It is no exaggeration to say that former President Donald Trump’s chaotic and denial-filled response to the COVID-19 pandemic lost him the support of independents and led to his defeat in the 2020 presidential election.
Four years later, another aspect of his response to the pandemic has emerged as a sensitive issue for another segment of the electorate: his own ardent supporters.
As I listened to Trump’s supporters praise him across the country over the past year, I found them uncharacteristically critical of him for the rapid development of a COVID-19 vaccine that he had hailed as one of the great achievements of his administration, a scientific breakthrough that has been inoculated to an estimated 270 million Americans and saved millions of lives.
“I’m not too excited about the vaccine rollout accelerating,” said Amaris Angell, the owner of a recently closed food truck business who went to meet Trump in Las Vegas on Sunday. “He still seems to be proud of that.”
“It’s poison,” Nanette Finazzo said of the coronavirus vaccine.
“I don’t believe in vaccinations,” Janet Reinecke said as she waited for Trump to take the stage on Sunday. “I never have.”
The anti-vaccination sentiment among Trump’s fan base hasn’t yet become a major political liability for the former president. Most voters I spoke to were quick to forgive Trump for listening to those around him at a time when no one really understood Covid-19, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ attempts to criticise Trump’s pandemic response during the primaries and caucuses fell flat.
But this dynamic is worth understanding because it’s an example of Trump taking cues from his base. Anti-vaccination sentiment has shaped his campaign and the type of president his supporters would like to see if he wins. Now, Trump appears to be taking careful steps to avoid losing his base to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an avowed anti-vaccination candidate running as an independent and attacking Trump over his response to the pandemic.
“He is now running away from his signature achievement (for which he deserves credit), Operation Warp Speed, as he sees it as a burden to the groups he wants to pander to,” Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said in an email.
The long and complicated history of vaccines
As my colleague Jan Hoffman wrote in March 2020, Trump has long had a rocky relationship with vaccines: In 2007, Trump suggested there was a link between autism and childhood vaccines, an idea that scientists strongly denied, and in 2015, Trump told an interviewer that he never got a flu shot.
“I don’t like the idea of injecting something bad into your body, which is basically what they’re doing,” Trump said at the time.
But as president of a country in the midst of a pandemic, and a victim of severe COVID-19 himself, Trump has promoted scientifically unproven COVID-19 treatments like hydroxychloroquine and even suggested injecting bleach, while also supporting the rapid development of a COVID-19 vaccine, celebrating when one was approved and praising it even after leaving office.
“I handed this new administration what everyone now calls a modern medical miracle,” Trump said in February 2021. “Some say it’s the greatest thing to happen in hundreds of years.”
In August of that year, in a sign of growing anti-vaccine sentiment on the right, he was heckled when he bragged about vaccines at a rally in Alabama.
“I encourage you to get vaccinated. I got it and it works. Get the vaccine,” Trump said, drawing boos from the crowd.
“You have freedom,” he retorted, “but I just happen to have the vaccine.”
Politics is involved
Trump has since backed away from his praise of vaccines, a shift that appears to have been shaped by politics.
By early 2023, DeSantis was gearing up to run for president. He had downplayed the public health measures Florida put in place early in the pandemic. He continually criticized Trump for not firing Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who had spent much of 2020 urging people to stop the spread of COVID-19 with precautions like wearing masks. To neutralize these attacks, Trump began painting DeSantis as a fake vaccine skeptic.
“Wake me up when Mr. DeSantis apologizes for vaccinating more people than President Trump and Dr. Fauci combined,” said a social media post written by another person and spread by DeSantis on his Truth Social account in August of that year.
In September 2023, President Trump told former Fox News host Megyn Kelly, who now hosts a show on SiriusXM, that he wasn’t proud of the vaccine and wasn’t planning on talking much about it, even though some people had told him he should.
“I’m not talking about that,” he said, “but what I did is I accomplished something for that particular thing.”
As Kennedy’s presidential bid has gained momentum, Trump has also sought to portray him as dishonest on the issue.
“He said ‘No vaccines are safe or effective,’ then he said ‘I would never say that, I am not anti-vaxxer!’ Where did this statement come from?” Trump wrote on Truth Social in April.
Whenever President Trump mentions vaccines these days, it is usually to express his opposition to mandatory vaccination.
“I will not give a penny to any school that requires vaccinations or requires masks,” he said in May in Waukesha, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee.
Disputes over obligations
Public health experts worry that anti-vaccine sentiment could shape a second Trump administration, whether by limiting investment in vaccines or appointing vaccine skeptics to public health agencies.
“I’m worried that President Trump won’t think about who is the most scientifically competent and the person who will follow the scientific evidence,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, who worked on President Biden’s COVID-19 response for more than a year. That work included setting up the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness, which Dr. Jha worries Trump will try to dismantle.
Jha said vaccination mandates have helped reduce childhood illnesses across the country, including in Republican-led states like Mississippi.
“Increasingly, we are linking political identity with the obligation to vaccinate our children, and that is bad for our country,” Jha said.
Joe Grogan, who led the Domestic Policy Council under Trump, said Trump “did everything he could” to quickly develop and approve a vaccine and criticized the Biden administration for enacting federal orders that were politically damaging.
“We’ve squandered so much trust over the last few years that it’s going to be very hard to get it back,” Grogan said in an interview, but made clear he was not speaking on behalf of the Trump campaign.
A Trump campaign spokesman did not respond to questions about the former president’s public health plans for a second term.
“I did not know”
Trump has also faced outside political pressure on vaccines: Podcaster Joe Rogan, who has been outspokenly anti-vaccination, said this week that Trump has “not gotten his act together” on the issue.
But supporters I spoke to in Las Vegas weren’t planning on criticizing Trump over vaccines or his handling of the pandemic, but suggested it would be something to watch in the future.
“I wanted Fauci fired,” said Ashley Wehner, 35, a stay-at-home mom who homeschools her children. “Everybody was just scared, and we didn’t know anything.”
Wehner, whose husband is a bartender whose job was affected by the lockdown, said the pandemic has eroded trust in pharmaceutical companies and the government, and as a result she said she is now paying much more attention to politics.
“The coronavirus pandemic really opened our eyes,” she said, adding that she has voted in every election since then.
What to read this weekend
Corona Comedy Night
Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has toned down his anti-vaccine views over the past year, but my colleagues say those views have long galvanized his supporters. Rebecca Davis O’Brienhas been covering his campaign, and she told us how her colleagues addressed the pandemic in the most unexpected place: a comedy club.
It was a campaign fundraiser billed as a “night of comedy,” but as one comedian after another entertained the crowd with jokes about the pandemic, it became clear just how much the politics of coronavirus and vaccines still resonate among die-hard Kennedy fans and Kennedy-curious voters.
Comedian Dave Landau used his own drug history to make a joke about vaccines: “I’ve shot heroin, but I don’t know about the vaccine,” Landau said to applause. “And the reason is, my friends kept getting vaccinated and they kept getting COVID, and I didn’t get COVID.”
Rob Schneider, a former “Saturday Night Live” performer turned anti-vaccine activist in recent years, mocked “health officials” who have recommended two, three and even four doses of the vaccine to achieve immunity from COVID-19. “The new thing now is you have to have a syringe in your ass for 24 hours,” he said.
Finally, comedian Russell Brand, who was accused of sexual assault last year and has been largely ignored by mainstream entertainment, closed the evening, blaming the pharmaceutical and tech industries, as well as Dr. Fauci.
Even though at least a dozen reporters, including me, covered their remarks, most of the comedians claimed their freedom of speech had been restricted by the press.
— Rebecca Davis O’Brien
