Ex-RNC chair says Trump destroying his legacy to please his worst allies

President Donald Trump in the White House Oval Office on April 23, 2025 (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok/Flickr)

President Donald Trump appears keen to please some of the worst of his MAGA supporters as he "tramples his own legacy," a former RNC chair wrote for MS NOW, mounting a "desperate pitch" as his pool of backers gets shallower and shallower.

Michael Steele previously chaired the Republican National Committee from 2009 to 2011, and has since emerged as an outspoken conservative critic of Trump and his political agenda, including in his role as a political analyst for MS NOW. In his latest piece for the outlet on Sunday, Steele wrote that the president is now "undermining [the] biggest accomplishment" of his first term, in a bid to attract "conspiracy-minded voters."

Steele referred to Trump's recent executive order, which called for major changes to the childhood vaccination schedule, after years of right-wing conspiracy theorists falsely claiming that vaccines are dangerous, especially to children. The order specifically calls for the measles, mumps and rubella shots — commonly and safely administered as a combined injection — to be spaced out across multiple appointments.

Steele wrote that this order marked "a remarkable reversal for a president who once treated vaccine development as one of the signature achievements of his first term."

"President Donald Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic was riddled with misinformation and chaos," Steele wrote. "But amid that dysfunction, his administration launched Operation Warp Speed, the public-private partnership that accelerated the development and distribution of COVID vaccines. Trump called it a 'monumental national achievement.' Even Joe Biden, who was running against him at the time, credited the administration when he got the shot. Six years later, Trump is trashing that legacy as he courts the most conspiracy-minded factions of the coalition that put him back in office."

He added later: "While touting the order, Trump made several wildly false and dangerous claims, including the lie that vaccines are linked to autism. It’s a desperate pitch to pro-Trump parents, the Make America Healthy Again movement and conspiracy theorists, all of whom distrust childhood vaccinations. Doctors are urging Americans to ignore Trump’s vaccine order. Compliance with it would lead to reduced efficiency even if it was based in some sort of scientific reality."

Vaccines for COVID-19 were developed in a historically short amount of time across 2020, in large part thanks to the first Trump administration's "Operation Warp Speed" initiative. Supporters and enemies alike have generally agreed that it was one of, if not the single best achievement of Trump's first term. Now, however, as the MAGA right-wing becomes increasingly enmeshed with the anti-vaccine movement, Trump and his allies have become increasingly critical of vaccinations and vaccine requirements, despite the preponderance of scientific evidence, leading them to discount or outright demonize the results of Operation Warp Speed.

"There’s a real risk here," Steel later concluded. "By giving the imprimatur of the White House to these outlandish theories, Trump elevates them in the political conversation and gives them new fuel to metastasize. He turns idle chatter on the internet into official government records and undermines the serious work of historians, scientists and prosecutors. That is bad enough. But with his latest sop on vaccination to the conspiracy-minded, Trump is repudiating his own record, hurting his own supporters and putting the lives of Americans at risk."

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