Florida’s Anti-Vax Misogyny and Trump’s Hypocrisy

On September 3, Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo made news again. With a grinning Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis at his side, he announced that his state would no longer require vaccines for children. Even more shocking were Dr. Ladapo’s subsequent admissions on national television.

Laced throughout were Republican hypocrisy and misogyny to which US President Donald Trump added an exclamation point a few days later.

“A Gift From God”

Describing Florida’s new anti-vaccine policy, Dr. Ladapo said, “Your body is a gift from God.” He added that the administration would be “working to end” all vaccine mandates. “Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery.”

On September 7, he tried to defend his actions on CNN’s “State of the Union”:

Anchor Jake Tapper: “Before you made this decision to lift vaccine mandates for Florida, which include obviously public schools, did your department do any data analysis, did you do any data projections of how many new cases of these diseases there will be in Florida, once you remove vaccine mandates?”

Ladapo: “Absolutely not….There is this conflation of the science and sort of what is the right and wrong thing to do… I’m saying it’s an issue of right and wrong.”

Tapper confronted Dr. Ladapo with facts: 82% of Florida parents with kids in school wanted mandatory vaccines for children; every medical organization in the country (American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, Florida Medical Association) urged mandatory vaccines for children; and even Florida Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) supported Florida’s existing vaccine mandate, which allows religious exemptions.

Tapper: “All of these people are wrong, and you’re right.”

Ladapo: “Casting it in that way is not what I would do. It’s not how I would look at it.”

Dr. Ladapo then explained why facts don’t matter: “I share what is the right thing to do. Whether it’s popular or not…. It’s really about ethics. Is it really appropriate for a government or any other entity to dictate to you what you should put in your body? It is absolutely not appropriate.”

Then came Dr. Ladapo’s money quote: “You have sovereignty over your body.”

He forgot an important GOP caveat: unless you’re a woman.

Hypocrisy and Mysogyny

Dr. Ladapo and Gov. DeSantis campaigned to defeat a Florida abortion-rights measure on the November 2024 ballot. During that effort, Dr. Ladapo signed a letter to Florida TV stations telling them to stop running an abortion rights ad, asserting that it was false and dangerous. His letter also said that broadcasters could face criminal prosecution.

A federal court enjoined Dr. Ladapo’s actions as a violation of the First Amendment right to free speech and barred him from taking any further action to coerce or intimidate broadcasters running the commercials.

The abortion-rights initiative received 57% of the popular vote, but failed to meet the 60% supermajority required for adoption.

And Then Came Trump

But when it comes to misogyny and hypocrisy among government leaders, Trump has few peers. The day after Dr. Ladapo’s appearance on CNN, Trump addressed his newly-created Religious Liberty Commission at the Museum of the Bible. He boasted that Washington DC’s crime rate was down 87% and asserted that it would be down even more—100%—if domestic violence wasn’t included in the city’s crime statistics:

Much lesser things, things that take place in the home, they call crime. You know, they’ll do anything they can to find something. If a man has a little fight with the wife, they say, ‘This was a crime, see?’ So now I can’t claim 100%.

The federal government has long recognized domestic violence as a national public health and safety crisis.

Among homicides in the United States, intimate partners kill almost 50% of female and 10% of male victims, according to a recent study published in the Journal of Family Violence.

A national survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 4 in 10 women and 1 in 4 men have experienced physical or sexual violence or stalking by an intimate partner.

An average of 24 people per minute are victims of rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner in the United States—more than 12 million women and men over the course of a single year.

One in 4 women (24.3%) and 1 in 7 men (13.8%) aged 18 and older in the US have been the victim of severe physical violence by an intimate partner in their lifetime.

The same day Trump appeared at the Religious Liberty Commission, the federal Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed E. Jean Carroll’s $83.3 million verdict against Trump for defamation. She had accused him of sexual assault in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman’s in Manhattan; he said that her claim was “totally false.” A jury found that Trump had acted with malice in defaming her.

The Epstein Story Gets Worse

Before September 8 ended, the dead hand of Jeffrey Epstein grabbed Trump again. For months, Trump had denied sending a signed sketch outlining a naked woman for inclusion in the child sex trafficker’s “50^th-birthday book.” In addition to vehement denials, he sued The Wall Street Journal for $10 billion for publishing the sketch.

The House Oversight Committee subpoenaed the Epstein estate for the “birthday book.” On September 8, the committee’s Democrats released the page of the book on which that sketch appeared. The signature “Donald” is remarkably similar to Trump’s other signed notes at the time, although the White House still denied that it was his.

Meanwhile, on September 4, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) was trying to help quell Trump’s ongoing Epstein debacle when he said that Trump had been an “FBI informant to try and take this [Epstein] stuff down.” Three days later, Johnson was eating those ridiculous words.

It’s All About Faith… in Marketing

In his hour-long rambling before the Religious Liberty Commission on September 8, Trump urged, “We have to bring back religion in America, bring it back stronger than ever before.”

Trump also said that he was donating his personal family Bible for display at the museum.

News reports of his appearance don’t indicate whether Trump’s “God Bless the USA” Bibles were on sale at the event. The autographed version is $1,000. The Presidential, First Lady, Vice President, Veteran, Platinum, Golden Age, and Inauguration Editions are $99.99 each. Trump earned $1.3 million from his Bible sales in 2024.

And don’t forget to check out Trump crypto, pumpkin spice, MAGA caps, jackets, tote bags, tumblers, gold sneakers, pickleball equipment…

If you don’t live near a Trump Store, those items and more are available at his online shop.