In December 2020, the first COVID-19 vaccines became available in the United States, developed under Operation Warp Speed — a program Trump created and rightly claimed credit for accelerating. Trump himself was vaccinated in January 2021, quietly, at the White House. He did not disclose it publicly for months.
The Divide
What followed was one of the most deadly failures of political leadership in modern American history. Rather than using his influence to encourage his supporters to get vaccinated — which would have been easy, given that he could have branded it as his vaccine — Trump stayed largely silent. Meanwhile, his media ecosystem did the opposite: Fox News hosts questioned vaccine safety, Republican governors resisted mandates, and the anti-vax movement became a core MAGA identity marker.
By mid-2021, vaccination rates had diverged sharply along partisan lines. Counties that voted for Trump had significantly lower vaccination rates than counties that voted for Biden. The gap widened as the year progressed. By fall 2021, when the Delta variant surged through unvaccinated populations, the consequences became measurable in death tolls.
A study published in Health Affairs found that from April to December 2021, excess death rates were 26% higher in Republican-leaning counties than in Democratic-leaning ones, after adjusting for age and other factors. A separate analysis by NPR found that the gap in death rates between red and blue America widened from late 2021 through 2022. The vaccines were free, widely available, and remarkably effective at preventing death. The gap was not about access. It was about politics.
The Booing
At an August 2021 rally in Cullman, Alabama, Trump briefly told the crowd: “I recommend take the vaccines. I did it. It’s good.” The crowd booed him. He quickly moved on. He never made a sustained public push for vaccination again. The one time his followers told him they didn’t want to hear it, he stopped saying it. He chose their approval over their lives.
Bottom Line
Donald Trump had more influence over the unvaccinated population than any other person in America. He could have saved thousands of lives with a sustained public vaccination campaign. He had the credibility with exactly the people who were dying. Instead, he let his media allies turn a public health tool into a political weapon, stayed silent when it mattered, and backed off the one time his crowd pushed back. The excess deaths in red counties were not inevitable. They were the result of a political movement that decided a preventable disease was a culture war, led by a man who got the vaccine himself and let his followers die.
Sources
- Health Affairs: Excess death rates 26% higher in Republican counties, partisan vaccination gap study.
- NPR: COVID death rates diverging by political affiliation and vaccination rates.
- Associated Press: Trump booed at Alabama rally after recommending vaccines, August 2021.