President Joe Biden, who has repeatedly urged Americans to mask up, was captured flouting face-covering rules in Nantucket on Saturday.
Photos show Biden wearing a black mask around his neck, leaving his mouth and nose exposed inside Murray’s Toggery Shop on the island — despite a large sign on the door advising shoppers at the clothing store “REQUIRED FACE COVERING.”
He left the shop about 4:45 p.m. Saturday with a beverage in hand, according to photos and reports.
The policy set by the clothing and souvenir store on Nantucket’s Main Street is in line with the island’s mask mandate, which the local Board of Health reportedly reimposed earlier this month due to an uptick in COVID-19 found in the sewer system.
The maskless store outing came as Biden spent Thanksgiving with his family at the home of a private-equity billionaire David Rubinstein in Nantucket, where he attended a tree-lighting ceremony and his motorcade received got a middle finger from a man on a porch.
The president, who received a booster shot in September, in August called for a three-month nationwide mask mandate, and earlier this year stressed that face-covering will be necessary through 2021.
“You know that wearing this mask through the next year here can save lives — a significant number of lives,” he said in February.
Biden’s Thanksgiving weekend local shop tour wasn’t the first time he’s recently broken mask-wearing rules. In October, Biden was caught violating Washington DC’s indoor face-covering mandate in Fiola Mare in Georgetown, where he carried a blue surgical mask in his hands while not eating.
