Donald Trump reportedly told donors at a Republican Party fundraiser that he hopes supporters get the Covid-19 vaccine.
“We need our people,” Mr Trump said at the New York event, according to The New York Times.
GOP strategists worry, partly jokingly and partly seriously, that the vaccine hesitancy of Mr Trump’s supporters will “kill off” part of the party’s own base, the Times reports.
Mr Trump’s comments at the New York fundraiser, based on two anonymous attendees of the event quoted in the report, come after the former president was booed for pushing the vaccine at a rally with his own supporters.
He told his Alabama “Save America” rally in August that he recommended they take the vaccine.
“I believe totally in your freedoms, I do, you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do. But I recommend, take the vaccines, I did it, it’s good, take the vaccines,” he said.
He was met with boos from the crowd before pivoting to recognise their freedom of choice after the negative feedback.
“That’s ok, that’s alright. You got your freedoms, but I happened to take the vaccine. If it doesn’t work, you’ll be the first to know, ok. I’ll call up Alabama and say ‘hey, you know what’, but it is working,” Mr Trump said.
“But you do have your freedoms, you have to keep, you have to maintain that,” he added.
The softening of Mr Trump’s pro-vaccine rhetoric in real-time at the Alabama rally in favour of their freedoms aligns with strategists quoted by the Times that the party’s leaders were simply following its voters.
Mr Trump has been privately ignoring pleas from his allies in the party to run a pro-vaccination campaign because he didn’t want to do Joe Biden any “favours”, according to The Daily Beast.
Quoting sources who spoke to the former president and first lady, Melania Trump, the Beast reports that Mr Trump doesn’t want to push too hard on vaccines to not “p*** off his base”.
Publicly, meanwhile, Mr Trump has blamed his successor for the vaccine hesitancy among Americans.
“People are refusing to take the vaccine because they don’t trust his administration, they don’t trust the election results, and they certainly don’t trust the Fake News, which is refusing to tell the Truth,” he said in a July statement.
To his supporters, TheTimes notes, the Trump camp has sent fundraising text messages to supporters reading: “FREEDOM PASSPORTS > VACCINE PASSPORTS”.
It promotes a $45 American flag t-shirt that says “This is my freedom passport”.
