The political landscape of American politics gets weirder by the moment, if you pay attention to what one former President is saying on the campaign trail.

In a campaign appearance in Richmond, Virginia, Trump promised that “I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate or a mask mandate.” He is obviously appealing to the anti-vaxxers who refused to take the vaccine that Trump himself rushed to completion and that Trump and his family did take while in the White House.

Assuming that he is serious about his threat, he is promising to eliminate public health measures that are now the law in every state. It is now commonplace (and has been for decades) to require children to be vaccinated for various diseases before they enter school—measles, chickenpox, mumps, polio, diphtheria, etc.

Even Florida, which is officially opposed to vaccine mandates, requires students to be vaccinated before they start public school. As of July 12, 2023:

What immunizations are required for a child to attend school in Florida?

  • 5 doses DTaP (diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis).
  • 4-5 doses Polio (Kindergarten). … 
  • 2 doses MMR (measles-mumps-rubella).
  • 3 doses Hepatitis B.
  • 2 doses Varicella (chickenpox).

Despite this mandate, Florida is currently experiencing an outbreak of measles. The surgeon general of the state has told parents that it’s up to them to decide whether to send their sick child to school.

A number of contagious diseases are reappearing, according to WebMD. Among them are tuberculosis, scarlet fever, measles, mumps, and whooping cough. Some come back because the vaccines are not as effective as the bacteria evolves, and some return because people are not vaccinated.

Michael Hiltzik, columnist for the Los Angeles Times, wrote that Trump and RFK Jr. are competing for the anti-vaccine vote. If Trump is re-elected and follows through on his threats, we can expect to see a resurgence of diseases like polio that were eliminated decades ago.

Hiltzik’s column is titled: “Trump and RFK Jr. want to make the world safe again for polio and measles. You should be terrified.”

People will die from diseases that were conquered by science decades ago.

Hiltzik wrote:

Trump’s words elicited febrile cheers from his Virginia audience, which may be a sign of what I earlier identified as the phenomenon of “herd stupidity” connected with the anti-vaccine movement. 

Did these people have any conception of what they were cheering? (We can assume that Trump didn’t.) Did they cotton on to the fact that Trump was advocating depriving all Virginia public and private K-12 schools, nursery schools, child care centers and home schools of federal funding?

We know that would be the consequence of his pledge, because we know that Virginia requires children attending any of those institutions to be vaccinated against 15 diseases, with boosters where appropriate. Virginia’s mandated schedule, like those of every other state, follows the recommendations of the CDC, which calls for some vaccinations within a month or two of birth.

Trump issued his ukase against vaccine mandates right after declaring at the Richmond rally that he would “sign a new executive order to cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity, and any other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content onto our children,” thus covering pretty much the entire right-wing culture battleground, almost all of which is based on manufactured outrage.

In context, Trump’s opposition to vaccine mandates falls into the category of glorifying individual “freedom” over the communal interest. As I’ve written before, opposing vaccine mandates as a substitute for opposing vaccination itself is a fundamentally incoherent position — little more than garden variety small-government Republican ideology almost invariably invoked to protect the interests of the “haves” over the “have-nots.”

What makes it incoherent is that mandates do work. They’ve saved the lives of millions of schoolchildren who would otherwise be exposed to deadly diseases at school and play.