This wasn’t just the individual choices of attendees, but actively encouraged by the Trump administration, which only reluctantly began urging mask use last month but is unwilling to let go of its insistence that it is also a matter of personal “choice.” This wackadoodle conception of liberty as intransigence and contrarianism at all costs is still part of the administration’s inconsistent messaging. As the New York Times noted, the intro video for the final night of RNC warned that Democrats are “telling you what to wear.”

Advertisement

“When you look at the way the president has handled the pandemic, it has basically been one evasion after another evasion,” Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security infectious disease expert Dr. Amesh Adalja told the Post. “And when you see this type of event and the way he is acting and the way he is allowing his supporters to act, it cements the fact that they have never taken this outbreak seriously from the beginning.”

While one could chalk this all up to incompetence—and that’s certainly a part of it!—the recklessness on display is also deliberate, toxic disregard for consequences. According to CNN, an anonymous senior White House official justified the nonexistent safeguards at Trump’s speech by saying, “Everybody is going to catch this thing eventually.”

Advertisement