A Christmas Miracle: The Populist Right Realizes You Can't be Anti-Vax and Pro-Trump
Former President Trump and His Fringe Base Face a Day of Reckoning over COVID-19 Vaccines
America has its three vaccines thanks to Operation Warp Speed, an initiative by former President Donald Trump. The development and deployment of vaccines is probably one of the greatest federal government accomplishments since the end of the Cold War. Weirdly enough, the populist base of the President has made undermining public confidence in the vaccines a cause celebre.
This boiled over when Trump, while appearing at First Baptist Church in Dallas, acknowledged that he had not only been vaxxed but also had been boosted, and received a small round of boos.
Then anti-vaxx Columnist Candace Owen of the Daily Wire asked about vaccine mandates in an interview.
Trump led by calling the vaccine one of the greatest achievements in human history and talked about how they had saved lives. Owens pushed back by pointing out that more people died this year with the vaccine available, and Trump pointed out that the people who were dying and getting hospitalized were overwhelmingly unvaccinated. At this point, Owens backed off to talking about school mask mandates which Trump didn’t like, but when she compared kids wearing masks in school to Communist China, he praised the Chi-com education system vs. ours and she had to find some other way to get it bad.
There was outrage by the Trumpist base. It was caused, of course, by him showering praise on a brutal dictatorship that’s America’s biggest rival in the world.
I kid, Trump nationalists are well-used to that. That’s no problem. What is a problem is Trump’s praise of the vaccines. People like Candace Owens have made a fortune bashing these things and convincing their readers and listeners that these are dangerous.
The events of the past week have brought a conflict within the populist right to the surface. President Trump is technically inaccurate when he says he developed the vaccines, in the same way, that President Obama didn’t actually get Osama bin Laden. Still, Trump’s program Operation Warp Speed, got these to market in record time and they’ve saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
There’s a good case to be made that Biden has been the worst COVID president, with the ill-advised pause in the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, the divisive private sector vaccine mandate, and a failure to plan to provide rapid tests, the Biden Administration looks like the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.
President Trump could come back in 2024 and say, “We developed the vaccines. We got the ball rolling but the Biden Administration failed, they confused people, they were slow and cost lives.” All true.
The issue of vaccines is a rare one where the needs of President Trump’s ego, the interest of President Trump’s party. and the national interest in promoting vaccination all align.
But what of the interest of President Trump’s fringe populist base?
Not so much.
They’ve been telling their audiences that the vaccine doesn’t prevent the virus and doesn’t protect you, but it does cause blood clots, its the mark of the Beast, and it hasn’t been tested enough.
Trump’s statement brings the logical conflict into focus. If all the anti-vaxxers say is true, Trump is either a co-conspirator in the corruption that Owens talked about, or he was played for a huge sucker. Neither narrative screams, “Four more years!”
It’s the same reason why Doctor Fauci is so reviled on the right. Fauci is very flawed, but much of the earliest hate for him came from Trump supporters who hated the Federal response to COVID-19 but wanted to support Trump. Fauci became the all-powerful Rasputin-like bureaucrat who made the hated policies.
In reality, Fauci is not all that powerful and Trump could have had him terminated. He could have sought for and appointed people who believed in achieving herd immunity, no masks, no social distancing, and would abandon research into vaccines and instead give free prophylactic hydroxychloroquine for all.
The reason that didn’t happen and the government pursued the policies it did was down to the decisions of one man, and it sure wasn’t Anthony Fauci.
The reality of the situation is that Donald Trump made the decisions in 2020 and bore ultimate responsibility for them including the decision on vaccines. The more the reality is made clear, the more populist will pushed to a decision point: Are you pro-Trump or Anti-Vaccine?
A schism in the Populist Right could be the moment that begins its ultimate decline. Anti-vax populists might be able to frustrate another Trump White House bid, but have no candidate of their own.
However, before those of us who have been alarmed by many aspects of Trumpism and the populist right celebrate, we should be aware that there’s an easy way out of this. An informal don’t ask, don’t tell policy. Call it honor among grifters.
Populists on the right could choose to not repeat Owens’ mistake of asking Trump to attack his greatest life achievement as a big pharma lie and Trump could continue to not proactively bring up vaccines. In both of these case, Trump was in a context where he had been asked about vaccines. But he’s not really done one of his Tweeted out press releases on the topic. If you don’t bug him about it, he’s not going to say much and the cognitive dissonance many on the anti-vaxxers feel about being all in for the man who made it all possible, will be lessened.
Then Trump, Owens, Alex Jones, and all their ilk can come together around what unites them: keeping people angry and parting them from their money.