Maybe I ought to be surprised, maybe not, but a pretty amazing story this past week did not get the headline treatment I think it deserved. Had I been the czar of the news business, it would have been a banner headline and that headline would have read, “Just how incautious, just how imprudent, just how irresponsible, are these people?” Because what happened was a metaphor for how divided our nation is, and how determined the far-right is to divide it further.
The story was Donald Trump’s appearance Sunday night in Dallas alongside former Fox pundit Bill O’Reilly. Remember, these are guys to whom the far-right looks for enlightenment. So after telling the crowd that both he and the former president “are vaxxed,” O’Reilly asked Trump, “Did you get the booster?”, and Trump said, “Yes.”
Apparently it was too much enlightenment.
Some who’d paid to be in the presence of a president they’d idolized began to boo him. Trump called them “a very tiny group”… but titanic or tiny, it’s pretty amazing because they were booing Donald Trump. In their world, it’s like they were booing God.
And why? Because he confessed to committing a taboo: he’d taken the latest prudent step to protect himself against the coronavirus.
Trump actually deserves a crumb of credit for that but as if the one-time president had violated their trust, these people broke into boo’s. Just how incautious, just how imprudent, just how irresponsible, are these people?
Now, they don’t just denounce the use of vaccine mandates, they denounce the use of the vaccine itself.
And you don’t just find them in a conservative stronghold for a Trump talk. In Boston this week, the new Democratic mayor, Michelle Wu, announced a mandate requiring proof of vaccination for anyone entering an indoor business. Protestors at City Hall screamed, “Shame on Wu.” Even if you put aside the slur, think about what they’re saying: shame on Wu for trying to keep her city safe.
But the sickness runs deeper than Dallas or Boston and this part won’t surprise you. During the Dallas appearance, true to form, Trump politicized the pandemic.
“What we’ve done is historic,” he began, referring to three Covid vaccines developed when he was still in the Oval Office. And it was. Even President Biden paid him praise on Tuesday when he thanked Trump’s administration and went on to say, “Just the other day former President Trump announced he had gotten his booster shot. It may be one of the few things he and I agree on.”
But Trump does nothing for the right reasons. When he told his Dallas disciples that they too should get vaccinated, he didn’t say it was to make them safe. He said it was to deny the other side— the left— of satisfaction. By refusing the vaccines, he told them, “You’re playing right into their hands.”
As the virus once again sweeps across the land, is that really the takeaway people need? Not that they’re putting their lives at risk and jeopardizing everyone around them if they don’t get vaccinated, but that if they don’t, they’re giving political advantage to their adversaries?
Well, if it’s all defined by politics, then here is the political reality. As writer David Leonhardt of The New York Times calculates it, “If Democratic voters made up their own country, it would be one of the world’s most vaccinated, with more than 91 percent of adults having received at least one shot. Only about 60 percent of Republican adults have done so.”
By and large, everything from rates of infection to rates of hospitalization to rates of death follow along those party lines. That’s the takeaway people need to understand.
Do you think though that you’d hear about that from any of the far-right firebrands, politicians or pundits alike, who do their damndest to discourage sane measures to tame the coronavirus? The ugly little secret is, many are vaccinated themselves, but they might betray their bread and butter if they try to persuade skeptics to get their shots. Countless Americans have died because they haven’t tried. And if history is any guide, they aren’t about to start.
Just how incautious, just how imprudent, just how irresponsible, are these people?
And although they are not about vaccines, there are two more stories this week that lead me to ask the same question. One is from Phoenix and it’s not about anyone getting booed, it’s about someone getting cheered, and that someone was Kyle Rittenhouse.
He’s the 18-year-old who killed two men during left-wing protests last year in Kenosha, Wisconsin, but was acquitted last month of murder. It’s one thing to cheer for his acquittal. It’s quite another to cheer for what he did. But that’s exactly what happened, the crowd at a Turning Points USA rally giving Rittenhouse a standing ovation when the rally’s host told him, “You‘re a hero to millions.”
A hero to millions? What’s sickening is, it’s true.
Then there’s U.S. Representative Lauren Boebert— she of the Christmas card photo with her young kids all bearing arms, right down to her 9-year-old. This story is, she was at the rally with Rittenhouse, telling the cheering crowd, “I am tired of having godless people who hate America run this country. You and I are going to take this country back.” Then she posted a video that featured critics’ complaints about her and ended with her winking, as gunshots rang out.
How incautious, how imprudent, how irresponsible are these people? We get our answer every day of the week.
For almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. Some of his writing also appears on a website he co-founded, BoomerCafe.com.
Amen! Thank you for helping keep America sane!