12/30/21: We learned a few days ago that Donald J. Trump had dodged the draft yet again. On five occasions he refused to go tramping through jungles and wading through rice paddies in Vietnam. Now, summoned to duty again, he refused to put on the uniform of the Unvaxxed Army.
The man may be an ill-informed, narcissistic lout. He’s a
coward too. But he’s no fool. He knows casualties in the Unvaxxed Army have
been fearful. And no member of his direct family line has ever joined a fight
when true danger threatened. Now we know. Mr. Trump made sure he got vaccinated
and then had a booster.
You might think the ex-president was moved by the fate of the 33,000 Americans who died from COVID-19 in November. You might think a man who held the highest office in the land would be appalled to see another 38,500 people in this country die, so far, in December, as CDC reports. A person with normal human emotions – empathy, for starters – might be doing everything possible to help the current administration tame the spread. We’ve now lost 820,000 lives. In just the last three days, as the Omicron variant runs rampant, we’ve piled up 1.3 million more infections. Yet no amount of suffering by others has moved this man.
Only political calculation. Donald J. Trump burns with desire
to get a second crack at being president.
As Newsweek and almost every other news outlet noted, Trump has decided to quit whining about how “Fake News” people kept talking about the virus while he was in office – just to make him look bad. It turns out, the “Fake News” people are still talking about the pandemic. Because it’s a pandemic, no matter who’s in the Oval Office. It’s President Biden’s burden now. Trump is just some random asshole, living in vaccinated safety at Mar-a-Lago.
By now, you’ve probably heard that in an interview with Candace Owens (an obnoxious leader in the anti-vaxxer pantheon), the draft-dodging Donald bragged, “I came up with a vaccine, with three vaccines. All are very, very good. Came up with three of them in less than nine months. It was supposed to take five to 12 years.”
Doctors? Researchers? Nah. “I came up with a
vaccine,” Trump claimed. Did it all by his lonesome.
Then he watched for almost a year, as leading voices on the right claimed Joe Biden had a plan to squash their freedom, or kill them all, by providing the opportunity to take the vaccines and be safer. Owens, herself, had been one of the leaders in the anti-vaxxer universe.
In talking with the former president, she did what she always did. She got in a shot against the current president. She made it clear she wanted nothing to do with any pro-vaccine lip, even from Trump. So she cut in, saying: “And yet more people have died under COVID-19 this year, by the way, under Joe Biden than under you. And more people took the vaccine this year, so people are questioning how...”
“Oh no, the vaccine[s]
work, but some people aren’t taking them,” Trump replied. “The ones that get
very sick and go to the hospital are the ones who don’t take their vaccine.”
Owens seemed caught off guard. Donald continued, “And if you take the vaccine
you’re protected. Look, the results of the vaccine are very good. And if you do
get it, it’s a very minor form. People aren’t dying when they take the vaccine.”
Trump wasn’t saying anything that President Biden and Dr. Anthony Fauci and pretty much the entire medical community have been saying for months – and even this humble blogger, for God sakes. So you had to wonder why he was speaking up now. As always, he equivocated. He wanted credit for saving the lives of those of us who listened to the experts and got shots. But he didn’t want to lose the support of the anti-vaxxers, who in normal times hang on his every word. So he threw them a bone. He said he was against mask mandates – even if requiring everyone to take the shots would make them safer – and people wouldn’t be dying.
“But it’s still their choice,” he said of those who planned to refuse the shots and boosters. He didn’t want to offend those whose votes he covets in 2024 – assuming they’re not dead – assuming he runs again – even if they are getting infected by the hundreds of thousands, spreading the disease around, and causing thousands of deaths daily. The people in hospitals? Trump doesn’t care. The 5,466 Ohioans in hospitals as of December 30.Trump doesn’t care. The 1,243 in intensive care. No. Trump doesn’t care. The nearly 2,100 Americans who died on December 28, putting a damper on the holidays of all their families. Not a problem. Trump has his booster. And he’s not going to push supporters to take the logical steps to be safe. Because he’s a coward.
He wants to be elected for a second term.
Nothing more to it.
He says the vaccines work. He wants credit. He wants your vote. He doesn’t care about:
The 5,523 Texans hospitalized with the coronavirus. He doesn’t care as they pile up medical bills.
And he doesn’t care that he never came up with a healthcare plan for anyone, vaxxed or un-vaxxed.
He doesn’t care that the positivity rate for tests in South Dakota is 19.2% as of today. He doesn’t care that 9,076 South Dakotans have been hospitalized over the course of the pandemic with virus infections. He doesn’t care.
He doesn’t care if 62,342
Floridians have died from COVID, more than died nationwide
from flu in any year during the last decade. He doesn’t care that the fatality
rate is 1.6% in the state where he lives. He’s safe. He’s vaccinated. He’s
boosted.
It doesn’t concern Trump if 833 South Carolinians fill hospital beds with the virus, including 91 being ventilated.
It doesn’t matter to the former president that on Christmas Day, 294 persons in Mississippi were hospitalized with the virus – that that number rose to 514 in just four days, that 85 were in ICU on Christmas – rising to 123 in four days – that the number of people being ventilated was 41 on Christmas – and 57, with two days remaining in a year where Trump wasted more than eleven months before calling on his base to get the shots that might have saved so many.
Trump doesn’t care. He
doesn’t care if 15 children in Idaho were hospitalized with
the virus on one day in October. He doesn’t care if the state has only 18 ICU
beds available.
He wants the credit for lives saved by the vaccines, but he also doesn’t want to piss off the people who keep shouting about how the vaccines are so dangerous. He says they aren’t. But he wants the votes of those who says they are.
He’s too cowardly even to
take a side.
*
IN ANY CASE, there has been stunned reaction across the political spectrum, but particularly from his base. Ms. Owens was reduced to painting Trump as a doddering old codger, talking demented nonsense at a Christmas family gathering. “I’ve seen other people that are older have the exact same perspective,” she assured fans. “Like they came from a time before TV, before internet, before being able to conduct their independent research … and everything that they read in a newspaper that was pitched to them … they believed that that was a reality.”
(Blogger’s
note: I gathered my data, above, from red-state health departments, almost
entirely.)
What Owens meant – in some bizarre world – was that Trump, who loathed “Fake News” had been faked out by “Fake News!” Whereas Owens was real news – despite her entire lack of medical expertise.
Alex Jones, the purveyor or bombastic coronavirus info, howled about Trump’s newfound love for shots and boosters. “Sign on to it. Take credit for it. Take this, sign on, believe it. Hell, we’re fighting Bill Gates and Fauci and Biden and the New World Order and Psaki and the Davos Group,” Jones exploded during one InfoWars episode, “and now we’ve got Trump on their team!”
Ben Garrison, another formerly avid supporter of the
ex-president, penned a damning cartoon showing Trump on a “vaccine bandwagon”
while people wearing red MAGA hats booed (and maybe keeled over dead).
Arizona congressional candidate Ron Watkins and famed fan of QAnon, expressed outrage during his own interview with Candace Owens. He described the vaccines as “subscription suicide shots,” and told fellow Q’ers to “choose life” rather than “comply” and get vaccinated.
Ali Alexander, who helped organize the “Stop the Steal” rally that went so well on January 6, also attacked his old hero. He, too, placed Trump on the same team as Dr. Fauci, kind of a “Let’s Go, Brandon,” blast at the former president, rather than the current.
“Yeah, Joe Biden praises him and his booster shot,” now, Alexander
moaned, and suddenly he’s all about getting vaccines. “Trump, stop. Just stop,”
he added. “Have your position (backed by Fauci) and allow us to have ours
(which is backed by science). This losing is getting boomer level annoying.”
Crazed MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell tried, like Owens, to divide the baby down the middle. He said it didn’t bother him if Trump was for the vaccines, because he was still “100% against mandates!”
As for Lindell, he assured a reporter from The Daily Beast, “I am 100% against the vaccine! You know that.”
Trump’s former U.S. Surgeon General, Jerome Adams, somehow
faulted Biden for Trump’s reluctance to admit he’d had the booster. As if Biden,
not Trump, had kept it secret. In fact, Adams’ illustrated a basic truth about
his old boss, without intending. That is: Trump’s ego needed constant stroking.
And if something wasn’t good for the egotist, the egotist wouldn’t life a presidential finger, except maybe to tweet-hate on opponents.
“We know the president’s love language is words of affirmation,” he said of Mr. Trump. “We know Joe Biden is known for his cooperation,” Adams continued. “So, to me, what was most shocking, what was most telling, wasn’t that Donald Trump came out and supported vaccines — it was that it took Joe Biden 11 months to finally do what he has been known to do for 79 years, and that’s to reach out across the aisle.”
Yes. Reach out to the man who insisted he was really elected, and not you. Sure. Why not do that.
“Once he gave President Trump those words of affirmation, you
heard President Trump come out and say, ‘Thank you, I appreciate that.’ And he
applauded it. And I hope we see more of that.”
The baby-splitting and the howls of anguish continued. Pro-Trump lawyer L. Lin Wood told fans to cut the ex-president some slack, despite having previously calling the vaccine “a planned bioweapon” on Telegram, a social media platform, favored by the right-wing demographic. “I believe We The People should wait until ALL the facts are known before passing judgment on the President’s wartime strategy and the tactics designed to achieve victory,” he wrote.
In New York City, anti-vaxxers showed up at Trump Tower and tried to gain entry to eat at the first-floor Trump Grill – but were barred by local ordinance. No shirt, no shoes, no shots, no service. “Trump is a fraud if he enforces this,” one protester yelled, spraying germs on any nearby bystanders.
“Trump is a billionaire,” the angry, unmasked, un-vaxxed protester shouted, “He can’t afford a thousand dollar fine…to stand up for what’s right?”
Well. Okay.
Add
“cheapness,” to Trump’s long list of personal failings.
Finally, Owens took to Twitter and tried to bridge the yawning canyon of right-wing illogic. She didn’t call Trump a tyrant for supporting vaccines. Suddenly, she realized, “I have no issue with any person who wants to get the vaccine. I just will never ever let that vaccine into my body. I believe firmly that Big Pharma is the greatest evil on the face of the planet. I am healthy, young, in shape and simply unafraid of Covid-19.”
And so, the dying continues.
Owens might be “healthy, young, in shape and simply unafraid.” But if Owens gets even a mild, passing infection, she can pass it on unwittingly to a co-worker, who can go home and infect an older relative.
*
WITH OHIO setting grim records, related to the coronavirus, Gov. Mike DeWine has called out additional National Guard forces to help in the overwhelmed hospitals. Over a thousand troops are deployed.
The Columbus Dispatch notes, “The Buckeye State is facing another winter COVID-19 surge. Ohio broke its daily record of reported cases three times in a row last week and leads the nation in COVID-19 hospitalizations per capita.”
DeWine isn’t nuts, like some Republicans, but he does have his base to consider. So, he has refused to issue a mask mandate for all public schools in the state. He does call on everyone to get vaccinated, though. Since June 1, out of 35,962 persons hospitalized with COVID-19, only 2,687 were fully vaccinated.
That would make the odds for those vaccinated 13-1, vs. unvaccinated, to stay out of the hospitals in 2022.
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