Trump vs.Trumpists

As only diehard Donald Trump fans seem to be aware, the former president is touring with disgraced former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, in which they discuss “history” to largely empty arenas.

But at one recent event, Trump revealed that he has gotten his covid-19 booster shot. And he made a surprising pitch to his fans, arguing that coronavirus vaccines should be embraced rather than rejected.

The response? Boos, from at least some in the crowd.

There is clearly a good portion of the Republican base that in this case finds the truest expression of Trumpism in rejecting what Trump is telling them. Opposition to vaccines has been woven so tightly into their political identity that not even Trump can remove it.

How did we get here? From the outset, the pandemic was politicized, with divisions drawn between liberals who wanted aggressive public health measures and conservatives who didn’t, egged on to deny the seriousness of the pandemic and see it as a plot concocted by enemies of Trump.

Once aggressive public health measures became associated with Trump’s foes, feelings about the pandemic became interwoven with personal identity and one’s place in a particular community. So when the vaccines became available, they were inevitably viewed through that prism.

That was true even for millions of conservatives who were perfectly fine before 2021 with having to vaccinate their kids before sending them to school, yet today recoil in rage at the very idea.

Here’s another measure of how far down the road Republicans have traveled into resisting efforts to stem covid-19 through social, collective or political action: The legal battle over the Biden administration’s rule requiring vaccines for health-care workers at facilities that receive Medicare and Medicaid funding.

Numerous red states are suing to have it overturned, and lower courts imposed injunctions on the rule. Last week, the Biden administration filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court, asking it to lift the injunction.

To be fair, vaccine resistance is far from universal on the right; polls have shown a majority of Republicans have been vaccinated, even if as many as a third haven’t gotten a vaccine and say they won’t in the future. And some have suggested that if Trump had been more emphatic in promoting the vaccines, he might have significantly reduced that number.

But it seems doubtful. As a political style, Trumpism doesn’t demand adherence to every last position Trump takes. At times, the Trumpist base understands its demands more clearly than the former president does, and there are few demands more central than the one stating that lines must always be drawn between us and them.

If liberals have embraced vaccines, the truest Trumpist must reject them. No matter how often Donald Trump tells them otherwise.