For progressives, masks have become a sign that you take the pandemic seriously and are willing to make a personal sacrifice to save lives. Prominent people who don’t wear them are shamed and dragged on Twitter by lefty accounts. On the right, where the mask is often seen as the symbol of a purported overreaction to the coronavirus, mask promotion is a target of ridicule, a sign that in a deeply polarized America almost anything can be politicized and turned into a token of tribal affiliation…

Visiting the White House, it’s striking how many people don’t wear masks. Very few Secret Service agents have them on. Some days, even the staff member performing temperature checks on reporters doesn’t wear one. In contrast, most, though certainly not all, members of the media wear some kind of face covering while in the press workspace or waiting to cover a presidential event. But very few keep them on during the televised briefings.

Inside the building it is a relatively mask-free zone. At one meeting this week that included chief of staff Mark Meadows and some 20 other White House officials, including Secret Service agents, nobody from the White House was wearing a mask or other face covering.