Entering Our Crank Era
The Trump administration will be defined by people who refuse to trust empirical reality. RFK Jr. will be its avatar.
The TV-guy administration grows: Yesterday, Donald Trump tapped Dr. Mehmet Oz as his administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. “Dr. Oz will work closely with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to take on the illness industrial complex, and all the horrible chronic diseases left in its wake,” Trump said in a statement.
We can only assume the next tranche of nominees will include Pat Sajak, Maury Povich, and Stephen A. Smith. Happy Wednesday.
Brain Worms in Control
by Andrew Egger
If you spent any time online in 2020 (a big year for being online!), you likely encountered the “plandemic”—the dark conspiracy theory that the coronavirus that brought the world to its knees had been deliberately unleashed by sinister elites to enrich themselves and increase their power over the masses via an eventual vaccine. The theory was huge among online conspiracy theorists, Facebook-addled MAGA boomers, and future nominees to run the Department of Health and Human Services.
Yesterday, Sam Stein and I1 unearthed a previously unreported video of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. playing footsie with the theory in August 2020:
Many people argue that this pandemic was a “plandemic,” that it was planned from the outset, it’s part of a sinister scheme. I can’t tell you the answer to that. I don’t have enough evidence. A lot of it feels very planned to me. I don’t know. I will tell you this: If you create these mechanisms for control, they become weapons of obedience for authoritarian regimes no matter how beneficial or innocent the people who created them.
Kennedy went on to call public health efforts against the pandemic “a pharmaceutical-driven, biosecurity agenda that will enslave the entire human race and plunge us into a dystopian nightmare.”
We uncovered plenty more wild remarks from Kennedy; read the whole thing to learn all you could hope to know of his belief that government measures to keep Americans safe were actually CIA interrogation techniques to break our collective spirit. I’ll just add a couple additional points.
The first is that Trump’s nomination of an out-and-out crank to run HHS is the strongest proof yet that the president-elect truly learned nothing from his experience quarterbacking the federal pandemic response.
The early and deep politicization and polarization that met that response was a tragedy. It caused many Americans to roll their eyes at critical information from pandemic experts, to fail to take lifesaving precautions like masking and social distancing, and ultimately even to reject COVID vaccination. It resulted in an untold increase in pandemic disease and death.
Trump wasn’t wholly responsible for that politicization. But his latent distrust of expertise led him to whiplash between showing support for his own government’s response and bursts of truly irresponsible punditry, heightening public confusion and a sense of chaos that added oxygen to conspiratorial thinking. The lesson he apparently took away from was that we’d be best served by a truly conspiracy-brained kook helming the federal health apparatus in the future.
The second is simply this: Pandemic or no pandemic, putting Kennedy at the helm of HHS will matter. Such is the case when you entrust a guy to run our health agencies who has organized his entire worldview around the hunch that scientific and medical subject-matter experts can never be trusted.
While we were reporting the piece, I spoke with Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatrician and virologist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. When it comes to public health, Offit is an American hero: He is the coinventor of the pediatric rotavirus vaccine, and he serves on the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee. He’s also no reflexive Trump hater. But when I asked him about RFK Jr., he didn’t hold back: “He’s like the anti-science secretary. . . . I think anybody who hears what he says should realize you shouldn’t have a science denialist heading agencies that are based on science.”
As HHS secretary, Offit said, Kennedy would be able to do substantial damage very quickly. He could dissolve HHS’s advisory committees, which give the department an enviable reservoir of public health knowledge. He could grind the approval of new state-of-the-art treatments to a standstill and even revoke approvals from treatments and vaccines already on the market. He could work to expose vaccine manufacturers to additional frivolous legislation. Much of this, we should note, Kennedy is on record supporting.
And that’s to say nothing of the messaging harm he would continue to do, with all the authority of the federal government behind him. “I’ve had emails from pediatricians just in the last week or so saying, you know, ‘I’ve had new parents come in and tell me they don’t want any vaccine because of what he has said,’” Offit relayed.
To Offit, this was the most discouraging thing:
In my lifetime, I got to watch the elimination of polio, a disease that caused 20 to 30,000 children to become paralyzed and 1,500 to die every year. In my medical lifetime I’ve gotten to watch the virtual elimination of a bacteria called Haemophilus influenzae B, which accounted for 20 to 25,000 cases of meningitis and bloodstream infections every year in this country. It dominated my pediatric residency in the late ’70s—I mean, we’d see a kid come in, a child come in every week with severe meningitis caused by that bacteria. Gone! Most pediatricians in our hospital don’t see that. Have never seen it. Rotavirus—I mean, that was our vaccine, I’m coinventor of that vaccine—that caused 75,000 hospitalizations a year. I don’t think pediatric residents have ever seen a case, currently in our hospital, of rotavirus-induced severe disease, the dehydration.
So, you know, vaccines work. When we make recommendations to give them, we lessen or in some cases eliminate diseases. So what is the problem we’re trying to fix?
Purges and Prosecutions
by William Kristol
Why did Donald Trump nominate Matt Gaetz to be attorney general?
It’s overdetermined, I suppose. Trump values people who’ve defended him. Trump likes people who’ll do whatever he wants. Trump isn’t bothered by people whose sexual behavior is disgusting, perhaps even criminal.
All of these surely contributed to the selection of the former Florida congressman.
But one key factor—perhaps the key factor—was identified by a Trump adviser familiar with the background of the selection. As that adviser explained to Marc Caputo:
None of the [other] attorneys had what Trump wants, and they didn’t talk like Gaetz. Everyone else looked at AG as if they were applying for a judicial appointment. They talked about their vaunted legal theories and constitutional bullshit. Gaetz was the only one who said, ‘Yeah, I’ll go over there and start cuttin’ f*ckin’ heads.’
No one has denied this account of Trump’s motivation. Not Trump, nor Gaetz, nor anyone in Trump world, nor anyone close to Gaetz. It’s all about “cuttin’ heads.” That’s what Trump wants from his attorney general.
And it’s not just what Trump wants from his attorney general. It’s clearly what he wants from many of those who will work for him throughout his administration in his second term.
Whose heads are to be cut? Certainly people serving within the government who’ve been hostile to Trump or are suspected of potential hostility. But the point is also to go after people no longer in government, and people who’ve never been in government, who are hostile or who it’s thought might be hostile, or resistant, to Trump’s efforts. Using the Department of Justice to go after such people is obviously a particularly important part of this effort. But other parts of the government have the ability to make life unpleasant—and worse—for dissidents in and outside of government.
We’ve already heard of some of the ways a Trumpist Department of Defense might purge the military. But it can go way beyond internal purges to external persecutions.
And of course the intelligence agencies—under the planned supervision of Tulsi Gabbard—have access to a lot of data about us. And other departments can also rummage through their files to find information about us that could be embarrassing, or that could be made to look embarrassing, if selectively leaked or released. Elon Musk and his Orwellian “Department of Government Efficiency” can be a key player in such efforts, as he’ll presumably have access to whatever information he wants from anywhere within the government.
Are you confident the various rules and protocols that now exist to protect privacy, and to guard against harassment or persecution, will be honored by all the true-believing Trumpists embedded in all the agencies? I’m not. Do you think all the Schedule F Trump appointees who will have replaced career civil servants will obey those rules and protocols? I don’t. Do you think there will be collaboration with friendly outside groups in disseminating information and intimidating dissent? I do. Are you confident a commitment to decency and the rule of law will check Trumpists implanted from the top of the government to the bottom? You get the point.
Donald Trump routinely refers to “enemies within” and “enemies of the people.” He said, as a presidential candidate: “I am your retribution.” Now, as Trump takes the reins of government, with authoritarian enablers and an authoritarian movement behind him, it would be foolish not to take seriously the threats of retribution against perceived foes and of persecution against perceived enemies.
Steve Bannon has called himself a Leninist. Bannon is presumably aware of Lenin’s decree of November 28, 1917, that “all leaders of the Constitutional Democratic Party, a party filled with enemies of the people, are hereby to be considered outlaws, and are to be arrested immediately and brought before the revolutionary court.”
Now is the moment when the author of this newsletter, to preserve his credibility as a judicious and reasonable pundit, is supposed to rush to assure you: Dear Reader, Don’t get me wrong. I’m just dramatically illustrating the kind of problem we’re talking about. Leninist purges and persecutions couldn’t really happen here in America.
I’m not ready to make such assurances.
Quick Hits
A NO-BRAINER STEP: You can always count on visionary moguls like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, co-heads of our shiny new “Department of Government Efficiency,” to come up with bold, paradigm-shifting ideas to shake up the status quo. For instance, actually firing federal workers en masse would be difficult and litigious. But what if we just made their lives and jobs way worse to inspire a bunch of them to quit? Per CNN:
A source familiar with early discussions about the focus of DOGE, as the initiative is known, told CNN that while nothing is final, early priorities include an effort to immediately end remote work across federal agencies, making a five-day work week a requirement for all federal employees.
“It’s a no-brainer step and many companies have done this. So why shouldn’t federal employees who are paid with taxpayer dollars be required to be in office?” the source said.
The thinking is this kind of mandate, coupled with moving agencies out of Washington, DC, would cause many federal workers to voluntarily leave, helping the new Trump administration thin out the federal workforce ranks and save the government money.
Nothing says “efficiency” like mandating 40 hours a week in the ol’ cubicle. At least D.C.’s beleaguered Metro system would get a nice boost.
THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT ISSUE FACING OUR COUNTRY TODAY: There are few forces in Washington more powerful than South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace’s thirst for the limelight, and this week she unveiled her latest stunt: a campaign targeting Delaware Rep.-elect Sarah McBride, who this month became the first transgender person elected to Congress. On Monday, Mace introduced a House resolution that would prohibit lawmakers and staff from “using single-sex facilities other than those corresponding to their biological sex,” telling reporters that “I’m absolutely 100 percent gonna stand in the way of any man who wants to be in a women’s restroom.”
Asked about the resolution yesterday, House Speaker Mike Johnson declined to say whether he would support it: “I’m not gonna get into this—we welcome all new members with open arms who are duly elected representatives of the people. I believe it’s a command, we treat all persons with dignity and respect, and we will. And I’m not going to engage in silly debates about this.”
Meanwhile, McBride responded to Republican attacks on social media: “Every day Americans go to work with people who have life journey different than their own and engage with them respectfully, I hope members of Congress can muster that same kindness.”
Here’s an easy way to understand what is happening. Mace saw that Republicans won in 2024 by spending tens of millions of dollars on anti-trans ads. And Mace is the ultimate political weathervane. How do we know this? Because here is an article on Nancy Mace from 2021 that she put on her own website:
“I strongly support LGBTQ rights and equality,” Mace told me. “No one should be discriminated against.”
“It isn’t a black-and-white issue,” Mace continued, “I do believe that religious liberty, the First Amendment, gay rights, and transgender equality can all coexist. I’m also a constitutionalist, and we have to ensure anti-discrimination laws don’t violate First Amendment rights or religious freedom.”
The congresswoman’s life experiences have shaped her refreshingly clear-eyed views on this issue.
“I have friends and family that identify as LGBTQ,” she explained. “Understanding how they feel and how they’ve been treated is important. Having been around gay, lesbian, and transgender people has informed my opinion over my lifetime.”
Cheap Shots
But mostly Sam. And while we’re at it, shoutout to our video guru, Barry Rubin!
Andrew: "The first is that Trump’s nomination of an out-and-out crank to run HHS is the strongest proof yet that the president-elect truly learned nothing from his experience quarterbacking federal pandemic response."
Andrew's looking at this rationally, and that's a mistake. What Trump understands is the American people simply don't give a shit about the 700K excess COVID deaths. What they care about exclusively is themselves.
Also, allowing illness and disease to weaken a nation is straight out of the authoritarian playbook, and Trump will pay no price for it.
To the ignorant, uneducated, conspiracy addled, anti-vax folks in the back row, Autism wasn’t as prevalent in the past because we just thought those people were “different”.
I am 65 and I can look back at my school years now and easily tell you which kids would have been considered on the spectrum if such a thing existed back then.