Trump Posts Picture of Him Wearing Mask, Calls It ‘Patriotic’

President Donald Trump wears a mask as he visits Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., on July 11, 2020. (Alex Edelman/AFP via Getty Images)

President Donald Trump on Monday posted a photo of himself wearing a mask, saying it is patriotic to wear one as COVID-19 cases remain constant across the United States.

“We are United in our effort to defeat the Invisible China Virus, and many people say that it is Patriotic to wear a face mask when you can’t socially distance,” he wrote on Twitter. “There is nobody more Patriotic than me, your favorite President!”

Trump was seen in public wearing a protective mask when he went to the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center earlier this month.

On Sunday, the president told Fox News that he likely won’t consider a national mandate on masks. “I don’t agree with the statement that if everybody wears a mask everything disappears,” he said.

“Everybody who is saying don’t wear a mask—all of a sudden everybody’s got to wear a mask, and as you know, masks cause problems, too,” Trump added in the interview. “With that being said, I’m a believer in masks. I think masks are good. But I leave it up to the governors.”

It comes after the governors of several populous states issued statewide mandates for people to wear face coverings whenever they go outside and social distancing isn’t possible.

Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), told reporters on Monday: “We could drive this epidemic to the ground” if everyone wore masks for the next four to six weeks. He cited case studies that came to the conclusion that masks are effective at preventing the transmission of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, a novel coronavirus that emerged last year in Wuhan, China, and causes the disease COVID-19.

“[T]he public needs consistent, clear, and appealing messaging that normalizes community masking,” Redfield and other medical officials wrote in the medical journal JAMA. “At this critical juncture when COVID-19 is resurging, broad adoption of cloth face coverings is a civic duty, a small sacrifice reliant on a highly effective low-tech solution that can help turn the tide favorably in national and global efforts against COVID-19.”

According to an analysis from ABC News, 28 states, Washington, and Puerto Rico have statewide mask mandates.