The president did not wear a mask. He also encouraged others around him not to do so, mocking those who did. He contracted COVID-19, as did many of his close associates. He expressed no remorse over any of this. He still does not wear a mask.

By contrast, a large majority of Americans, about 74 percent, according to a poll taken this month, are wearing masks to prevent the spread of a deadly pandemic. Most Americans even approve of a national mask mandate. Absent a vaccine, most experts believe wearing masks is one of the most effective ways we can work together to curb the pandemic, and there is evidence that it has saved hundreds of thousands of lives in the United States alone. Many of those who refuse masks — and almost 100 percent of those attending anti-mask rallies — are right-wing nuts for whom resistance to masks is a political statement. One pro-Trump demonstrator attended an anti-mask rally wearing a mask decorated with the words, “Tastes Like Socialism”.

Resistance to the mask is wholly syntonic with American libertarian right-wing ideology. That’s because epidemiologically, your decision to wear a mask protects others more than it protects you. As well, it is a societal project of the kind that doesn’t resonate with such people: if you were the only person in America wearing a mask, your mask wouldn’t help anyone enough to be worth the bother — its effectiveness depends on mass participation. This other-directed, collective project is against everything the far right stands for, and they are correct to identify mask-wearing as a kind of proto-socialism in spirit. For someone like Trump who cannot imagine a perspective outside of his own narcissism, mask-wearing just doesn’t compute: “I just don’t see myself” wearing it, he said in the spring, as if it was a fashion choice. He clearly still feels the same way. Hundreds of thousands of deaths in, the mask is just not him.