Dear Mr. Trump, America needs you

Dear Mr. Trump,

I know it's been a rough few months. You lost the election to Sleepy Joe Biden, and censorious Silicon Valley liberals have kicked you off of Twitter. It must be a bit lonesome down at Mar-a-Lago. But America has a problem, and we need your help.

You see, the delivery of the vaccines you helped develop through Operation Warp Speed (let's call them the Trump Vaccines) are going out around the country, but many of your most loyal supporters don't want to get them. If you went on TV and urged your followers to get vaccinated, and called up conservative media and told them to stop casting doubt on your vaccines, America could end this pandemic much more quickly.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Vaccine uptake has been going very strongly. We've got hundreds of millions of vaccines on the way, and 145 million shots already administered. All told, on vaccination America is doing shockingly well — leaving the snooty European Union in the dust. Even deep state libs grudgingly agree that you deserve some credit for Operation Warp Speed, which provided the initial funding to kick-start vaccine development and production. So far, so good!

But many conservative states are already struggling to make use of the doses they are getting. Supplies are piling up and many appointments are going unfilled. The main reason is that Republicans, and especially Republican men, tend to be skeptical of the vaccine. A recent NPR/PBS News/Marist poll found Republican men are the most vaccine-skeptical group in the country, with 49 percent reporting they would not get vaccinated, while a Kaiser Health News poll found that nearly a third of both Republicans and white evangelicals say they will "definitely not" get vaccinated. Even dozens of Republican members of Congress have not gotten their shots.

That may be because they've been watching some of your favorite television programs. On Fox News, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham have been running disgusting smears of the Trump Vaccines for weeks. Carlson in particular has repeatedly interviewed the former New York Times sicko Alex Berenson, who is apparently trying to make a quick buck spreading disinformation about your wonderful vaccines.

We already know that you support vaccination. You said yourself that you and your wife got the shot, and at CPAC recently you said, "Everybody go get your shot." On Newsmax recently, to your credit, you said, "I got the vaccine. I got the FDA to do it in 9 months instead of 5 years … That's going to save the world, frankly."

So how can you tolerate these other conservative media personalities talking nonsense about your big, beautiful vaccines? How dare they? It's a personal insult to you, a slander of all your hard work and leadership, and will quite literally get thousands of your own loyal supporters killed. (Those are votes any future Republican presidential candidate may well miss.)

I humbly suggest you start making some calls, and booking some appearances on these shows. Sean Hannity is a good friend of yours, and I'm sure he at least would have you on. Tell your loyal MAGA followers every chance you get that all red-blooded patriots should get the Trump Vaccine immediately, just like you did. (Again, it could save their lives.) Tell Hannity, Carlson, and Ingraham to knock it off — and call up Lachlan Murdoch, and tell him you won't stand for this sort of thing. After all, if these vaccines are so dangerous, why was his father Rupert Murdoch so eager to get his dose?

What's more, Republicans will listen! In the Kaiser survey, one in five Republicans said they would be more likely to get vaccinated if you urged them to do it. And I would bet a lot more would follow along if you got Fox News and the other conservative networks to cool it with their anti-Trump Vaccine smears.

Now, other Republicans have made some halting efforts to convince MAGA voters to get their shots. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said at a recent press conference that there's "no good argument not to get the vaccination. I would encourage all men regardless of party affiliation to get the vaccination." But nobody trusts McConnell, and he doesn't exactly make for compelling television. He simply doesn't inspire the sort of fervent loyalty that you do.

The quickest way to end this pandemic is if enough people get vaccinated that the virus can't find enough viable hosts to spread. That will take something like 70 percent of the country getting their shots. But if half of Republicans refuse to get theirs, the pandemic will continue to smolder for weeks or even months.

So please, Mr. Trump: Do us all a solid, and stop letting these TV goofballs mess up your greatest accomplishment.