Opinion | America’s polarisation over face masks a symptom of deeper culture war

Name: In first Covid-19 presser in months, Trump shifts tone and reverses stance on masks
Uploaded: 2020-07-28T22:00:14.000Z
Duration: 2 min
Description: In first Covid-19 presser in months, Trump shifts tone and reverses stance on masks

The pandemic and the protests of recent months should serve as a reminder of a simple truth: a mask is just a mask. What matters for democracy is not whether people cover their faces in public, but which people do so and why

Reading Time:3 minutes

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US President Donald Trump wears a face mask during a visit to the Walter Reed National Military Medical Centre in Bethesda, Maryland, on July 11. Trump has recently backtracked and expressed support for wearing masks after months of suggesting that they were a political statement against him. Photo: AP

Hugo Drochon

Published: 6:00am, 29 Jul 2020Updated: 7:02am, 29 Jul 2020

For the past month, the United States has regularly broken its daily record for new Covid-19 cases, registering more than 4.2 million cases overall and nearly 150,000 deaths. Although other developed countries seem to be containing the spread, the US has gone in the opposite direction: Arizona has as many cases as the entire European Union, which has 60 times the population.

What went wrong? Part of the answer is certain states reopened too soon. California, an early success story, experienced a 90 per cent increase in cases in recent weeks and has reimposed some lockdown measures. Florida’s daily count of new cases – around 5,000 in the last week of June – had more than doubled a month later.

Perhaps the biggest culprit is the deep division over face masks, which have become another front in the US culture war. A recent Pew survey found only 49 per cent of conservative Republicans said they wore a face mask most of the time in the past month; that figure was 83 per cent among liberal Democrats.

America’s polarisation over face masks began at the top. Since the onset of the pandemic, US President Donald Trump has steadfastly refused to wear one in public, mocking a reporter who refused to remove his as being “politically correct”. Many Republican officials, including state governors such as Florida’s Ron DeSantis, followed Trump’s lead.

During his now-infamous Tulsa rally in June, masks were few and far between. Only in late July – with his poll numbers plummeting and massive outbreaks raging in states he must win to be re-elected – did Trump endorse wearing masks.

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In first Covid-19 presser in months, Trump shifts tone and reverses stance on masks

By contrast, Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, appears regularly in public with a mask and adheres to social distancing guidelines. Biden has said that if he were in Trump’s place, he would “do everything possible to make it required that people had to wear masks in public.”

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