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This would have been enough on its own not too long ago to kill someone’s campaign. Fuck all of this.

This is an older article from 2023 where he also talked about. Why is this person even on the ballot???? www.livemint.com/news/world/n...

No money for schools with vaccine mandate: Donald Trump’s vision for Americawww.livemint.com Check what else ‘must be done’ to save America from destruction, as per Donald Trump.

Because tens of millions of Americans absolutely eat this stuff up and it's still a democracy for now.

It's not a democracy. Get your head out of your ass please.

Congrats on your successful invocation of a GOP talking point.

You have to be pretty comfortable to believe the US is a democracy when the representatives win by capital and are controlled by capitalists. This has been articulated long before the GOP

Yep. The US being such a weak democracy is a huge part of why the populist pressure valve is currently on red

Look, if it were actually democracy, the numbers we saw from 2016 would never have seen Trump seated in the office. but I understand what you're trying to say.

I can think of some billion reasons why, if you know what I mean

Does anyone have a clip of former President Trump saying this in Richmond? I trust former Rep. Comstock (R-VA) to be accurately conveying what he said, and the article linked downthread confirms he's said it before. I think hearing it from the horse's mouth is the most powerful way to attack.

Thank you to everyone for your responses and, in particular to @mizzelle.bsky.social for sending the Youtube link to the Richmond speech. The link below starts right when Trump promises that he will ban all federal funding to any school that has any vaccine mandates. Measles, anyone?

Watch Donald Trump rally in Richmond: 'We are going to make a big play for Virginia'youtu.be In Richmond, supporters started lining up Saturday morning for an evening rally at a downtown convention center. The entry lines stretched several blocks by ...

And polio.

He says “a vaccine mandate or a mask mandate.” Is it clear he’s definitely talking about all vaccines here? From context (because of the mention of masks) I would assume he just means covid. But I don’t know if he’s talking about this elsewhere. (I know he’s said general antivax things before.)

If you watch the full vid he’s not specifically talking about covid he also mashes it in with transphobia

"I'll take 'Things That Turn Frogs Gay' for $450M, Alex!"

Florida is currently saying let it rip with measles so it's probably all vaccines.

Also there's been a push since Covid for states - some which used to have pretty tight restrictions with no exemptions - to roll back vaccine mandates not just covid ones. Alabama springs to mind - they allowed religious exemptions but not moral or philosophical for school

*should have said limited exemptions The internet's recency bias is making it hard to pull up but there were charts pre-covid of which states it was easiest/hardest to opt out of school vaccines and I remember finding the list surprising

It's not like he has a policy memo we can read to answer that question. Whatever he's saying is just whatever he's saying. There is no false reading of it and no true reading of it. Probably best to plan for the worst.

And it's not like "no vaccine requirements in schools, even for measles" is an unheard-of position for the current GOP wapo.st/3P73Cj0

Analysis | The GOP’s anti-vaccine mandate push is seeping into other vaccines — and schoolswapo.st The writing has been on the wall for a while. Now Republicans in some states are moving forward with actual proposals.

It sort of doesn't matter what he means. If people respond well to the notion of banning all vaccine mandates, then he'll simply retcon his remarks to mean that.

I feel like 1. it's unlikely he's thought about it half as hard as you do in this skeet, and 2. it doesn't matter what he means by it now, he'll feel free to have meant something else by it later.

Boy, am I just totally *not* willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, and pre-cleanup the language for him. Democrats should hit him on this, interpreting as all vaccines, because that’s what he said. If he wants to clean it up, let him clean it up.

“If you’re explaining, you’re losing” The onus should be on him to explain.

doesn’t matter. Biden could threaten to withhold funds from FL for their “don’t say gay” or “white folks shouldn’t feel bad about race” laws, but if he did, FL would just shrug @ say, “NP. We’ll close the schools. We like ‘em ignorant anyway.” Blue states want a healthy, educated populace.

I mean, this is Trump, so he probably doesn't care what he means. If it gets the crowd rallied up, he'll say it. Unless one of his minions especially wish to follow through on it, it's likely he'll forget about it by next week.

If he didn't mean all vaccines here, he will the next time when it's clear his base approves.

Over a million Americans died because of his inability to follow expert advice. If the conversation shifts to the pandemic response, that can only help Trump's opponents.

Yes it's clear. If he was being specific about Covid, he'd have said Covid. He says what his audience wants to hear and his audience isn't interested in nuance when it comes to vaccines.

He's talking like it's all vaccines for the anti-vax base, but leaving enough deniability so he can walk it back to "just covid" if he gets called on it.

I don't see how he could be talking about only covid, because thanks to the CDC's neutering, I don't think there are very many, if any, covid mandates left.

I think you’re way overparsing it. He doesn’t have a policy plan; he just takes words he’s been trained on and arranges them in an order that makes his audience happy. ChatGPTrump.

We wouldn’t give another candidate a pass or a charitable interpretation of their words. We shouldn’t with this guy either.

polio ftw! also, he’s vaccinated.

Death cult stuff.

His voice falls in stating it, almost as if he realizes what he is saying as he’s saying it. Which we know cannot be the case.

He might have had a twinge of doubt, but of course, powered through.

I would hazard a guess that if someone asked him if he was talking about basic childhood vaccines, like polio or measles, he wouldn't have a clue what they were talking about. More likely he's still rerunning the Covid controversies, because that's what he does.

And I'm not saying that's a good thing, but I also think one has to be careful not to expand on the actual verbiage (such as it is), because then he might comes across as actually engaging in some kind of thought, rather than just regurgitating words.

This is the mistake that political reporters did from the very start of his winning the Presidential election and they continue to do it to this day, even as his verbiage gets more disjoined, repetitive and nonsensical.

LBJ reportedly spread a rumor that a political opponent slept with barnyard animals. An aide challenged him that LBJ had to know it wasn't true. LBJ supposedly said, "I know it's not true. I want to hear him deny it." I want to hear Tump deny he's against MMR. Anti-vaxxers won't like that.

Clinton should give Trump the Lyndon Johnson treatmentthehill.com She should take her cues from LBJ and use Trump’s own words against him.

I've said before, calling Trump a liar gives him too much credit. He opens his mouth and words come out, and he's learned which words make people happy so he says those ones a lot. Those words intersecting with reality close enough to be 'true' or 'false' is entirely accidental.

Amen. FPOTUS can say something false, thinking it's true (because he's ignorant). He can say something false, thinking it's false (because he has not compunction about lying). He can say something true, thinking it's true. He can say something true, thinking it's false (ignorance). He doesn't care.

In general I'm not sure whether he thinks *at all* on whether the words he says are true or false. The only exception I can think of is his election night 2020 remarks, where I think he was completely and actively conscious of the lie, and the gravity of it, the entire time he was speaking.

What he cares about deeply though is everyone defending what he said. Even if he is wrong. Apparent when he went with "CJ or DJ" at a SOTU. Then with that Sharpie enhancement to include Alabama. Finally, with the J6 election fraud. It has worked remarkably well for him.

OMG he’s a Large Language Model. GPTrump-4.

The worst part is that the people pushing this like Trump and the GOP leaders — Everyone knows they are vaccinated themselves and willl continue to vaccinate their grandkids. They just want to deny others. Because their entire belief structure is “fuck you, I got mine”

in case the video isn't jumping to the right point for anyone else, it's around 1:08:55

I wonder if this also isn't designed (by people smarter than Trump) as a blow to public schools. More parents will turn to private schools that do have vaccine requirements. Greg Abbott is probably wondering how to make this work in favor of charter schools.