It’s a tough job but other people have to do it.

President Donald Trump fixed his course on reopening the nation for business, acknowledging that the move would cause more illness and death from the pandemic but insisting it’s a cost he’s willing to pay to get the economy back on track.

Because he’s confident that he won’t be the one paying it. (He has no reason to be confident of that, especially given the way he keeps gathering people around him with not a mask in sight, but he doesn’t bother with reasons.)

On his visit to a Phoenix Honeywell International Inc. factory producing medical masks, Trump encouraged Americans to think of themselves as “warriors” as they consider leaving their homes, a tacit acknowledgment of deep public reservations about reopening the country too soon. Twenty states have begun to reopen without first meeting criteria Trump himself outlined last month, including a sustained decline in the number of infections they’ve reported, according to an analysis by Bloomberg News.

We have to be “warriors” but there are no Nazis who can surrender.

Speaking separately in an ABC News interview broadcast on Tuesday evening, Trump said closing down the nation was “the biggest decision I’ve ever had to make.”

By which he means: check out how important I am.

“There’ll be more death,” he said. “The virus will pass, with or without a vaccine. And I think we’re doing very well on the vaccines but, with or without a vaccine, it’s going to pass, and we’re going to be back to normal.”

But it’s not going to “pass” – i.e. just disappear of its own accord. That’s just Trump’s verbal magic-summoning, and it won’t work.

Meanwhile he bounced around the factory wearing safety goggles but no mask.

Senior White House officials also did not don the masks, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend when social distancing isn’t possible. Factory workers, members of the press and other support staff did. Trump also lamented that he had to stand six feet apart from two supporters during his speech…

Masks are for pussies and socialists and Mexicans and people of Paris and other such LOSERS.

Here he is in the goggles and the no-mask, with the usual upper-body tilt to hide his gut, which causes his hands to dangle feebly in front of him.