The last month or so has seen a wave of complaints that President Trump, unlike former presidents, isn’t out there pushing the vaccine.

President Trump’s latest comments addressed both the vaccine and why he isn’t acting as a salesman for it.

Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday recommended Americans get vaccinated to help fight the Covid pandemic, engaging on the issue after months of relative silence.

“I would recommend it,” Trump said during an interview on Fox News with Maria Bartiromo. “And I would recommend it to a lot of people that don’t want to get it and a lot of those people voted for me, frankly. But again, we have our freedoms and we have to live by that and I agree with that also. But it is a great vaccine. It is a safe vaccine and it is something that works.”

“We have our freedoms”.

That’s a traditionally American response.

The vaccine is an option. President Trump helped make it happen, and despite Democrat doubts and fear-mongering, it’s here. And it’s up to people whether to get it or not.

The Democrat hard sell can only accomplish one thing and that’s to make people who are already skeptical about the vaccine, less likely to get it.

And that’s the traditional lefty paradigm which assumes that people can’t possibly make decisions on their own about it or anything else, and that the main job of government is to bully people into collectively following its guidance.

That’s not the American view of government. It’s an un-American socialist agenda. And when Americans are told what to do, they get their backs up. That’s how free people respond to a hard sell. America was built on letting people make their own decisions. When Democrats respond by pressuring people, the backlash leads to everything from civil disobedience to conspiracy theories to violence. The obvious solution is to stop the nanny statism. But you can no more ask socialists to stop trying to inflict a nanny state than you can ask a skunk to change its stripes.

President Trump’s answer is a reminder of how an American president is supposed to respond: by telling people they have the right to choose.