Amid an uptick in coronavirus cases, Republican presidential candidates are taking aim at limited, local returns to masking requirements -- using those moves as an opening to warn against broader restrictions.
In recent days, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has lambasted front-runner Donald Trump's handling of the pandemic's early stages. The former president, meanwhile, is, pledging to cut federal funding for entities such as schools and airlines that mandate masks or vaccines.
The renewed focus on Covid-19 comes after a late-summer rise in hospitalizations. The US Food and Drug Administration gave the green light Monday to updated Covid-19 vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech.
Trump, who was in office for the first 10 months of the pandemic, claimed at a Friday rally in South Dakota that Democrats were trying to "restart the Covid hysteria" ahead of the 2024 election.
"I said, 'What's going on?'" the former president told the Rapid City audience, referring to reports about the potential return of masking. "Oh, that's right, there's an election coming up. Now these guys, they'll do anything."
His remarks echoed a late-August video by Trump on his Truth Social platform, in which he claimed that "left-wing lunatics" were seeking a return to Covid-19 restrictions in order to justify policies such as mail-in voting in the 2024 election.
Those claims are not matched by any widespread nationwide effort by Democrats.
After first lady Jill Biden tested positive for Covid-19 last week, President Joe Biden has at times worn a mask while indoors. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the president would be "masking while indoors and around people" and would remove his mask "when sufficiently distanced from others indoors and while outside as well."
However, Democratic leaders have not pushed for a return to any of the mandates or restrictions that were in place early in the pandemic, leaving the issue to local officials. An Axios-Ipsos poll from last month found that just 2% of Americans viewed coronavirus and Covid-19 as the top public health issue facing the country.
In some places, though, mask mandates have returned -- and several 2024 Republican hopefuls have seized on those instances.
After a Maryland school said it would require third graders to wear masks for 10 days after at least three students tested positive for Covid-19, Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and US ambassador to the United Nations, described the decision as a violation of parents' rights.
"The parents get to make these decisions," she told Fox News. "The parents can decide whether they want their children to go to school when there's a possible outbreak or not, but don't sit there and mask them back up. We're already dealing with kids dealing with stress and depression and anxiety, and these younger kids -- they have to see their teachers' faces."
Many Republican contenders have been vocal in recent weeks about their opposition to returning to any early-pandemic public safety measures.
Tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who in 2020 tweeted that a proposal by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders to deliver masks to all Americans "strikes me as a sensible idea," and that "wearing a mask = personal responsibility," told the conservative outlet The Daily Signal that he opposes any mask mandates.
"No mask mandates," he said. "No vaccine mandates. No lockdown ever again."
South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott said last week on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, that he would "stand against mandates, lockdowns, and school closures."
"One of the things I've said all along is we should never have had mandates in this country for Covid," Scott said in New Hampshire last week, acknowledging that the US seems to be "sitting on the precipice of another Covid outbreak."
Trump vs. DeSantis
The most significant clash over Covid-19 policies, though, could pit Trump, who has for months led all polls of the 2024 GOP race, and DeSantis, who has consistently placed second in those polls.
While Trump skipped the first GOP debate in Milwaukee last month, DeSantis needled his administration's handling of the pandemic.
"Why are we in this mess? Part of it and a major reason is because [of] how this federal government handled COVID-19, by locking down this economy," DeSantis said onstage.
Trump for months has criticized DeSantis' handling of the pandemic. And DeSantis -- who built his national image on bucking the trend of governors imposing lengthy mask mandates, business closures and more -- has in recent days been aggressively firing back at the former president.
On Fox News last week, DeSantis criticized Trump for his reliance while in the White House on the guidance of Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the time.
"At the end of the day, the leader's got to take responsibility. I think it was pretty clear, early on in Covid, that Fauci was misfiring. He was elevated to where his pronouncements were basically viewed as gospel around the country, and we rejected that," DeSantis said.
The Florida governor defended himself from the former president's claims that DeSantis followed guidance from Fauci and the Trump administration and "shut down his beaches" and "shut down the entire state." DeSantis called the decision to restrict access to beaches a "local decision" but acknowledged that he initially followed federal guidelines during the early stages of the Covid-19 outbreak.
"Those first few weeks, we followed some of the federal guidelines. I've always said that. But then I was looking at the data myself, and I made the decision that we were going to chart a separate course. And so we did that, and clearly Florida boomed as a result," he said.