Triumph of the ill will
Look below the surface of RFK, Jr.'s insane anti-health policies, and you'll glimpse the basic fact of Donald Trump's urge to dominate the American citizenry however he can
This piece was previously published at The Hot Screen.
At the start of Trump II, the new president’s appointment of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as head of the Department of Health and Human Services could still be portrayed in news coverage largely as a political payoff to an ally who helped get Trump elected, rather than as a strong endorsement of RFK’s insane anti-vaccine obsessions. There was even speculation about the tensions between RFK, Jr.’s views and Trump’s own, given that it was the Warp Speed initiative that had quickly developed covid vaccines in the first Trump administration.
Even today, as RFK, Jr. has catalyzed a crisis at the Centers for Disease Control and invited a wave of scrutiny of his fundamental unfitness to head the nation’s health department, the coverage puts the onus of vaccine skepticism and a larger war on American health care firmly on his steroidal shoulders. More and more Democratic congresspeople and senators have called for his resignation, a sign that they are finally taking seriously the deadly threat anti-vax policies pose to the nation, and see RFK, Jr.’s destruction of agencies like the CDC as unacceptable.
But the idea that RFK, Jr. is primarily responsible for the administration’s anti-vax, anti-public health push does not withstand the barest scrutiny. Unlike a situation where a cabinet secretary has gone rogue — accepting bribes, pursuing policies against administration direction — RFK, Jr.’s actions have received no reprimand from the president, which leads to the logical conclusion that he is simply carrying out Trump’s vision for the country. While we can’t totally know to what extent Trump has been influenced by Kennedy’s cockamamie views on health, he is certainly now responsible for Kennedy’s infliction of damage on the country. The buck stops here, as they say, and it matters not if “here” is a Trump who 100% agrees with Kennedy or is simply satisfied with his appointee’s dire choices.
In fact, Trump far more than any other single American is responsible for encouraging anti-vax sentiment in the United States, via his unique role in abetting the development of life-saving covid vaccines, and then gradually condemning them as it became politically expedient for him to do so. While anti-vax sentiment may have conquered MAGA for a variety of reasons independent of Trump — anti-government animus, a susceptibility to conspiracy theories, hatred of smarty-pants scientists and do-gooder doctors with their selfish obsession with keeping people alive — Trump played the role of authoritative skeptic. After all, if he went from vaccine advocate-inventor-savior to doubting Donald, he must have done so based on truly damning information, right?
Let’s be real, though: Trump’s turn against vaccines was no hard sell, not the outcome of an agonized wrestling with the facts and a careful deliberation as to his grave responsibility to tell the truth to millions of his followers. Trump recognized that he had best not get on the wrong side of anti-vax sentiment that was already strong, perhaps even realizing that its sources were not dissimilar from the various aggrievements and hatreds that had driven many of his supporters to back him. In this, you might say that Trump’s turn against vaccines was a pseudo-democratic act, in which he assented to the supposed wisdom of the vox populi.
But Trump’s appointment of RFK, Jr. should be viewed not simply in the context of these more opportunistic incentives to turn against vaccines, but as a key element of a second term in which he seeks to dominate and subjugate American society, rather than govern as an actual president. How better to show your dominance than to withhold from millions the life-saving drugs that could prevent and cure disease? As with his obsession with inflicting violence on his fellow citizens, Trump gravitates to the extremes of life and death as a way of expressing his power over others.
This fundamental urge was in plain view this week, as was the fact of his ultimate responsibility over public health matters. Defying mainstream public health consensus and overwhelming evidence to the contrary, he denounced the use of Tylenol, particularly by pregnant women; asserted that children receive too many vaccines (“They pump so much stuff into babies, it’s a disgrace”); and made deeply stupid comments about hepatitis B vaccinations for children. Questions of whether he is speaking out of sheer ignorance or due to bad information are largely beside the point: the overwhelming message is that he is the authority, no matter what, and citizens need to follow his directives. Indeed, at one point, he even seemed to concede that he was expressing his personal desire, saying, “You know, I’m just making these statements from me, I’m not making them from these doctors.” His sometimes-bizarre language emphasized this impulse to impose his will, as he told women to “fight like hell” not to take Tylenol and stumbled over the word “acetaminophen,” the generic name for Tylenol, as if flaunting his lack of knowledge of the subject at hand.
But despite his pathological desire to lord it over his fellow Americans, and his vast capacity to do so, Trump’s very refusal to admit any bounds to his power may yet be his undoing. To watch this man lecture Americans on fundamental health questions, while demonstrating and even admitting to his own basic ignorance, is to submit to a Rorschach test of both personal and national character. Speaking with unearned authority, dispensing quack medical advice like a 19th century snake oil salesman, Trump actively endangers our loved ones and ourselves in the name of placing himself above us all. In doing so, his desire for dominance becomes indistinguishable from an expression of profound contempt for each and every one one of us — and the fuel for a vast political reckoning that he will almost certainly be unable to see coming.