National Review Writer Blasts Team DeSantis for Attacking Trump on Vaccines: Risks Making Trump Look Like the ‘Saner’ One

AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall, File

Over the past year or so, the writers and editors at National Review have often been among Ron DeSantis’ loudest cheerleaders, touting the Florida governor as the path forward for a post-Donald Trump GOP, but DeSantis’s campaign strategy on the topic of vaccines is drawing major concerns, as NRO senior writer Noah Rothman argues.

The wisdom of seeking to escape Trump’s problems with another Florida Man who seems determined to mimic many of the ex-president’s flaws remains to be seen, but nonetheless, Rothman spent much of his column titled “The DeSantis Campaign Could Regret Flirting with Vaccine Skepticism” praising DeSantis’ campaign apparatus as “refreshing and necessary” for its willingness to attack Trump with “a variety of solid attacks” that came “from almost every available angle.”

The problem, wrote Rothman, is that Team DeSantis was “exercising little discretion in the formulation of some of these attacks” on Trump and “staking claim to ground from which they will eventually have to retreat” — meaning their aggressive efforts to cut into Trump’s sizable lead in the GOP presidential primary ran a very real risk of being general election poison, should DeSantis somehow win the nomination.

Trump’s disastrous interview with Fox News anchor Bret Baier last week provided the DeSantis campaign with “plenty of fodder” for attacks, Rothman wrote, but the “DeSantis War Room,” the campaign’s rapid response social media account, “inexplicably committed itself to criticizing Trump for being too supportive of Covid vaccines.”

Rothman broke down the main arguments from Team DeSantis, such as claims Trump was refusing to acknowledge “adverse effects” from the Covid-19 vaccines, and pointed out that the massive number of people who have been vaccinated provides “ample subjects to study.”

“Basic logic would suggest that it would be difficult if not impossible to hide widespread side-effects in the population of over 230 million Americans who are considered fully vaccinated,” wrote Rothman, noting as one example, the risk of myocarditis “was more pronounced among those who contracted Covid-19 and were unvaccinated than among those who contracted it and were,” and further, “the risk of this complication arising from the Covid vaccine was no greater than that of its arising from other vaccines.”

Still, Team DeSantis has dug into this attack repeatedly and aggressively, leading Rothman to ask, “To whom is this sort of agitation appealing?”

A solid majority of Republicans are themselves vaccinated and boosted against Covid-19, and those numbers seem to be even stronger among older Republican voters, who make up a major share of the GOP primary electorate and are even more likely to describe themselves as MAGA supporters.

The Florida governor was acting in a “profoundly cynical” way to attack the same vaccines he once promoted, noted Rothman, and considering the recency of these pandemic-era events, it seems unlikely that voters would not see through this “hypocrisy.”

By attacking Trump on vaccines, DeSantis was undermining “one of his candidacy’s core strengths” in an effort to “offend the ‘right’ people with rhetorical overtures” toward voters who “do not make up anything close to the majority of Republican primary voters” and aren’t likely to be “the kind of committed, reliable supporters upon whom a successful campaign depends.”

If DeSantis becomes the GOP nominee, Rothman concluded, the “flirtation” with these anti-vaxxer elements “will become a millstone around the campaign’s neck in the general election”:

It is profoundly heartening to see Republican campaigns at long last taking the fight for the soul of the GOP to Donald Trump in earnest. But throwing wild haymakers at the former president without concern for the collateral damage could do more harm than good. It is important to see targeted, tailored attacks on Trump that appeal to his conservative supporters as much as they do his opponents. But if, at the end of the day, it’s Trump who ends up looking like the saner party in this debate, those attacks have doubtlessly backfired.