WATCH: Morning Joe Regular Absurdly Insists We Can Solve Pandemic By Heaping Vaccine Credit on Trump

Morning Joe bro Donny Deutsch said that we could solve the coronavirus pandemic by heavily marketing the immunizations as “The Trump Vaccine,” which is not a new stupid idea, but stupider in the context of the delta variant.

On Friday morning’s edition of the MSNBC morning show, Deutsch told co-host Mika Brzezinski “I have an interesting branding idea, it kind of makes me sick on one level but I think it would be effective on the other level, is that let’s call this the Trump vaccine.”

Let’s give our old fearless leader some big kudos here and say Donald Trump, this is your vaccine, you’ve saved lives, this is warp speed under your thing, and let’s sell it that way to the American public, to these people who come — actually if Donald Trump came out, if somebody could appeal to Donald Trump and say ‘Donald, we’re going to just rescue your legacy here, and you are going to get credit for the vaccine. You’re going to get credit for saving tens and hundreds of millions of lives,’ and let’s repackage this as the Trump vaccine, just like there was Obamacare, it’s the Trump Vaccine. Let’s give the big guy credit. And I really think that that in a strange way would start to motivate and change some minds.

I know that’s probably not going to happen, but to me that would be the final push. And the other answer is just mandate. Look, you can’t smoke cigarettes inside. Why? Because yes you have freedoms in this country, but you don’t have the freedom to get other people sick. and we got there with cigarette smoking and second hand smoke, but let’s call this the Trump vaccine, let’s do it, let’s sell it that way, let’s give the guy credit.

Brzezinski responded with a hesitant “Whatever… Whatever works.”

This idea has been trotted out for a very long time, perhaps most ostentatiously by Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera in the immediate wake of Trump’s defeat in November. The idea was stupid then, but not nearly as stupid as it is now.

With the U.S. on the verge or in the middle of a new delta-fueled wave, the desperation to get the unvaccinated idiots who are providing transmission and a playing field on which to mutate further (“Gamma variant,” anyone?) into the herd is palpable. That desperation, coupled with a desperation for content, has led to multiple recent floatings of the idea that if we all just swallowed hard and credited Trump, these people would drop their resistance and get the shot.

That might have worked in November or January, but Trump ruined any chance he had to ensmarten his idiot base when he chose to get the vaccine in private and only reveal it months later.

Aside from the abundant evidence that nothing — not even literally being interviewed from an actual Covid hospital bed — will change these people’s minds, Trump has already advised his followers to get vaccinated. Repeatedly.

But here’s why that hasn’t worked already, and won’t ever work: it’s too late. His followers figure to themselves “He’s just saying these things now because he has to,” as they have countless other times when Trump would first defend, say, white supremacists or Capitol insurrectionists, or refuse to disavow David Duke, only to later deliver some sort of rote and forced fig leaf of varying strength. They figure it’s part media ass-covering and part troll.

It would be a tough pill to swallow, but worth it if it worked, but it wouldn’t work. And talking about it wastes time that should be spent building support for things that would work, like vaccine mandates and reinstating mask guidance for everyone because nobody wants to check whether people have been vaccinated.

Watch above via MSNBC.

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

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