https://voxday.net/2025/04/09/trump-and-the-vaccine/An illuminating glimpse into how Trump’s tendency to surround himself with bad actors has rendered him less effective than he might otherwise be:
During an interview on the “Try That in a Small Town Podcast Rich, a vocal conservative, described a dinner he attended with Trump and several Republican senators in 2022. At the time, the former president was holding large rallies with up to 40,000 people, but one thing about the crowds was troubling him. “He goes, why are people booing me at my rallies when I bring up the vaccine?” Rich said. He noted that Trump was still very proud at that point that he had brought the COVID products to market at “warp speed.”
The country star argued that Trump’s advisors were not serving him well. “It dawned on me that nobody had told the man what I was telling him,” he posited. “They all work for him, they all got something to gain from him—they are not going to tell him this.”
Rich declared, “I don’t work for him and I think a lot of him and I wanted him to understand the truth about it. I said here’s why they’re booing you, Mr. President. Because every human being out in that rally, either themselves or they know someone directly, who has been harmed by the vaccine or has even died from it, including me,” he said, adding that he told Trump he has “members of my own family who were forced to take it against their will to keep their jobs, and now they’ve got all kinds of problems,” including major heart and lung problems.
According to Rich, Trump said, “this is unbelievable!” and asked if anyone else at the table had heard it.
Rich said Hershel Walker, who was the Republican nominee in the 2022 U.S. Senate election in Georgia, answered that he was hearing the same thing. “Mr. President, down in Georgia, my constituents come up at my rallies and what John just said I hear every single day,” Rich recounted Walker as saying.
He said that Trump then looked over at Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), who nervously nodded in agreement.
The country star shared that he started telling Trump about the vaccine injured members of his own family, but Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) cut in (“swishing his chardonnay around”) to warn Trump about “conspiracy theorists like John Rich,” saying Democrats will try to take credit for what he did and they’re going to beat you in the next election.”
The country music star had told the hosts earlier that Graham is his “least favorite politician in the world,” and that he “would rather go hang out with Tim Walz.”
It certainly explains why Trump a) stopped bragging about the vaccine and b) still hasn’t held anyone accountable for it. I wouldn’t rule out the latter eventually, though. He’s understandably a little busy with that whole economic war thing at the moment.
It’s easy for us who are either skeptical Gen Xers or longtime conspiracy theologians to forget that most people still blindly trust doctors, trust experts, and trust scientists, or at least they did back in 2020. Especially if they are Boomers or an older generation. They didn’t grow up in the same world we did.
