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I can't wait for the RFK Jr. health regime

When this news popped up in my In Box, I first thought it must be a hysterical exaggeration:

During a get out the vote call Monday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. disclosed that “President Trump has promised me control of the public health agencies,” including the Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Institutes of Health. Kennedy also said Trump plans to put him in charge of the United States Department of Agriculture.

But I clicked on the links and discovered it’s quite true. How many times, I wonder, over the past year, have I at first mistook the news for satire?

Trump has confirmed it. “I’m going to let him go wild on health. I’m going to let him go wild on the food. I’m going to let him go wild on medicines.” When he announced this to the roaring crowd in Madison Square Garden, they screamed in ecstasy, as if having a lunatic anti-vaxxer in charge of the CDC had been their heart’s most passionate desire ever since they first heard the word “measles.”

Trump may be lying, of course. Or he may change his mind. It’s not as if Honest Trump is known for being true as the Northern Star. It’s possible he said what he needed to say to get RFK Jr. on board, but means to tell him as soon as he’s elected that he no longer has any use for him, and what’s RFK Jr. going to do? Entirely possible. But from the way that crowd ululated with excitement, it seems this is a very popular idea. Trump noticed this, and that means he’ll probably do it.

I should say from the outset: I do think these agencies need root-and-branch reform. I do think Big Ag’s lobbyists, agricultural subsidies, and cheap, over-processed food have contributed in some measure to the obesity epidemic. Americans live shorter, unhealthier lives than their counterparts in the OECD and yet pay far more for medical care, and I do think the federal government could play a more constructive role in fixing this problem, though I’m not sure it can do as much as some people imagine, and when Democrats propose modest measures that might help—like banning sugary drinks—the GOP calls them totalitarians.

I agree that the CDC failed the biggest test in its history during the pandemic: I’ll never forget that Mauritanians could get a Covid test weeks before Americans could. As for the FDA, it infuriates me that we still don’t have a Covid nasal vaccine. No one should be catching Covid, no less dying from it, in late 2024. No one would be catching it or dying of it if our whole system for drug development weren’t a labyrinth of bad incentives and insane bureaucratic obstacles. This is true of so many therapies, vaccines, and treatments for the diseases that are apt to kill us or the people we love. This system needs root-and-branch reform.

Something is severely wrong with our federal grants system, too. By dint of national amnesia or our pathologically forgiving spirit, we have decided to let bygones be bygones and refrain from further pondering the fact that we firehosed money into Ecohealth, a sinister and fraudulent organization, which subsidized the insanely dangerous virological research in China that most likely caused a pandemic that killed somewhere between 8 and 20 million people. Those of us who don’t think this should be so easily forgotten assuredly understand the impulse to burn it all down.

But among the traits we need in a president (or any adult), impulse control is high on the list.

This is a notable aspect of the Trump phenomenon. Very often, he identifies a problem with which Americans are rightly enraged. When he says forthrightly that corrupt or incompetent people and organizations are, in fact, corrupt or incompetent, he’s often right. But this is the limit of his talent, because invariably, he proposes to do everything in his power to make the problem a million times worse.

I don’t need to explain to anyone why putting RFK Jr. in charge of these agencies ranks among the worst ideas of his campaign, do I? The competition is stiff, but this one is up there with handling “the enemy within” by turning Washington DC into Tiananmen Square.

RFK Jr. believes, and has said repeatedly, that no vaccine is safe and effective. Our public health agencies are certainly flawed, but they are not, by and large, staffed by outright swivel-eyed cuckoo-cloud-dwelling lunatics with no medical or scientific knowledge whatsoever, nor even a germ of common sense, and no experience at all in managing anything, no less a massive government bureaucracy, no less four of them, no less four that handle a massive and complex portfolio of highly technical problems at the cutting edge of the life sciences, about which RFK Jr. knows not one blessed thing. He has a law degree and a BA in literature. If he passed a high school biology class, I’d be surprised. (Journalists: Next time you see him, ask him if he can explain the difference between a prokaryote and a eukaryote.)

Infectious diseases are civilization-killers. Our mastery of these diseases that terrified our grandparents represents one of the great triumphs of our species’ intellect and spirit. Quacks like RFK Jr., Bret Weinstein, Andrew Wakefield, and the rest of those murderous grifters represent the nadir of humankind’s capacity for stupidity, venality, and casual sociopathy. RFK Jr. is already responsible for God-knows-how many deaths. We know for sure that 83 young children in Samoa, with their whole lives ahead of them, died as a direct result of his campaign to persuade Samoan parents not to vaccinate their children. They died in agony, too.

“But Claire,” you say. “Behold Admiral Rachel Levine. She has suppressed research indicating the inadvisability of trying to change boys into girls and vice-versa by means of medical experiments straight from Sigmund Freud’s notes on the terrors of the unconscious mind. Could RFK Jr. really be worse?”

Oh yes.

I certainly agree that it is a big problem that the Biden Administration does not grasp the unwisdom of obliging Americans to call this fellow “Rachel” and defer to his judgment about subjecting their children to sexual mutilation. No argument from me.

I also agree the Harris Administration will surely be no improvement on this score. I’m with you—right until you tell me, “and we’re replacing Levine with RFK Jr.”

Pour le mémoire, these are all things RFK Jr. believes:

• The coronavirus vaccine was developed so that Bill Gates could control you via the microchips they contain. Yes, he believes this. (So does Trump’s ex-wife Marla Maples, apparently.)

• Covid was ethnically targeted to spare the Chinese and the Jews.

• Childhood vaccines cause autism.

• 5G networks are being used for mass surveillance.

• The Covid vaccine is the “deadliest vaccine ever made.”

• Vaccination requirements for schoolchildren are like the Holocaust.

• The herbicide Atrazine causes transgenderism. (Think grocery prices are too high now? Just wait for RFK Jr. to reverse the Green Revolution.)¹

• Antidepressants cause school shootings.

• Wi-Fi causes cancer and “leaky brain.”

• HIV doesn’t cause AIDS.

I could extend that list for pages. Any one of them, transformed into policy, would be a mass catastrophe. If he’s put in charge of those agencies, I have to assume every last scientist who works for them will resign, with the physicians leading the exodus: How could anyone who’s taken the Hippocratic oath take orders from RFK Jr.?

The destruction of the agencies that fund critical medical research will be an utter tragedy. To destroy them with no plan to replace them with something better is criminal. We need a CDC. We need an FDA. We need an NIH. We are not medievals: We live in an advanced technological society, and we require a government staffed by technocrats with advanced degrees. Sound elitist to you? You’re an idiot. We would die like cockroaches without reasonably safe systems for feeding our massive population—which cannot be fed without pesticides or modern agricultural methods. We need them to ensure our drinking water is clean. We need them to ensure we have a safe supply of the medications and vaccines to which we or those we love owe our lives and which RFK Jr. would like us to do without.

Massive, deadly epidemics of preventible childhood diseases are far worse. If this isn’t obvious at once, it is because—much like the the Second World War—the generation that remembers all too well what “worse” looked like is no longer alive to tell us that some ideas are so stupid that it’s not even funny to entertain them.

What’s worse than a lousy response to a pandemic? No response to a pandemic. Trump’s incompetence, as I mentioned earlier today, made the pandemic far worse than it would have been under a minimally competent president. Imagine what it would be like with RFK Jr. leading our response.

The destruction of these agencies would set back cancer research, Alzheimers research—research into all of the diseases that are likely to kill you and your family—by years. And what about drug authorization: Can you imagine the chaos? The FDA may need reform, even need it desperately, but it sure wasn’t the FDA telling Americans that Ivermectin cured Covid. “Slow and incompetent” and “run by RFK Jr.” are not commensurate problems. One is in a different order of magnitude of disastrous.

The expression “it couldn’t be worse” is for children.

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Parenthetically, RFK Jr. is also (yet another) Putin tool. If I hear the words “Russia hoax” again I’ll explode. It will make a complete mess when my guts splash all over the carpet and the walls, but I’m at the limit.² It is utterly implausible to believe that Trump has surrounded himself with the biggest Putin shills in the United States by accident.

Bobby and Putin’s favorite pedophile.

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Also parenthetically, here’s something you should watch and contemplate if you sincerely believe Trump will carry out a policy that’s important to you. I’m thinking of a reader who told me recently that he’s voting for Trump because he believes Trump is better for Israel. But this applies to any policy, any promise, any vow that issues from that yapping pie-hole:

This is not like Kamala on fracking. That is a normal political volte-face for obvious electoral reasons. We see that all the time. Trump is a pathological liar, stress on pathological, meaning the man is ill. Someone who is regularly capable of reversing himself on a dime because he’s been flattered or offered something that benefits him (be it money or votes) cannot be counted upon to do what you’re imagining. Trust me, the whole world has his number. Foreign leaders know very well how easily he can be manipulated. They will manipulate him. Our policy toward Israel will be determined not by what’s in our best interest, and certainly not by what’s in Israel’s best interest, but by what’s in Trump’s best interest. Israel’s adversaries are in a good position to offer him a better deal, and they’ll try.

So he will probably support Israel if Israeli leaders keep lavishly flattering him, if doing makes his base applaud loudly, and if—this is the important part—no one offers him more flattery or money or applause to do the opposite.

As I type this, Trump is campaigning in Michigan. Guess what he’s telling Muslim voters:

With early voting under way, campaigning on its last legs and Democrats seeing a dip in support over the Gaza war, Bishara Bahbah has taken it upon himself to woo Arab American voters to back former President Donald Trump over Vice President Kamala Harris. Bahbah, a wealth management expert and author, used to be a Democrat and was registered as such until earlier this year. After what he said were “repeated pleas to have the US stop arming Israel,” he jumped the fence and joined the ranks of the Republicans.

In May, he launched Arab Americans for Trump, an independent group that is separate from the official Trump campaign, which has been campaigning in the swing state of Michigan and elsewhere. Bahbah has been working closely with powerful Trump allies, including Richard Grenell—former acting director of national intelligence in the Trump administration who hopes to become US secretary of state if Trump is re-elected—and the Lebanese American businessman Massad Boulos, whose son is married to Tiffany Trump, Trump's daughter.

“People are getting really tired of the war-mongering of this administration and people don't see much of a difference between Biden and Harris in terms of how she views the world and the Middle East.” … [Bahbah] said Arabs in America have been watching the horrors of war and the Biden administration’s failure to rein in Israel with disbelief.

What do you imagine his campaign has been promising these leaders in private to elicit this response? It had to be good enough to make them forget about the Muslim ban. Trump will betray one or the other side of this conflict. Are you quite sure it won’t be your side? What if he decides, in the wake of the election, that Muslims were more “loyal” to him than Jews? I assure you, he loves neither of us.

This goes for any and every problem you fondly imagine he’ll solve.

And hey, what about Aileen Cannon for Attorney General? That’ll be a hoot. They’re seriously considering this.

I agree that Merrick Garland has been a disaster. I curse his name every morning, afternoon, and evening. But obviously, the solution to that problem is not Aileen Cannon. There is one and only one reason to put Aileen Cannon in that position and that is to corrupt our judiciary as fast and as thoroughly as possible. Are you quite sure you won’t ever need a competent and independent judiciary?

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Sometimes I think it would be best if Trump wins. I think of something my friend Tanju said, in an article he wrote for us a while back. Erdoğan looked set to win yet another election, yet again having ensured the opposition had no real chance. This was, Tanju wrote, a blessing in disguise:

Were the opposition to win, they would face the daunting tasks of restoring the rule of law, cleaning up corruption, reviving institutions, reestablishing international credibility, and civilizing the police and security services. With a hostile parliament, these challenges would be almost Sisyphean. After 21 years of destruction, Turkey’s economy and administration need a sea change, not tinkering around the edges. I suspect the opposition does not fully grasp how bad the situation is.

The economic challenges alone are almost insurmountable. In the first four months of 2023, the budget deficit soared to about 7 percent of GDP (compared to 1.9 percent for the whole year in 2022.) The Central Bank’s reserves are in the red. The economy is in shambles. It will get much worse after the elections, particularly given the exorbitant promises Erdoğan made to the electorate—promising, for example, a 45 percent pay raise to public servants—and his extensive borrowing to maintain the pretense that the economy isn’t collapsing. Inflation will flare up again to pay for these expenditures.

Whoever takes over the management of this economy will be carrying a bomb with a lit fuse. It will take some time to clean up the mess, and if the opposition takes over—assuming Erdoğan manages to avoid prosecution—he’ll just sit back, watch the chaos unfold, and blame everything on the new government, saying, “I told you they have no idea what they’re doing.”  He would be reelected in a jiffy.

So if Erdoğan wins the next round, as he almost certainly will, it will be blessing in disguise. I would rather see this economic and social bomb explode in his hands and bury political Islam for good.

Trump’s supporters are in the grip of an ideology very much like political Islam in its irrationality and revolutionary zeal. His supporters are in such a frenzy to put him in power that I’m not sure they can be defeated at the ballot box. We all know they’ll say they won even if they didn’t, and many are sincerely willing to see the country plunged into civil war.

The boring, slow, frustrating business of liberal democracy and its endless compromises and disappointments no longer interest them. They want a revolution, and they have all the energy on their side because revolutionary madness always has a special energy of its own. Once you decide to liberate yourself from the surly bonds of reason, everything seems boundlessly possible: Put RFK Jr. in charge of the CDC—we’ll get healthy that way! Pull out of NATO—we’ll get peace that way! Put tariffs on everything—we’ll end inflation that way! (The Erdoğan version of that one is “lower interest rates to bring down inflation,” and like Trump, he has no use for economists who tell him otherwise. It’s right there in the Quran: God himself says high interest rates cause inflation. Do you propose to argue with God?)

Members of an ecstatic mass movement can’t be reached by normal political arguments. I once asked my grandfather what he thought of the morality of firebombing Dresden. He said there was no alternative: Germans had to see their cities destroyed. I fear the same may be true of the MAGA movement. Nothing short of getting what they want—then seeing what they get—will bring it to an end.

If only they weren’t going to take the rest of us and the world down with them.

1. For what it’s worth, I’ve also entertained the idea that there could be an environmental reason for the sudden rise of this phenomenon. I don’t think the speculation itself is nutty. The idea of asserting it’s a specific pesticide—on the basis of no evidence at all—is what’s nutty, particularly because the public is so susceptible to this kind of suggestion. With one book, Rachel Carlson, RFK Jr.’s spiritual doppelgänger, condemned hundreds of millions to death from of malaria.

2. Saturating a society with cliches like this, or “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” is a classic tactic of reflexive control. “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” I believe, emerged organically. “Russia hoax” was Trump’s innovation. But Russians are masters of reflexive control and they saw how well those phrases worked, so they’ve done their bit to saturate American society with them. (See Twitter for examples.)

Readers have probably noticed that Trump supporters use these phrases a lot. If you pay attention, you’ll see that they use them reflexively in response to a challenge to their beliefs. Whether Trump knows it or not, he’s a master of what the quacks would call neuro-linguistic programming, and he regularly offers his supporters phrases like this because they serve as an amulet against cognitive dissonance. They allow the person who uses them to self-soothe. In repeating exactly the same words as everyone else in the group, the speaker reminds himself (unconsciously, obviously) that he is merged with the group and partakes in its strength. He regresses to a much younger age, short-circuiting the adult, reasoning part of his mind.

These phrases usually mean the speaker is protecting himself against a disturbing thought about Trump’s derangement, or the hoax Trump and Russia have perpetrated on them. The very fact that someone uses them is evidence that a) it’s no hoax; and b) endless and repetitive exposure to these slogans has had the intended effect. (“Deranged Trumpist Syndrome,” you might call it. Of course, we’re all vulnerable to the hypnotic power of repeated phrases: That’s how advertising and pop music work.)

Scott Adams, the cartoonist, made himself quite famous by writing about Trump’s skill in this regard—he calls it “hypnosis” and “persuasion”—but because he’s a Trump fan who’s cashing in on the gravy train, he never mentions the part about “standard technique of cult indoctrination.”

If you’re the one using these phrases, stop. I beg you. Step back and formulate an original argument in response to the statement that caused you to think of that phrase. Stay in your reasoning mind. Try, in your response, to avoid using any phrase you’ve heard before (still less a million times before). Notice how this makes you feel.