Donald Trump Jr. inadvertently kicked off a popular movement with liberals on social media, after jokingly suggesting that only those vaccinated against Covid-19 should be able to cast ballots.
“Someone should introduce a bill mandating that you have to show your vaccination card to vote, and watch everyone on the left’s brain malfunction and explode,” Trump Jr. said in a tweet shared over the weekend by Democrat super political action committee Really American.
While Trump Jr.’s post was intended to poke fun at the Democratic Party’s seeming support for Covid-19 vaccine mandates set by businesses while pushing back against the stricter voter ID laws recently enacted in states such as Georgia, liberals were quick to embrace the idea, taking it at face value.
Many supporters of the idea to link constituents’ vaccination status to their eligibility to vote cited the higher vaccination rates among those who identify as Democrats, and were already savouring the prospect of stripping unvaccinated Republicans of their voting rights.
Trump Jr. responded to the hashtag #VaxtoVote kicked off by his tweet by blasting supporters of the Democratic Party for endorsing the restriction of the voting rights of people they disagree with – something critics of the new Georgia voting legislation have accused Republicans of doing.
“Libs with a hilarious self-own trending #VaxToVote,” he tweeted. “After years of crying about voter ID as a supposedly ‘racist’ restriction on voting rights, the left is now un-ironically calling for vax cards to be required to vote...You know, an ACTUAL restriction on voting rights.”
A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found attitudes about vaccination in the US are largely divided along party lines. Conducted June 27 to 30, it reported that, while some 86% of Democrats have received at least one Covid-19 vaccine shot, only 45% of Republicans have been similarly inoculated. Some 47% of Republicans said they might never get vaccinated.
Still, Don Jr’s “proposal” might not ring hollow among a sizable portion of his party’s supporters, as the GOP voter base appears to be split on the issue. A new survey by the Covid States Project showed that, while about 64% of all Americans favor a universal vaccine mandate, 45% of Republicans approve of the idea.
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