Last updated on July 18th, 2023 at 01:44 pm
Over the last weekend, while Trump participated in his disappointing “speaking tour” with Bill O’Reilly, Trump answered a casual and quick O’Reilly question, “Are you boosted?” To which Trump said that yes, he had received the booster. In what is now an expected development, the crowd booed. O’Reilly admitted that the boos bothered Trump so much that he was forced to comfort Trump in a call later that evening.
The crowd may have booed, but the admission impressed one person who appreciated Trump’s honesty and… responsibility? President Joe Biden gave a presidential statement on Tuesday focused upon the Omicron explosion across the United States. During the speech, Biden praised Trump’s Operation Warp Speed effort to bring the vaccine to the public. The Trump part of the “operation” was limited to signing off on doing away with many of the regulatory steps in the face of an emergency but Trump regularly emphasizes his important contribution. President Biden also said of the booster, “it may be one of the few things he and I agree upon,” when saying that people need to be vaxxed and boosted in the face of the Omicron threat.
This morning, Trump demonstrated once again that everything with him is transactional and Trump’s feelings and beliefs about a person depend almost wholly upon the last thing the person did or said to him. At least this time it was positive. Fox News asked Trump to comment:
To get more stories like this, subscribe to our newsletter The Daily.
“I’m very appreciative of that — I was surprised to hear it. I think it was a terrific thing, and I think it makes a lot of people happy…I think he did something very good. You know, it has to be a process of healing in this country, and that will help a lot.â€
Trump’s statement makes it quite obvious that Trump believes that Biden “finally admitted” that Trump engineered this great program and it worked. And, of course, the admission “will make a lot of people happy” because they love Trump that much.
One could mock the self-obsessed nuance in the response all day long, but on this particular matter, there is a much more important point. To the extent there are pleasant words and agreements between the President and Trump, there is no better time and no better topic. If the relative warmth persuades a few thousand or tens of thousands of Fox News watchers to simply get vaccinated in the next couple of days it could save dozens to hundreds of lives. It would be especially important as the nation is standing beneath a tsunami of Omicron that is now expected to explode over the next month.
The “weirdness” of the Trump-Biden words leaves one wondering how many hundreds of thousands might still be alive had Trump been open and insistent upon people getting vaccinated and boosted from the moment he left Washington. One can see a scenario where 80 to 90% of the country would be fully vaccinated by now.
Of course, Trump has been fixated upon what he thinks is a bigger tragedy, his loss. And now, he has that small worry that his reaction to that loss could soon leave him having to answer charges which will be impossible to deny. It is unlikely there will be many more warm moments between Trump and President Biden again soon.
@JasonMiciak believes a day without learning is a day not lived. He is a political writer, features writer, author, and attorney. He is a Canadian-born dual citizen who spent his teen and college years in the Pacific Northwest and has since lived in seven states. He now enjoys life as a single dad of a young girl, writing from the beaches of the Gulf Coast. He loves crafting his flower pots, cooking, and currently studies philosophy of science, religion, and non-math principles behind quantum mechanics and cosmology. Please feel free to contact with any concerns.
