The prime offenders include Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (Yale College, magna cum laude; Harvard Law, cum laude), U.S. Senate hopeful Eric Greitens of Missouri (Duke, full scholarship; Rhodes Scholar), and U.S. Senate candidate J. D. Vance of Ohio (Ohio State, summa cum laude; Yale Law). Of course attending fancy schools does not necessarily make someone smart, nor do the well educated have a monopoly on intelligence. Smart people make bad calls all the time, moreover, as David Halberstam indelibly noted, and stupid ones stumble into good decisions. What these politicians have in common is that though they’ve given every indication they’re smart in the past, now—in their best attempt to succeed in the Trump-era Republican Party—they are masquerading as what they imagine voters want, with results that ring almost comically false.

Start with DeSantis. Last April, when vaccines were new and not nearly so politically polarized, the governor got the Johnson & Johnson shot, reportedly because he preferred a single shot to two. He didn’t get jabbed in public (“I’m not sure we’re going to do it on camera; we’ll see,” he told reporters. “If you guys want a gun show, maybe we can do it, but probably better off not”) but he did disclose that he’d gotten it, and then criticized the FDA for pausing distribution of J&J later that month.

Now, however, DeSantis won’t even say whether he’s received a booster shot. “So that’s something that I think people should make their own decisions on,” he said last week. “I’m not gonna let that be a weapon for people to be able to use. I think it’s a private matter.”

What’s going on here? One possibility is that since getting his first shot, DeSantis has become fervently, genuinely anti-vaccine, which would be pretty silly, because evidence is only mounting that the vaccines are both effective and safe. A second is that he has no personal objection to the vaccine but has decided to forgo the booster nonetheless, because he understands the anti-vax mood in the noisiest parts of the Republican base, and he wants to claim that mantle. The more likely scenario is the one that the conservative journalist Jonathan V. Last lays out: “You’re not supposed to remember this, but DeSantis is a smarty-pants, Ivy League elite lawyer who is playacting as a populist crusader … DeSantis almost certainly got the booster.” In short, he wants to claim the anti-vax mantle without foolishly endangering himself.