Pelosi: Trump not wearing a mask is ‘cowardly’

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) accused President Trump of being “cowardly” for not wearing a mask amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, and said she would support a policy to make wearing the face coverings mandatory in public. 

“I totally agree with Joe Biden. As long as we’re faced with this crisis, masks should be mandatory,” Pelosi said Friday on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” referring to the former vice president and presumptive Democratic nominee’s remarks that he would require the use of masks in public if he’s elected president.

“In fact, the reason the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] hasn’t made it mandatory is because they don’t want to embarrass the president, or insult the president, whatever it is,” she continued.

Pelosi singled Trump out for not wearing a mask in public despite health guidelines from his own administration advising people to do so.

“And not wearing a mask himself as an example to the country? How cowardly is that?” she said. “It’s not about protecting yourself, it’s about protecting others.”

The speaker has gone after Trump in increasingly personal terms in recent months, calling him “morbidly obese” earlier this year, in a sign that the already tense relationship between the two has steadily deteriorated.

The remarks come after a series of high profile appearances by Trump where he did not wear masks in crowded arenas.

Health officials have renewed their calls for people to wear masks and take other precautions against the coronavirus in light of a new spike in cases across the country, with more than a dozen states seeing their worst day of coronavirus cases and deaths to date this week.

The White House coronavirus task force held its first press conference in weeks Friday, with Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, urging young people to take precautions even though they are at lesser risk of dying from the illness. 

“A risk for you is not just isolated to you, because if you get infected, you are part — innocently or inadvertently — of propagating a dynamic process of the pandemic,” Fauci said.