On Monday’s “Morning Joe,” host Joe Scarborough said that the mask mandate for attendees sitting behind President Trump at his Sunday rally was a selfish act that benefitted him, not his supporters.
Sunday’s rally was held in Henderson, Nevada just outside of Las Vegas.
Co-host Mika Brzezinski explained, “It was the first time supporters [were] indoors since his Tulsa rally on June 20th, an event that health experts later blamed for a surge in local coronavirus cases. Much like the president’s other recent campaign events, the crowd was packed in and few people wore masks, but this time the supporters standing directly behind the president — whose faces would end up on television — they were mandated to wear masks.”
“Oh, wait a second. Hold on a second. Hold on, hold on,” cut in Scarborough in a deadpan. “So you’re saying the people behind Donald Trump were required to wear masks, but the people who were far from Donald Trump weren’t. That’s fascinating. I wonder why that is? Could that be because Donald Trump cares about Donald Trump and not you?”
Footage from the rally showed a bleacher full of attendees with masks, though several had pulled them down.
“I’m on a stage and it’s very far away,” Trump told a reporter from The Las Vegas Review Journal. “And so I’m not at all concerned.”
Brzezinksi reminded viewers that the rally was in defiance of state directives limiting gatherings of 50 people or more. Clark County, where Henderson is located, has the highest number of COVID-19 cases and deaths in Nevada by far — 62,000 of the state’s 73,000 cases alone. Over 190,000 people in the United States have died from the coronavirus.
The MSNBC morning show has been critical of Trump and his handling of the coronavirus for months. Last week, Scarborough fumed that new reporting from Bob Woodward that the president knowingly downplayed the threat of the virus amounted to lies to the American people and their families.
Watch the “Morning Joe” segment above via MSNBC.
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