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Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff who complied with President Donald Trump’s efforts to downplay the coronavirus throughout the summer, contracted the virus himself, a senior administration official said Friday night.
Meadows tested positive for the virus Wednesday, the official said, telling a small group of advisers.
A Trump campaign adviser, Nick Trainer, also learned that he has the virus, said a person briefed on his diagnosis.
Meadows’ diagnosis came as the pandemic swept across the United States, averaging more than 100,000 new cases per day over the past week and another record on Friday, with more than 129,000 cases in a single day.
As of Saturday morning, more than 9,830,800 people in the United States had been infected with the coronavirus and at least 236,500 had died. Meadows is just the latest in a string of people connected to the White House who contracted the virus in the past seven weeks, including Trump and the first lady, Melania Trump, half a dozen aides to the president, and five aides to Mr. Pence, including his chief of staff, Marc Short.
At least one event at the White House – a celebration of Trump’s nomination of Justice Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court – is suspected of being a super-broadcaster after more than a dozen attendees, journalists and guests attended. to the event or came into contact with people who tested positive for the virus.
That event took place in the Rose Garden and inside the White House. Trump has spent most of the pandemic downplaying the threat of the virus, and various White House officials have fueled his desire to treat it as a localized threat in Democratic-leaning states. On Tuesday night, Meadows was at Trump’s election party at the White House, which featured several hundred people gathering in the East Room for several hours, many of them without masks as they mingled as they watched the election results. .
The president’s chief of staff was also in contact with a group of aides earlier that day at Trump’s campaign headquarters in Virginia, crammed into a confined space, where he was not wearing a mask when the president greeted workers from the Bell.
During the pandemic, Meadows has encouraged Trump’s desire to downplay the threat of the virus and focus instead on the economy. He dismissed the use of masks in the White House and only used one very sporadically when traveling with the president or during events in the Oval Office.
In the closing days of the presidential campaign, Meadows made unwanted headlines when he acknowledged during a television interview that the government could not “control” the pandemic. Trump’s critics and political rivals seized on the comment as evidence that the administration had given up on fighting the virus.
“We are not going to control the pandemic,” Meadows told Jake Tapper, the host of “State of the Union” on CNN. “We are going to control the fact that we receive vaccines, therapies and other areas of mitigation.” – New York Times
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