‘Gutless’ about booster

Trump began the recent dust-up by attacking the governor’s refusal to acknowledge whether he had received a COVID-19 booster shot.

“The answer is ‘Yes,’ but they don’t want to say it, because they’re gutless,” Trump said in a television interview this month, referring only to “politicians” but clearly alluding

to DeSantis. “You got to say it — whether you had it or not, say it.”

DeSantis’s response came on Friday in an interview on the conservative podcast “Ruthless.” The governor said one of his biggest regrets was not forcefully opposing Trump’s calls for lockdowns when the coronavirus first began to spread in spring 2020.

“Knowing now what I know then, if that was a threat earlier, I would have been much louder,” DeSantis said.

DeSantis then moved quickly to place blame on Dr. Anthony Fauci, who advised Trump on the country’s COVID response, a much safer target with conservatives.

The former president did not immediately respond.

Without a Twitter account, his hair-trigger retorts have become less frequent. A spokesman for Trump also did not respond to requests for comment. An adviser to DeSantis declined to comment.

DeSantis, however, has touched on a delicate issue, one of the few on which Trump is out of tune with his party’s hard-liners: the efficacy of the vaccine and deference to public health experts’ advice on how to curb the spread of the virus.

In an interview with Candace Owens, a rightwing media personality, the former president said “the vaccine worked” and dismissed conspiracy theories. “People aren’t dying when they take the vaccine,” he said.

DeSantis, though, has been much more eager to focus on his resistance to COVID-19 restrictions, than to make a case for vaccination and booster shots.

Trump’s loudest antagonists are likely to continue to stoke the tension

between the two men. Ann Coulter, the conservative commentator who has fallen out with the former president, delighted in the dust-up this week.

“Trump is demanding to know Ron DeSantis’s booster status, and I can now reveal it,” Coulter wrote on Twitter. “He was a loyal booster when Trump ran in 2016, but then he learned our president was a liar and con man whose grift was permanent.”

In an email, Coulter, herself a part-time Florida resident, put a finer point on what makes DeSantis’ rise unsettling for the former president. “Trump is done,” she wrote. “You guys should stop obsessing over him.”