Although the 2024 presidential election remains two years away, the Republican Party’s moderate position on Covid-19 management has coalesced. Glenn Youngkin, Virginia’s new Republican governor, distilled the policy in a series of recent initiatives: vaccinated and boosted himself, he extolled the virtues of vaccines and boosters while simultaneously rescinding a mask mandate for his state’s public schools and a vaccine mandate its public employees.

Perhaps more surprisingly, this line has been echoed by former president Donald Trump, who has received a booster after initially expressing scepticism about them. He regularly touts the development of the vaccines as a significant policy achievement of his administration. This puts Trump at odds with many members of his own base and even longtime supporter Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. DeSantis has played it coy with regard to whether he intends to receive or has received a booster for his single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine, stating only that he had “done whatever I did, the normal shot.” Trump, perhaps sensing the shifting of the political winds, fired back at his erstwhile ally, claiming that failing to disclose one’s booster status was “gutless.”

Even if tensions between Trump and DeSantis have been exaggerated for the sake of gossipy New York Times deep dives, the ex-president appears to have seized upon a critical differentiator between him and possible opponents: not mask and vaccine mandates, which most mainstream Republicans oppose, but actually receiving the vaccine or its approved boosters, which many Right-wing or “based” constituents have opposed. Beyond that, Trump has exposed a possible weakness with DeSantis’s approach: the dangers of trying to fudge one’s vaccine status to survive a primary, similar to past politicians trying to gloss over their dicey draft exemptions or conceal their sexual peccadilloes.