Trump Better Figure Out A New Message About Covid-19.
Two days after the town of Cullman, AL invoked a state of emergency because of a more than 200% increase in Covid cases, Donald Trump showed up to headline a super-spreader event on a farm outside of town.
People who go to Trump’s events these days still wear MAGA hats and t-shirts, but they don’t wear masks. Trump began using masks as an ‘us versus them’ declaration early last year; the ‘us’ being red-blooded, strong Americans, the ‘them’ being all those other people who don’t even qualify as Americans at all.
At some point during the campaign last year, Trump stopped talking about the ‘risks’ of being masked because he stopped talking about the virus too. This was particularly after it was announced that there wouldn’t be any vaccines available until after the election, which meant that his whole, phony Warp Speed nonsense wouldn’t get him any more votes.
And by the way, for a couple of my friends who are still telling me that Trump was a good guy because of Warp Speed, the company that hit the market first with a vaccine — Pfizer — did it without taking a dime from the government to help cover the costs of an accelerated development of their drug.
It now turns out that the spike in the virus because of the Delta variant appears to be driven mostly (not entirely) by transmissions to people who still have not gotten immunized against the Kung Flu. And I can guarantee you that a lot of those people are the same ones who don’t want to wear masks. Gee, what a surprise.
On the other hand, Trump knows Goddamn well that if he’s going to stick around in any capacity other than as a defendant in various civil and maybe criminal actions, he has to be invited to speak at political events for the 2022 election cycle that will start getting on the calendar after this coming Labor Day. And he also knows that the spike in Covid-19 cases happens to be highest in red states, like Florida, where public officials have spent the last several years trying to maintain his fiction that the virus will disappear without getting vaccinated or wearing a mask.
So, he tested out a new approach last night in Alabama when he told the crowd that he thought that getting vaccinated was a good idea. And what happened? Instead of the usual raucous ‘lock him up’ chants he used to get when he mentioned Anthony Fauci, this time he was booed.
He immediately tried to get beyond the reaction of his audience by stammering something about how everyone still needed to ‘protect’ their freedoms and that he wanted to ‘protect’ their freedoms. What is he saying? That if you get vaccinated, you’re no longer ‘free?’
That’s right. If you don’t get vaccinated, you’re still free to catch the virus. And even among Republican voters this idea is beginning to catch on. The latest surveys show that 80% of Democrats back mandates, along with half the folks who claim to be independent when it comes to how they vote. Only 35% of registered Republicans back public health mandates, but if any election turns on how the government is dealing with the virus, even in really red states, the GOP candidate will lose.
If the virus is still floating around next year, Trump won’t get an invitation to a single GOP event if the guy or gal running for office believes that they could be vulnerable because of Covid-19. So, Trump had no choice but to test out a weak defense of vaccinations which didn’t go over well at all.
I hope that Trump’s most energized MAGA followers will continue to fight against public health mandates because sooner or later, when companies like Wal Mart begin to require getting vaxxed in order to stay on the payroll, those idiots can all go and crawl back under the rocks where they belong.
Want to be ‘free?’ Fine. Don’t use your ‘freedom’ to threaten my health.
