During a press conference on Monday afternoon the Director for the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Robert Redfield, continued with the theme of pleading with Americans to put on a mask to stymie the spread of COVID-19. He said that, if everyone complied with said pleading, then “over the next six weeks we could drive the virus into the ground.”

The reward for such a proposition certainly seems tantalizing and relatively easy for the average citizen, though it’s likely to fall on millions of deaf ears.

President Trump could offer leadership and both encourage and insist that Americans wear a mask for the next month and a half, but that is not likely to happen.

Public health experts have urged Trump to wear a mask, noting that it could go a long way in encouraging his supporters to do the same.

Polls show mask-wearing has become a partisan issue, with Democrats much more likely than Republicans to wear masks.

According to a new poll released by the CDC on Tuesday, 76 percent of adults said they had worn a face covering when leaving their house within the past week. That lines up with other polls that have been conducted on the issue.

However, that number needs to improve if the U.S. wants to get COVID-19 under control, Redfield said.

“I do think if we could get everybody to wear masks right now — I really do think over the next four, six weeks, we could bring this epidemic until control,” he said.

President Trump continues to generally oppose masks amid a raging pandemic that claimed the lives of at least 134,815 Americans.

Trump is also potentially putting millions of American children at risk by insisting that schools reopen. His delusional view of the virus — mainly that it’s “harmless” — serves his political agenda of getting the economy moving and the country back to “normal” ahead of the fall election.

But if he’s going to win back any of the suburban moms the Republican Party lost so badly in the 2018 midterms, he may want to reconsider using America’s children as chips in his political games.

Though many states are pulling back on reopening after seeing their case numbers soar, Trump threatened to withhold federal funding from school districts that do not reopen. While most schools are funded locally, cutting federal funding would likely impact the neediest of America’s children and hit schools already squeezed by the pandemic.

This leaves many saying that the decisions coming out of the Trump administration are astonishingly wrong, and that America has the worst possible leader in its greatest time of need.