Trump defends hosting White House holiday parties during pandemic

Jenna Ellis, a Trump campaign legal adviser, was pictured maskless at one of the gatherings and later tested positive for Covid

At a vaccine event on Tuesday, the president defended the White House’s decision to maintain a packed calendar of holiday parties during the pandemic, even as medical authorities discourage such gatherings amid Covid’s continued devastation.

“They’re Christmas parties and, frankly, we’ve reduced the number very substantially as you know,” Mr Trump told reporters on Tuesday. “And I see a lot of people at the parties wearing masks and I would say that I look out at the audience at those parties and we have a lot of people wearing masks and I think that’s a good thing.”

Jenna Ellis, a Trump campaign legal adviser, recently tested positive for the virus, The Hill reported on Tuesday, and had travelled recently with the president’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who was hospitalised on Monday with the disease. Ms Ellis was pictured at a White House holiday party without a mask.

The White House reportedly plans a schedule of at least 20 holiday parties, and hasn’t required guests to wear masks, although a spokesperson told The New York Times they are encouraging mask use and physical distancing.

Medical experts have strongly encouraged Americans to hold off on in-person gatherings over the holidays in an effort to stem the unrelenting, exponential growth of the virus around the country, which last week broke records yet again, this time for most deaths in a seven-day period, with 2,249 people succumbing to the virus.

“My concerns,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, told CNN on Monday, "are the same thing of the concerns that I had about Thanksgiving, only this may be even more compounded because it’s a longer holiday.”

The city of Washington, D.C., also recently put limits on indoor gatherings and indoor dining, although those don’t apply at the White House because it is federal property.

Even if they did, it seems unlikely the White House would follow them. It has adopted a cavalier approach to coronavirus on its premises, with top officials regularly ignoring their own government’s health directives and not wearing masks.

At least 40 members of the Trump administration and inner circle, including the president and numerous top advisers, have caught coronavirus.