President Donald Trump said Thursday he’d finally overcome his aversion to wearing masks against the coronavirus — yet he didn’t want be photographed.

Touring a Ford auto factory in Ypsilanti, Michigan, where workers have converted to building respirators and other medical equipment for fighting COVID-19, Trump held up a mask and declared he’d covered his face earlier.

“I had one on before. I wore one in this back area but I didn’t want to give the press the pleasure of seeing it,” he told reporters and photographers covering his visit.

Nearly everyone at the Ford factory was wearing a face covering, in line with company policy and government recommendations on curtailing the highly contagious virus.

In a statement from the auto giant, it said that company chairman Bill Ford “encouraged President Trump to wear a mask when he arrived. He wore a mask during a private viewing of three Ford GTs from over the years. The President later removed the mask for the remainder of the visit.”

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Trump, pushing to get Americans to put the pandemic behind them and reopen the faltering economy, has never worn a mask in public. He previously has said that he doesn’t consider the look fitting his perception of himself as a world leader.

On Thursday, he said the mask “was very nice, it looked very nice.”

Skepticism about the need for masks is rife among right-wing Americans who support Trump.

In more extreme circles, demands by local government or private businesses for the public to wear masks has been interpreted as a conspiracy against constitutional freedoms.

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© Agence France-Presse

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ByAFP