Donald Trump just gave away how truly far gone he is
Donald Trump quietly got vaccinated for COVID back in January before leaving office, even as he directed his surrogates in the right wing media to push anti-vaccine rhetoric aimed at sabotaging President Biden’s vaccine rollout. For Trump, this kind of duplicity has long been merely par for the course. But now he’s done something that’s thrown a monkey wrench into his own strategy.
Trump has rarely appeared in public in 2021, only occasionally calling in to right wing talk shows and hosting occasional rallies. At one of his increasingly rare rallies a few months ago, Trump tried vaguely steering his supporters toward getting vaccinated, but it played poorly with the audience. Not shockingly, Trump has held very few rallies since then.
It’s been fairly obvious this year that his babysitters have been trying to keep him out of the public eye as much as possible. This is a guy who loves to run his mouth, and who could get Fox News or OAN to let him call in regularly, yet he rarely does it. Trump loves holding rallies more than just about anything else in politics, yet he rarely holds them. When he does appear in public, he comes off as half senile and three quarters dead. Most of the time he’s kept in isolation, even as his handlers release press releases in his name.
The more Trump appears in public, the more the average American can see that he’s a goner, and the less the media can hype his imaginary Trump 2024 campaign. So his handlers have good reason for keeping him hidden; every time he appears in public it costs him (and presumably them) money. But then came Trump’s cash grab of a “victory tour” with fellow washout Bill O’Reilly, and that’s when Trump decided to publicly stake himself to a strong pro-vaccine and pro-booster stance.
This has created such a mess, pro-Trump surrogates like Candace Owens are now throwing up their hands in frustration. After all, they’ve spent all year helping him sell anti-vaccine stances, and now they’re stuck trying to explain why Trump has switched sides.
It’s not difficult to figure out why Trump is taking this new position. He sees the general public accurately giving President Joe Biden credit for his aggressive vaccine rollout, and he wishes he were getting credit instead. So now Trump is trying to rewrite history to read that he’s the one who rolled out the COVID vaccine. That’s a typical Trump strategy. The trouble is, he appears to have fully lost track of the fact that Team Trump spent all year steering his base toward believing every wacky COVID vaccine conspiracy under the sun.
In other words, Donald Trump has slipped cognitively to the point that he no longer even understands how to play his own game. The old Trump would have known that he couldn’t get his base to just instantly flip-flop from being anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorists to suddenly being pro-vaccination, and that he would have had to steer his base gradually toward changing its position on the vaccine. The new Trump doesn’t seem to understand how any of this works, or what his base is built on, or the tactics he’s had to use to steer his base toward changing positions in the past.
Donald Trump no longer seems to even know where he’s at, let alone where his base is at – and the strategies he’s trying to use are so incoherent as to make a huge mess for himself. His babysitters had it right when they had him locked away inside Mar-a-Lago and did most of the speaking for him. If they can no longer stop him from publicly running his mouth like this, he’s going to shatter the Trump 2024 fantasy faster than the January 6th Committee or the Manhattan District Attorney can.
