But Trump’s willingness to turn personally to this issue is far from clear. While he likens himself to “Lone Ranger” on one of several occasions he wears a mask personally, he has not used a strong social media platform to encourage his supporters to do the same. And in a meeting with advisers, Trump has stated that heavier calls to wear a mask might send the wrong message as he tries to move away from the virus.

The debate about the mask has come to summarize federal efforts that are characterized by repeated reversals, conflicting recommendations, low stock and competing internal interests which lead to chaotic messages and negative health outcomes.

The careless response has caused great damage to the President’s political views – with his reluctance to mask only deepening the impression that Trump does not take the pandemic seriously. Many of Trump’s closest allies now say privately that wearing a mask in public can help him appear more in tune with the crisis. They fear his failure to do so – and to encourage his supporters to follow suit – could threaten the economic recovery Trump relied on to re-elect his election, because the plague could further roll back the reopening he desperately needed to have a chance in November.

The Trump administration’s decision in the earliest days of the pandemic to recommend the use of masks has emerged as a critical misstep in a much-maligned national response. Even when it became clear that the asymptomatic spread caused the virus to spread quickly and quietly, a joint national effort to convince Americans that wearing a mask could prevent transmission was never actually installed.

Administration public health experts have defended their actions, saying it was necessary to prevent the escape of equipment that was in short supply.

“I don’t regret that,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, testified at the Congress last week. “At that time, there was a lack of equipment needed by our health care providers – who put themselves every day in danger of caring for people who are sick. We don’t want to divert masks and PPE from them, to be used by people.”

But only now, months into a crisis that shows no signs of waning, high-ranking White House officials and the President’s allies are beginning to realize that as more Americans begin to wear masks, the plague could be slowed.

White House officials say their message this week will shift to reassuring Americans that the virus will not subside anytime soon – but steps like wearing a mask can help hold it back because the country is learning to live with it.

“While there is an outbreak and we are inclined to the needs of the outbreak, we have the infrastructure to deal with it,” said an official in a preview of the push for new messages.

However, after months of refusing to wear it himself, demeaning his election rivals for appearing closed in public and triggering a cultural reaction to its use, it is unclear whether the President’s efforts to convince people to cover their faces will prove effective.

Appearing on April 3, Friday afternoon, Trump announced the US Centers for Disease Control urging Americans to wear masks when they leave home. But he immediately stated he would not wear it himself. Instead of encouraging Americans to heed recommendations, he suggests they do what they want.

“With a mask, that would be a completely voluntary thing,” the president said. “You can do it. You don’t have to do it. I choose not to do it.”

His announcement came after days of heated task force meetings where officials argued in the Situation Room about whether to back down and order Americans to cover up. At the Oval Office, Trump has expressed deep skepticism that every American will wear a mask – and worry that advising them will cause panic.

Disparaging worries

In the earliest days of this pandemic, recommending masks to the general public was not a topic of discussion among White House officials.

An exception is Matt Pottinger, deputy national security advisor who has set the policy of the President of Asia. A Wall Street Journal reporter based in China, where she covered the SARS outbreak, Pottinger once lived in a country where wearing a mask had long been routine and where, when coronaviruses began to spread, the virus spread everywhere.

According to senior government officials and former current officials, Pottinger and several members of the National Security Council recommended to other members of the task force in February that wearing a mask was one of the recommendations for America when the virus began to spread in the United States.

Presenting data from South Korea and Japan that suggest widespread use of masks can help slow the spread of the disease, Pottinger and members of the NSC team of weapons of mass destruction have argued that similar advice should be offered to Americans.

Underlying internal back and forth is the lack of medical-level masks for frontline hospital workers, which the state and federal government are struggling to resolve through patchy shipments and appeals to the private sector. Some White House officials are concerned that a blanket recommendation for Americans to use face masks can cause a rush to medical masks that are urgently needed, exacerbating an already severe situation for hospital workers and first responders.

“The government wants the mask to go to health professionals and does not want to panic and (have) people buy the masks needed for the front lines,” said a former administration official who was present for the discussion. “That is part of the justification.”

However, that did not prevent Pottinger from wearing his own mask at the White House, and encouraged others at NSC to do the same. At one point in March – while the government still recommended not to wear masks – councilors accepted shipments of blue surgical masks from Taiwan for use at the White House.

At the time, the CDC said on its website that “it does not recommend that people who wear facial masks properly protect themselves from respiratory diseases, including Covid-19.”

Administration officials said that Americans do not go out to buy masks: “There is no need for Americans to go and buy masks,” Pence said when appearing on CNN on March 1. In late February, General Surgeon Jerome Adams tweeted: “Seriously people – STOP PURCHASING MASKERS! They are NOT effective in preventing the general public from catching #Coronavirus.”

In other cases, some administration officials went further by suggesting that wearing a mask could increase the risk of infection for the wearer.

“You can increase your risk of getting (coronavirus) by wearing a mask if you are not a health care provider,” Adams said during an interview on Fox & Friends on March 2. “People who don’t know how to use it properly tend to touch their faces a lot and can actually increase the spread of the corona virus.”

At the end of March, more and more evidence began to emerge that showed the spread of asymptomatic viruses causing cases to surge across the country. Senior officials at the CDC told the White House that stronger guidelines – including new recommendations about masks – are needed to prevent the virus from spreading among asymptomatic people, according to people familiar with internal discussions.

The agency sent a memo to the White House outlining guidelines recommended in the last week of March, people familiar with the document said. They made it clear that cloth face coverings – not medical grade masks – were recommended.

But after accepting them, some Trump advisers warned that national recommendations might have negative side effects and advocate something more limited in scope, potentially only in the hardest hit areas.

Opinion among officials is divided. Some people wonder whether people in the United States – unlike citizens of Asian countries, where wearing masks are common – will bow to covering their faces, perceiving it as a cultural barrier. One group raised the idea of ​​changing their name to a “mask of decency” to attract American altruism.

Health experts, including Dr. Deborah Birx, the mask that is feared can put people to sleep so as to ignore other preventive measures such as social exclusion. And some of Trump’s political advisers raised different concerns: Does asking Americans to wear masks convey weaknesses when the President adopts “wartime” mien?

The debate took place during a coronavirus task force meeting in the White House Situation Room, but also in the Oval Office, where Trump seemed unenthusiastic about telling Americans to cover their faces and telling advisers that he would not be seen wearing them in public.

“That is being discussed very actively. We are discussing it actively today in the task force and I can assure you, it will be on the agenda tomorrow,” Fauci, a nation contagious disease expert, told CNN in early April. “Given the fact that we know that people without symptoms clearly transmit the infection, it only makes sense that it’s not a bad idea to do that.”

Mask politicized

At one point, the debate extended to public view during the briefing of the public task force when Birx, who had been arguing against the mask’s recommendations in private, warned to get a “false sense of security that the mask protects you exclusively from infection.”

A day later, Trump appeared – reluctantly, according to people familiar with the matter – to announce a new CDC recommendation on masks. But it has been clear since he said he would not adopt in the guide itself that the debate about the mask is far from before.

“Wearing a mask when I greet the president, prime minister, dictator, king, queen – I don’t know,” Trump said. “Somehow, I didn’t see it myself.”

Apparently, none of Trump’s supporters, who took the President’s refusal to wear a mask as a sign that appearing in public with a closed face is a sign of weakness.

During April, May and June, Trump did little to counter this impression and instead exploited a new cultural war, mocking his rival Joe Biden for wearing a mask when he appeared on Remembrance Day to lay a bouquet of flowers.

Personally, Trump told his aides that wearing a mask would send a terrible message when he tried to project momentum in fighting the virus and reopening the economy. He was also worried that photographs of him in the mask would be reused by his political opponents to accuse him of curling up with a scourge.

While his campaign produced a mask bearing the slogan “Keep America Great,” the aide was never convinced Trump would sign their sales to the public and they didn’t appear in the campaign’s online store.

When Trump emerged from the White House for the first time for a visit to the Honeywell factory in Arizona that produced respirators, he briefly wore a mask backstage but looked uncomfortable and was told by an executive that he didn’t need to wear one.

Later, when he visited the Ford factory in Michigan where a mask was needed, he was encouraged to wear a mask by the president of the automaker and wear it briefly with a presidential stamp. But then he deleted it, telling reporters that he “didn’t want to give the press happy to see it.”

The White House insists that because Trump is tested regularly – like everyone who comes close to him – he doesn’t need to wear a mask, even though the Abbott tests used by the White House have shown high levels of false negatives.

However, when a new wave of cases hit the country, it became increasingly clear that many Republicans had decided that a fuller hug to wear a mask was needed.

GOP about faces in masks

Over the past week, high-ranking Republican officials and conservative media members – including those closely watched by the President – have suddenly turned towards recommending masks, and in some cases needing them. Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued mandatory statewide orders on Thursday requiring Texas citizens to wear masks in public. Vice President Mike Pence, whose mask-free visit to the Mayo Clinic in May turned into a symbol of the White House’s relaxed manner, has begun regularly wearing a navy blue number with a presidential stamp.

The sudden embrace of masks even by politicians who have trapped the issue as a personal choice has added to Trump’s pressure to support the use of stronger masks, according to sources with knowledge of the discussion.

“There is more talk about the use of masks as a frontline defense,” said one person involved in the discussion, adding there were various views shared and that the White House had not approached.

“#realmenwearmasks,” he wrote.

A leading GOP aide said they saw the mask as a key to preventing the country from closing back. Medical experts and task force members have stressed the importance of masks for White House officials recently, hoping they would agree to strengthen the message, people familiar with the conversation said.

While Trump continues to refuse to wear a mask in public, he somewhat changes his tone, appearing to be more preferred than the mask during a recent FOX Business Network interview and admits that he wore it on occasions where social distance is not possible.

“I’m all for the mask,” Trump said. “I think the mask is good.”

However, the complete embrace of a mask can prove to be politically difficult for Trump, who has repeatedly taunted his 2020 rival Joe Biden for wearing a mask in public and which has characterized the faceplate as a sign of weakness.

People familiar with White House thinking say Trump’s aides hope to move beyond the political aspects of wearing masks and reframe them as a real problem for public health and safety, a high order for a President who seems to trigger political divisions and mask culture. wear for months.

Trump remains

How much the President will take a leadership role in encouraging the use of masks remains unclear. In Thursday’s appearance to mention positive employment figures, he only briefly mentioned face covering in the list of best practices for stopping the spread of Covid.

But some Trump aides are beginning to reframe the problem as one of personal responsibility, hoping to place responsibility on individuals to contain the virus – and, by extension, speeding reopening. In public appearances, officials argue that the recent surge in cases is due to the failure of people to comply with social distance guidelines or mask recommendations – and not premature retraction of orders to stay at home which Trump strongly supports.

“This is really not about reopening,” Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar said Sunday on CNN “State of the Union,” defending the White House’s push to lift restrictions in countries where infection rates have increased. Azar claims the culprit is “what our behavior is in it.”

“If we act irresponsibly, don’t be social distance, don’t use face masks in settings where we can’t be social distance, if we don’t practice appropriate personal hygiene, we will see the spread of disease,” he said.

Pence on Sunday also tried to focus on the responsibility of Americans to wear masks – not on the reopening the White House wants.

“Younger Americans have gathered in a way that might disregard the guidelines we provide at the federal level for all reopening phases,” he said on CBS.

But the helper’s push for individual responsibility seems complicated by Trump’s own behavior as the pandemic continues to rage. After holding political events in Oklahoma and Arizona – where active social distance is not permitted, wearing masks are absent and people are getting sick – Trump made headlines on Mount Rushmore on Friday which took 7,500 people to a stadium in where distance proved impossible and not everyone covered their faces.

Even when Trump finally started pushing people to wear masks, even though he didn’t wear them himself, his son Donald Trump Jr. actively spreading doubts about the effectiveness of the mask against the corona virus.

On Facebook, Trump Jr. posted a picture of a lab where scientists work in certain hazmat suits known as positive pressure suits. The text in the picture says: “This is what the virologist uses to protect himself from the virus. However, don’t worry. Your bandana might function too.”