“He’s out of touch on the vaccine,” one user wrote on a pro-Trump forum that was a staging ground for the Jan. 6 insurrection after Trump appeared on OAN. Another asked “Why lose half your base over a faulty vaccine actively being used to take away rights?” Someone else responded, “I love Trump but this shit is getting intolerable.” At a rally in Cullman, Alabama in August, Trump was booed when he told the crowd he recommended getting vaccinated…
It remains to be seen if Trump thinks the potential benefit of focusing on his record with vaccines outweighs the potential backlash from his most loyal followers. In mid-January, Trump seemed to be trying out a reelection stump speech during a rally in Florence, Arizona, a swing state where he lost narrowly to Joe Biden in 2020. This time, he didn’t talk at length about vaccines.
“Not hearing President Trump pushing the ‘vaccines’ was my favorite part of last night’s speech,” one user on a pro-Trump forum wrote. “He’s a tough guy, but not so tough that he could take 10,000 of his own people booing him…His team had to have made that assessment and he decided to tweak his message a little bit.”
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