White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’ COVID Diagnosis Leads to Viral Jokes (What Else?)

Meadows recently stormed off a TV interview after refusing to put on a mask

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In what feels like a metaphor for the 2020 election, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows tested positive for coronavirus and reports suggest he has been trying to conceal this knowledge from the public for at least two days.

And social media had a field day with the news.

“Oh good! It sounds like there’s a scene at the end of the movie after the credits,” comedian Mike Drucker joked.

“And he said we’d forget about coronavirus after the election,” New York Times opinion columnist Farhad Manjoo joked, referring to a frequent statement from Trump and his associates that implies Democrats are only pretending to care about the disease.

Bloomberg, which broke the story, said it isn’t clear when Meadows tested positive, only that he informed people who work closely with him shortly after election night; the New York Times said Meadows tested positive on Wednesday. According to Bloomberg, at least four other White House employees have also tested positive in recent days.

Meadows has been one of the most aggressive defenders of Donald Trump’s failed response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has already killed more than 230,000 Americans. For instance, he was recently criticized for telling CNN that “we’re not going to control the pandemic.” And, in early October, he abruptly ended an interview and stormed off after reporters asked him to put on a mask while speaking to them.

All that said, it may not shock many of you reading this to discover that a lot of people on social media made a lot of jokes at Meadows’ expense. And more than one user joked that Meadows is just trying to get out of telling Trump that he was defeated for reelection by Joe Biden.

See some of the more amusing jokes below:

https://twitter.com/fmanjoo/status/1324929745188839424

But a few people also noted that Meadows is one of the more than 128,000 people diagnosed with the virus on Friday, a new record for the United States and the third day in a row in which a record number of infections have occurred.

https://twitter.com/hecklerkat/status/1324933619278897152

 

Ross A. Lincoln

Ross joined TheWrap as a news editor in 2017; he was previously associate editor at Deadline from 2015-2017, and before that comics editor at The Escapist, and features editor at Game Front. As a writer, in addition to TheWrap his bylines can be found at Deadline, Box Office, The Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, The…

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