If you don’t want to publicly announce your vaccination status, that’s fine. Why claim, though, that doing so is a violation of “HIPA rights” or that your status is a deeply personal matter, akin to your sex life or some childhood embarrassment?
The irony is that Trump should get a tremendous amount of credit for the development of the vaccines. The least you could say is that they happened under his watch.
The reason why Trump, MTG, and Tucker all refuse to announce that they’ve been vaccinated, which they undoubtedly have been, is that the MAGA base has created a “shibboleth” around refusing the vaccine, one adjacent to bizarre conspiracy theories.
In 2016, I genuinely believed in an “Overton Window” thesis about Trump. Trump himself was always stupid and bombastic, but, I thought, he was pushing the entire GOP base towards existential issues, like identity. That did happen to a degree, but something else was at play.
The dynamic of the Trump movement is that you stake out the most “lib owning,” “wing nut” position possible, and then demand that others comply or run cover for you, or at least don’t denounce or correct you.
Sometimes that “lib owning” position can touch on more existential issues. But more often than not, it’s simply wacky: Covid doesn’t exist…the vaccines are the real virus…the Democrats are eating babies… etc. This all started with Obama’s birth certificate.
The great irony of Covid is that Trump had an opportunity, early on, to own the issue and win big: The Democrats were crying “racism” and opposing travel bans; Trump’s initial instincts were sound; and the pandemic led to a de-facto nationalism and a renewed respect for borders.
Trump couldn’t develop a nationalist and statesman-like response, first, because of Wall Street and then because his base went “all in” with conspiracy theories. Trump was unwilling, perhaps unable, to tell them “no.”
If Trump had dispensed with the “power of positive thinking” nonsense and become a doom-saying Covid fascist, he would have won in 2020, maybe even established lasting policy.
Instead, Trump pursued this bizarre strategy of denying Covid…while bragging about travel bans… overseeing the development of the vaccines … while undermining them in the press.
The wacky “shibboleth” strategy of the American Right—and increasingly the Right in Western Europe—simply cannot ever win, even when it, on occasion, gets something right.
The “lock-downs” and mask mandates are ending, or are going to end soon. Vaccines are safe. The Right spent more than a year obsessing about the most ridiculous nonsense imaginable and soon will have nothing to show for it.
*HIPAA
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
