The first sign of trouble began, oddly enough, in Alabama. In August 2021, Donald Trump headlined an event in the ruby red state he won by 25 points, and the former president briefly encouraged attendees to get Covid vaccines. As regular readers might recall, the booing was audible and immediate.
In December 2021, it happened again. The Republican appeared at an event in Texas, where he acknowledged having received a booster shot — a comment that again generated booing from his ostensible supporters.
By last summer, Trump had clearly been browbeaten into submission by his own base. During a rally in Alaska, the former president described vaccines as “that I’m not allowed to mention.” He clearly wanted to brag about his record, telling the crowd that “nobody else could have done” he did, but the Republican nevertheless grudgingly concluded, “I’m not mentioning it in front of my people.”
As we discussed at the time, Trump clearly wanted to brag about the development of the lifesaving vaccines, reminding everyone that they’ve been enormously effective and deserve to be seen as a once-in-a-generation miracle. But he was also scared of getting booed by his own acolytes, so he avoided any explicit references to the “v” word.
This year, as the race for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination starts to take shape, the former president’s approach to vaccines has been overhauled. Instead of bragging about their development and urging people to protect themselves from a dangerous contagion, Trump is now trying to use the right’s hostility toward vaccines against potential GOP rivals, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. The New York Times reported last week:
In a sign of how toxic the conversation about the coronavirus vaccines has become within the GOP, Mr. Trump’s allies are building a file of “opposition research” on Mr. DeSantis that consists of videos of him praising the vaccine in its early days.
When Trump spoke with reporters…
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