The True Danger of RFK Jr.’s Role in the Next Trump Administration Is Already Clear
Kellyanne Conway pushed the idea of “alternative facts” in an interview almost eight years ago as then-President Trump’s senior counselor. Since then, the nation’s sense of a shared reality has only degraded further. Certain Trump lies stick out for their absurdity (the Sharpie-drawn addition to a hurricane map in 2019) or vilification (“eating the dogs”). Others, like the lies he told to try to overturn the 2020 election, stick out for how they were used for a brazen assault on American democracy. But, arguably, the single most destructive set of falsehoods perpetuated by Donald Trump, in terms of the toll on American citizens, had to do with the COVID pandemic.
It’s impossible to calculate the damage that Trump’s pandemic lies did. They unquestionably led to greater numbers of American deaths. They seeded suspicion and harebrained ideas of alternative cures, some toxic. One study out of Cornell that analyzed 38 million articles about the pandemic in English-language media found that Trump was, in fact, the single biggest driver of COVID misinformation, conspiracy theories, and falsehoods. Fortunately, we still had people operating within the federal health agencies who relied on good science and public health measures. The dispassionate expertise from the medical community provided some kind of solid ground in a frightening time, despite Trump’s politicization of the disaster—even as the figureheads were assaulted by misinformation powerful enough that Anthony Fauci, years later, would still face heated conspiracy theory–based accusations from members of Congress.
This kind of safeguard may not exist in the second Trump era.
In the weeks leading up to the election, Donald Trump indicated he would elevate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to a place of leadership over America’s health policy.
In his acceptance speech early Wednesday morning, Trump promised that Kennedy would “help make America healthy again” and that “we’re going to let him do it.” (Kennedy, Trump went on to say, would have to stay out of environmental matters—the place where he could theoretically clash with Trump being oil: “Bobby, stay away from the liquid gold. Other than that, go have a good time, Bobby.”) Kennedy is part of Trump’s presidential transition team; in October, Trump said Kennedy would have a role in his administration.
Obviously, this could be a bit of an empty threat. We have no idea if Trump will follow through with this plan. But by Wednesday morning, Kennedy was telling NPR that the administration would now recommend the removal of fluoride, the mineral that helps prevent cavities, from the drinking water supply. (Fluoride has long been the subject of conspiracy theories.) And while he hasn’t yet said anything about his plan for vaccines, Kennedy is one of the nation’s most influential anti-vaxxers. In late October, the co-chair of the Trump transition team said that after a lengthy conversation with Kennedy, he had come to doubt that vaccines were safe. Not the COVID vaccine or any specific vaccine—vaccines generally.
If Trump personally cares about getting rid of fluoride or vaccines, he has not indicated it publicly. Instead, it seems that Trump cares about having Kennedy’s support—and that he doesn’t care to think too much about public health matters, despite the recent overhaul of American society by a major pandemic or the continued fallout of a seismic shift in reproductive health access in the country, with life-or-death implications.
Thanks to some limitations to presidential power, Kennedy likely won’t be able to ban fluoride in drinking water or block Americans’ access to vaccines. (He could potentially exert some pressure on the Food and Drug Administration when it comes to approving certain vaccines.)
But broadly speaking, any elevation of Kennedy to executive power—even hypothetical—signals the further erosion of any kind of facts-based decisionmaking, and points to Trump’s embrace not just of falsehoods that benefit him politically but nonsense in general.
Kennedy, after all, is one of the most committed conspiracy theorists on the national stage. He promotes ideas about a cabal of billionaires working with the pharmaceutical industry to take control of the American populace. He really, really believes that vaccines cause childhood autism, despite the medical community thoroughly debunking any such notions. He has speculated, baselessly, that Wi-Fi causes cancer. He has incorrectly attributed health issues to aluminum and acetaminophen. In other words, he has operated as an anti-scientific wellness guru, but for the entire American public.
He has no health care qualifications—his background is in environmental law—but he has pushed plenty of ideas that are dangerous to public health. Like Trump, Kennedy pushed ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as COVID medications. But he exceeded Trump’s COVID misinformation efforts, railing against “vaccine passports” and claiming that hundreds had died from the COVID vaccine. He has said that Fauci had masterminded “a historic coup d’état against Western democracy”—he wrote a whole book about Fauci’s supposed villainy—and said Fauci should be prosecuted for his handling of COVID. Kennedy has suggested Bill Gates wanted to track citizens through microchips in the vaccine. He also suggested that there were labs around the world that had developed “ethnic bioweapons that kill people from certain races” and that COVID was a “bioweapons problem”—that it was “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.
His conspiracy theories aren’t limited to medical matters. He has, for example, suggested the CIA murdered his uncle. (He has also said he would “open the files” on 9/11.) But his passion is clearly for challenging all established medical science, far beyond any measure of healthy skepticism. And in medical science specifically, spreading doubt can be dangerous. In 2019, on the island of Samoa, 83 people died from a measles outbreak; anti-vaccine activists, who were actively urged on by Kennedy, undeniably worsened the situation.
Established medical science should be one of the easiest places for Americans to find, if perhaps not complete agreement, anchors for a shared reality. Where medical experts find mountains of studies and years of data to be conclusive, Kennedy goes zooming against the grain, for little apparent reason. Trump’s decision to give a man so committed to dashing that shared reality a place of prominence is a warning. The threats of a second Trump administration may not always come in the form of practical policy changes: They can come, just as potently, in casting doubt and sowing confusion.
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