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Comment by jfengel | Hacker News Reader

It's real. I don't know about O'Reilly, but Trump was vaccinated before he left office. He doesn't talk about it publicly very much, but he did speak at a rally back in August, and recommended vaccinations.

The audience booed then, too.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-booed-al... https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-targets-biden-over-af...

The new news is that he also got a booster, and got booed again.

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Clif High has a theory that Trump is using these info drops to judge where his base is at as far as support goes. You can see his theory in this video starting about 31 minutes in:

https://www.bitchute.com/video/WVUaNNbB02yA/

As far as I can tell he seems to like playing it by ear. He may well use the feedback, but it feels less calculated than that.

I don't entirely understand why he's not taking more credit for it. He seems to be caught between taking credit for the cure and denying that there is anything serious needing to be cured.

His base has made opposing vaccination an existential part of their identity, in no small part because Trump downplayed the virus, refused to wear a mask and played reporting on the pandemic off as Democrat propaganda - and while Trump has never made explicit anti-COVID vaccine statements himself AFAIK (he has tweeted about spurious links between vaccines and autism,) he definitely contributed to the atmosphere of politicization and lack of confidence in vaccinations that now seems to have him pushed into a corner.

He doesn't make anti-COVID-vax statements, he does tend to talk out of both sides of his mouth on it. In the latest thing he didn't encourage it, and explicitly denied the need for mandates in a way that justifies anybody's antivax excuses. But he also called to take credit for it, several times. So he seems to want to have it both ways, and it seems to fall flat in a way that's unusual for him.

I think it falls flat because his base chose a side a long time ago, and he now knows it's not a side he can win on.

And yet he got more votes in 2020 than anyone in history, except the guy he lost to. A guy who now faces having to deal with a bunch of crises and unable to do any favors for his own base.

A rematch is, at this point, a toss up. It's a long way to 2024 but it's not out of the question.

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