pottinger and members of the National Security Council's team of weapons of mass destruction argued that a similar recommendation to Americans.

• READ: Protective masks: why the guidelines have changed so much and how using them can help the economy?

Amid the internal discussion, the persistent shortage of medical masks for front-line health personnel in hospitals was propped up, which states and the federal government were quick to resolve with spaced-out shipments and calls to the private sector. Some White House officials feared that a general recommendation for Americans to wear facial coatings would lead to a lack of much-needed masks for medical professionals, exacerbating the already complex situation for hospital and service workers. of emergency.

"The government wanted the masks to go to medical professionals and wanted to avoid panic so that people would not buy the necessary masks on the front line," explained a former administration official who was present at the discussions. "That was part of the justification."

Still, that did not stop Pottinger from wearing a face mask at the White House, and encouraged other members of the National Security Council to do the same. At one point in March - as the government continued to recommend against wearing medical masks - the council members received a shipment of blue surgical masks from Taiwan for use in the White House.

At the time, the CDC indicated on its website that "it was not recommended that healthy people wear a face mask to protect themselves from respiratory diseases, including covid-19."

Administration officials publicly asked that people not go out and buy masks: "Americans don't have to go out and buy masks," Vice President Mike Pence said during an appearance on CNN on March 1. In late February, Chief Health Officer Jerome Adams tweeted, “Seriously, people, STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing the general public from spreading #coronavirus. "

In other instances, some government officials have even suggested that wearing a mask may increase the risk of infection. "You can increase your risk of contracting [coronavirus] by wearing a mask if you are not a healthcare provider," Adams said during an interview on Fox & Friends on March 2. "People who don't know how to use them properly tend to touch their faces a lot and can actually increase the spread of the coronavirus," he insisted.

However, towards the end of March an increasing amount of evidence began to appear showing how the asymptomatic spread of the virus was causing the increase in cases across the country. Senior CDC officials told the White House that stricter guidelines - including a new recommendation on face masks - were needed to prevent the virus from spreading among those without symptoms, according to people familiar with internal discussions.

The federal agency sent notes to the White House detailing its recommended guidance in the last week of March, people with knowledge of the documents said. The CDC made it clear that cloth face coatings were recommended, not medical grade masks.

But, after receiving the communications, some of Trump's advisers warned that a nationwide recommendation could have negative side effects and advocated for a measure with a more limited scope, potentially only in the most affected areas.

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Opinion among officials was divided. Some wondered if people in the United States - unlike citizens of Asian countries, where the use of masks was already commonplace - would at some point submit to covering their faces, considering it a cultural obstacle. One group raised the notion of renaming them "courtesy masks" to appeal to American altruism.

Health experts, including Dr. Deborah Birx, feared that face masks could induce people to abandon other preventive measures such as social distancing. And some of Trump's political advisers raised a different concern: Would it be a weakness to tell Americans to wear masks at a time when the President was adopting "war" behavior?

The debate took place at coronavirus task force meetings in the Situation Room of the White House, but also in the Oval Office, where Trump seemed not to be enthusiastic about telling people to cover their faces and also informed them to advisers that he would not be seen in public wearing a mask.

“That is really being discussed very actively. We actively discussed it today in the working group and I can assure you that tomorrow it will be on the agenda, ”Fauci, the country's leading infectious disease expert, told CNN in early April. "Given the fact that we know that asymptomatic people clearly transmit the infection, it just makes sense that it's not a bad idea to do that," he added.

Masks are politicized

At one point, the debate came to the fore during a coronavirus task force briefing, when Birx, who had argued privately against a recommendation for the use of masks, warned of having a “false sense of security that this mask protects you exclusively from infection ”.

A day later, Trump announced - reluctantly, according to people familiar with the matter - the new CDC recommendations for masks. But it was clear from the moment the president said he would not adopt the use of masks that the debate on its use was far from over.

"Wearing a face mask while greeting presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens, I don't know," said Trump. "Somehow, I don't see it for myself," he insisted.

And, apparently, the matter was also not considered by many of the president's supporters, who interpreted the president's refusal to wear a mask as a sign that appearing in public with his face covered was a sign of weakness.

Over the course of April, May, and June, Trump did little to combat that impression. Instead, he took advantage of a new culture war and mocked his rival Joe Biden for wearing a face mask when he came out on Memorial Day to put on a flower crown.

• LOOK: The psychology behind some people not wearing face masks

“It is as if his entire face is covered. It is as if he had put a backpack over his face, ”Trump told The Wall Street Journal.

Privately, Trump told his aides that wearing a mask would send a terrible message, as he tried to project momentum in the fight against the virus and the reopening of the economy. The president was also concerned that images of him in a mask were reused by his political rivals to accuse him of cowering in the face of the crisis.

Although his campaign produced skins with the slogan "Keep America Great", the staff was never sure whether Trump would authorize their sale, and these products never appeared in the online campaign store.

When Trump first left the White House to visit a Honeywell factory in Arizona that was producing respirators, he briefly put on a mask behind the scenes, but it seemed awkward and an executive told him he didn't need to wear it.

Later, when he visited a Ford plant in Michigan, where the use of masks was mandatory, the company president encouraged Trump to put on a mask and did it briefly. But then he took it off and told reporters that he "did not want to give the press the pleasure of seeing him."

The White House insisted that since Trump was regularly screened - like everyone else around him - then he didn't need a mask, although the Abbott exams used by the White House showed high rates. of false negatives.

Trump's public reluctance on the issue also seemed to cause confusion among his supporters about whether it was really necessary to wear a mask: A national Quinnipiac University poll in mid-May found that only 40% of Republicans said they should all wearing masks in public, compared to 64% overall.

Those numbers have improved over time, but the latest polls continue to show a partisan divide in the use of masks. A Pew Research Center poll in mid-June showed that 52% of Republicans said that masks should be worn most of the time, compared to 86% of Democrats.

However, as the country experiences a further increase in cases, it has become increasingly clear that many Republicans have decided that a more widespread use of masks is necessary.

The Republican Party on the masks

Over the past week, senior Republican officials and conservative members of the media - including those the president is watching closely - have abruptly turned to recommending masks and, in some cases, demanding them. Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued a statewide order Thursday requiring citizens to wear masks in public. Vice President Mike Pence, whose unmasked visit to the Mayo Clinic became a symbol of the White House's laid-back demeanor, began regularly using a navy-blue one with the presidential seal.

The sudden acceptance of masks, even by those politicians who once framed the issue as a personal choice, has increased pressure on Trump to back facial protection more strongly, according to several sources with knowledge of the discussions.

"There is more talk of wearing masks as a front-line defense," said one person involved in the discussions, adding that a variety of views are being shared and that the White House has yet to decide on an approach.

• LOOK: How to wear a face mask? We answer all your questions

Meanwhile, senior Republican members of Congress have advocated masks in a much more aggressive way than Trump in recent days. Representative Liz Cheney, Republican No. 3 in the House, posted a photo of her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, in which he appears wearing a blue surgical mask under a cowboy hat. "#Realmenwearmasks" (which in Spanish translates # LosHombresDeVerdadUsanMáscaras), wrote Cheney.

Additionally, a top Republican aide said they are considering the masks as a key factor in preventing states from closing again. Medical experts and members of the task force have emphasized the importance of the masks for White House officials recently, hoping they agree to amplify the message, sources familiar with the talks said.

Although Trump still refuses to wear a mask in public, he has changed his tone a bit, and had a more favorable attitude towards masks during an interview with FOX Business Network, in which he acknowledged that he has used this protection where social distancing it is impossible.

"I am in favor of masks," said Trump. "I think the masks are good," he completed.

Still, full acceptance of the masks could be politically difficult for Trump, who has repeatedly mocked his 2020 rival Joe Biden for wearing a mask in public and who has also characterized facial coatings as a sign of weakness.

• READ: What are the most effective methods to prevent transmission of the new coronavirus?

People with insight into the White House thinking say Trump aides hope to overcome the political aspect of face masks and rethink their use as a real concern for public health and safety, a high demand for a president who has seemed stoking the political and cultural divisions of the masks for months.

Trump still represents resistance

It is still unclear to what extent the President will take a leadership role in encouraging the use of masks. In an appearance last Thursday to promote positive employment numbers, Trump only briefly mentioned facial covers in a list of best practices to stop the spread of covid-19.

But some of Trump's top advisers have begun to rethink the matter as a personal responsibility, hoping to put the burden on individuals to contain the virus and, by extension, speed up the reopening. At public events, officials have argued that the recent spikes in the cases are due to the inability of people to adhere to social distancing guidelines and to comply with recommendations on the use of masks, and not due to the premature suspension of confinement orders that Trump so motivated.

"It really isn't about reopening," Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union" program, defending the White House incentive to lift restrictions in the states. where infection rates have increased. Azar affirmed that the fault lies "in what are our behaviors within that".

"If we act irresponsibly, we do not distance ourselves socially, we do not use facial protection in places where we cannot distance ourselves socially, if we do not practice adequate personal hygiene, we will see the spread of the disease," he said.

This Sunday, Pence also tried to focus on Americans' responsibility for wearing masks, and not on the reopens the White House wanted.

"Younger Americans have flocked in ways that may have ignored the guidelines we gave at the federal level for all phases of reopening," he said on CBS.

• READ: Young people are organizing coronavirus parties and pay the first person who becomes infected, says an official

But the assistants' drive for individual responsibility seems complicated by Trump's own behavior as the pandemic continues. After convening political events in Oklahoma and Arizona - where social distancing was actively discouraged, the wearing of masks was absent, and people became ill afterward - Trump led an event at Mount Rushmore on Friday that brought 7,500 people to a stadium where distancing was impossible and not everyone covered their faces.

Even when Trump has finally started encouraging people to wear masks, even if he doesn't, masters son Donald Trump Jr. is actively raising doubts about the effectiveness of the masks against the coronavirus.

On Facebook, Trump Jr. posted a picture of a lab where scientists worked in certain hazardous material suits known as positive pressure suits. The text in the image says: “This is what virologists use to protect themselves from a virus. However, don't worry. Your scarf will probably work, too. ”

Alex Marquardt, Jeremy Diamond and Kristen Holmes, all from CNN, contributed to this report.

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