President Donald Trump is attacking Joe Biden for calling on governors to mandate that all Americans wear masks for the next three months.
Trump claimed Biden has been wrong about the coronavirus pandemic at every turn, “ignoring the scientific evidence and putting left-wing politics before facts and evidence.” Trump went on to say that Biden was advocating for the president to use executive power to institute a nationwide mask mandate and that Biden was in favor of “locking all Americans in their basements for months on end.”
“To Joe, I would say stop playing politics with the virus,” the Republican president said at a White House press briefing.
Biden did not, in fact, directly call for an executive order, but he did at an earlier campaign event call for the institution of “a mask mandate nationwide, starting immediately.” Biden, however, said that it should be left up to the governors to make mask-wearing mandatory.
Trump spent the early months of the pandemic not wearing a mask during public appearances. Trump first wore a mask in public about a month ago, during a visit to a military hospital, although he has expressed support for them.
On Thursday, he said it’s patriotic for Americans to wear masks, but he added, “maybe they’re great, and maybe they’re just good. Maybe they’re not so good.”
Biden, at his earlier event, said all Americans should wear masks, citing health experts’ predictions that it could save 40,000 lives from the coronavirus over the next three months. The Democratic presidential candidate also responded to those who push back against such mandates.
“This is America. Be a patriot,” he said. “Protect your fellow citizens. Step up. Do the right thing.”
The back-and-forth marked a new line of attack from Trump, who is trailing Biden significantly in most nationwide polls — just like Trump did with Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Biden has made what he says is Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic — which has now caused the deaths of at least 167,000 people in the United States — a centerpiece of his attacks on the president.
While Trump has charged that if Biden were elected he would cause everything from a stock market crash to a surge of crime in the suburbs, he has largely avoided taking Biden on when it comes to the pandemic, choosing instead to deflect blame for the deaths and economic damage.
On Wednesday, when the U.S. reported 1,499 new coronavirus deaths, the highest number in a day since May, Trump pushed for schools and businesses to continue opening and called for college football to go on.
On Thursday, he again dismissed critics who say he was too slow to react to the pandemic in the U.S., claiming on Fox Business Network that “nobody blames me.”
“Look, we got hit by the China plague, and we’re not going to forget it,” he said, “We got hit by the China plague.”
The Associated Press contributed to this article