WAUKESHA, Wis. — President Donald Trump assured supporters packed shoulder to shoulder at weekend rallies that “we’re rounding the turn” on the coronavirus and mocked challenger Joe Biden for raising alarms about the pandemic, despite surging cases around the country and more positive infections at the White House.
Trump’s remarks came Saturday, hours before the White House announced that a top aide to Vice President Mike Pence had tested positive for the virus. Pence has been in close contact with the adviser, the White House said, but still planned to keep traveling and holding rallies around the country.
The revelation of another high-ranking administration official testing positive for the virus coupled with the administration’s decision to continue business as usual punctuated a day that marked the starkly different approaches that Trump and Biden are taking to campaigning in the age of the novel coronavirus.
Pence’s office confirmed late Saturday that his chief of staff, Marc Short, had tested positive — the public announcement coming just as Trump was wrapping up a day of big rallies in North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin, three battleground states that will have enormous impact on deciding the Nov. 3 election.
Trump commented on Short early Sunday after his plane landed at Joint Base Andrews, outside Washington. “I did hear about it just now,” he said. “And I think he’s quarantining. Yeah. I did hear about it. He’s going to be fine. But he’s quarantining.”
Pence is considered a “close contact” under Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines, but will continue to campaign, his spokesman said. “In consultation with the White House Medical Unit, the Vice President will maintain his schedule in accordance with the CDC guidelines for essential personnel,” Pence spokesman Devin O’Malley said. The guidelines require that essential workers exposed to someone with the coronavirus closely monitor for symptoms of COVID-19 and wear a mask whenever around other people.
O’Malley added that Pence and his wife, Karen Pence, both tested negative for the virus on Saturday “and remain in good health.” Pence, who held campaign events in Florida on Saturday, is set to campaign in North Carolina on Sunday.
The revelation bookended a day in which Biden and Trump demonstrated remarkably different attitudes about what they saw as safe behavior in the homestretch of a campaign that, as with all aspects of American life, has been upended by the pandemic.
“We don’t want to become superspreaders,” Biden told supporters at a “drive-in” rally Saturday in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, picking up a term that has been used to describe the Rose Garden event in late September in which Trump announced his latest Supreme Court nominee.
More than two dozen people linked to the White House have contracted COVID-19 since that gathering, as have campaign aides. Trump spent more than three days hospitalized at Walter Reed Military Medical Center after becoming stricken.
Biden pressed his case that Trump was showing dangerous indifference to the surging virus on a day he looked to boost his candidacy with the star power of rock legend Jon Bon Jovi, who performed before Biden took the stage at a second drive-in rally in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania.
Meanwhile, in Lumberton, North Carolina, his tongue firmly in cheek, Trump called Biden “an inspiring guy” for raising alarm about the pandemic. The president said that he watched Biden’s Bucks County rally as he flew to North Carolina and sarcastically observed that it appeared attendees, who were in their cars, weren’t properly socially distancing.