If You Oppose Endless Covid Mandates, You Can Blame the Divisiveness of Donald Trump

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There is now so little doubt that our views regarding the coronavirus pandemic break down along partisan political lines that it is widely accepted by the news media — even when it is clearly not this simple — that vaccinated people are overwhelmingly Democrats and unvaccinated are almost all Republicans. But there is almost no cogent analysis for WHY such a deep divide exists on nearly every aspect of Covid, an illness that is not inherently political.

After all, the virus obviously does not discriminate based on politics, and you could argue that it is actually a little more dangerous to Republicans, who tend to be older than Democrats. While economic lockdowns would seem to more abhorrent to conservatives, there are elements of the often heavy-handed governmental response, specifically mask and vaccine mandates, which, at least logically, should be far more offensive to pro-civil liberty liberals, especially since racial minorities are statistically less enthusiastic about getting vaccinated.

Usually, with a mysterious cultural oddity like this one, there are multiple significant factors which can be cited to explain it. In this case, one which overwhelms all others is that the pandemic began while Donald Trump was president of the United States.

Quite simply, Trump is the prism through which nearly everyone, especially progressives, sees how we should respond to the pandemic. It is because of Trump, and the extremely emotional reactions to him on both sides of the widening political canyon, that many people, whether they realize it or, have chosen their positions here, specifically regarding mandates.

If you look at the political evolution of mask mandates, which were initially mocked by Dr. Anthony Fauci at the start of the pandemic, it is clear that the movement to urge government to order their use was led by progressives. It is my view that this was borne more out of a desire to express opposition to Trump (who, rather ironically, was likely “anti-mask” at the start because of statements Dr. Fauci had made) than strong scientific evidence, data, or logic warranting mask use being mandated.

At that point, liberals became invested in the idea that masks must work to stop the spread of Covid. After all, if they are not as effective as believed, this would mean that Trump and his knuckle-dragging, anti-science supporters were right, and, just as unacceptably, they have been causing themselves a whole lot of hassle over most of the last two years.

As a true conservative/libertarian who loathes Trump, I will always have great anger at liberals and the “experts” they revere for lacking the courage to question their view of masks once we got unprecedented real-world data from all over the world showing little evidence that aggressive mandates make a difference worthy of a government edict in a supposedly free country. But the core problem here was the fundamental flaw in Trump’s hyper-divisive style of wielding power, which caused over 50% of the country to not just disagree with him, but to despise and distrust him so much that they instinctively came to the opposite conclusion of whatever they thought he believed.

Anti-Trump Republicans like the “Lincoln Project,” made up of people I used to respect and consider friends, are the ultimate proof of this phenomenon. Post-Covid they have regularly taken positions which they NEVER would have come to if they didn’t feel compelled to be anti-Trump at all costs. Conversely, in a Trump-less world, qualified people like Dr. Scott Atlas and Senator Rand Paul would be taken very seriously despite their contrarian opinions on the science, but instead they are completely discredited in the mainstream media because of the toxicity of their support of a president who once infamously suggested we study injecting our citizens with bleach in order to stop the virus.

In short, there is a strong case that had Trump been in favor of wearing masks, and especially if he had wanted government to mandate their use, liberals would not have become so religiously devoted to them, and my nine-year old daughter would not be forced to wear one in school here in California, likely for years to come. In fact, the evidence that liberals were so blinded by their hatred of Trump that they came to opposite position than him, almost involuntarily, goes way beyond masks and relates to schools directly.

It has been conveniently memory-holed by the news media, but one of the most outrageous developments of the 2020 presidential campaign was that medical “experts” radically changed their view on schools reopening, likely not based on science, but because Trump had just made doing so a central issue. This gave cover to the teacher’s unions and their Democratic allies to deny Trump a major victory and, in the process, rob millions of kids a year of real schooling (a similar dynamic occurred with college football, where liberal academia did their very best to kill the sport during the presidential campaign, before having to settle, thanks to a massive public backlash, for only castrating it beyond recognition).

Then there is the white-hot topic of vaccine mandates. It is truly bizarre, even for these insane times, that it is now Democrats and their news media allies who are demonizing those who have the audacity to be “vaccine hesitant,” when it was they who, when Trump was still president, sowed seeds of doubt about the vaccines back when they were worried their hyper-fast development might help him win re-election.

Had Trump won, and was now, via a highly questionable executive order, federally mandating that gigantic numbers of people take them or lose their jobs, Democrats would undoubtedly be calling him a tyrant and a racist. There is also little doubt that the news media would question the vaccines more, and would be highlighting every “breakthrough death” as if it was an indication the vaccines were underperforming expectations.

Here again, Trump is at least partly to blame. Not just because his unprofessional governing style caused Democrats to lose their minds, and Republicans to lose their majorities needed to reign in the absurdity of the dramatic liberal overreach. But also because, thanks to Trump being president when Covid hit, liberals will always, mostly subconsciously, overestimate the danger of the virus, and will therefore go further than science or logic would warrant in their futile/counter-productive attempt to completely eradicate it, if only to prove that they could somehow do what Trump could not.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.