President Donald Trump blasted Democrats for new lockdowns across the country spurred by COVID-19, but predicted that the closures will be lifted right after the November election.
“The country has to open,” Trump said during an interview that aired Wednesday evening on Fox News. “We did the right thing. We closed it down. We saved millions of lives. Now we’re opening it up. And I think the Democrats are actually doing it largely for political reasons.”
“I really believe the Democrats are doing this for a political reason. If you close down California — you know, it’s a big state — you close down some of these places, it’s not going to show,” he said. “Watch. On November 4, everything will open up.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, recently ordered another lockdown across the nation’s most populous state, which has recorded 413,579 confirmed COVID-19 cases by Wednesday. There have been 8,050 deaths in the state, according to the Johns Hopkins Center for System Sciences and Engineering.
Newsom’s most recent lockdown closed bars and restaurants without outdoor dining, and even laid out exactly what bars and restaurants can sell.
“California says chicken wings, cheese sticks, fried calamari and french fries are not considered meals as it cracks down on outdoor restaurants that are offering drinks without food as the state battles a surge in COVID-19 cases,” the Daily Mail reported. “The state’s Alcoholic Beverage Control agency has issued guidelines on what constitutes as a ‘meal’ after Governor Gavin Newsom reversed reopening measures last month by ordering all bars to shut.”
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, also a Democrat, has also tightened outdoor dining rules that will force bars to sell more food in order to sell alcohol.
“Let’s be clear,” Cuomo wrote Tuesday on Twitter. “Outdoor dining is now permitted statewide. Outside drinking is not.”
“[L]ast week, Cuomo tightened the rules to force bars and restaurants to serve food with drinks, in an apparent attempt to circumvent the social distancing problems. The bars responded with $1 or 50-cent menus, offering items like ‘Cuomo chips’ in a bowl or peanuts to meet the new rules but still draw in customers,” The Mail reported.
On masks, Trump said “I don’t feel comfortable” wearing a mask while on stage, but said he was fine when he visited troops at Walter Reed Hospital recently. He added, “My attitude is it probably helps, so give it a shot.”
The New England Journal of Medicine said on May 20:
We know that wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers little, if any, protection from infection. Public health authorities define a significant exposure to Covid-19 as face-to-face contact within 6 feet with a patient with symptomatic Covid-19 that is sustained for at least a few minutes (and some say more than 10 minutes or even 30 minutes). The chance of catching Covid-19 from a passing interaction in a public space is therefore minimal. In many cases, the desire for widespread masking is a reflexive reaction to anxiety over the pandemic.