Trump's Cabinet selections, a case of over-correction
RFK Jr. is a case in point
I find it interesting that Donald Trump’s approach to picking a Cabinet is nearly the exact opposite of the one he used to pick his first one. As president-elect in 2016, Trump undertook a lengthy process before making his selections. He ended up picking mostly establishment figures who were not well known to the public. In some cases, Trump picked people he didn’t really know.
Now, as president-elect, Trump is making selections in great haste. He is favoring non-establishment “disrupters.” He is picking people who are comparatively well known to the public (or at least the portion that watches Fox News) and whom, in most cases, Trump himself knows.
If Trump believes his approach to picking his first Cabinet turned out to be misguided, he’s right to try a different approach. The danger, though, is that he will over-correct.
This isn’t danger isn’t just theoretical. Trump’s new approach is yielding highly questionable selections.
Fortunately, one of the very worst, Matt Gaetz, has stepped aside (probably after being pushed). Trump might find a place for him, but it almost certainly won’t be in a job that requires Senate confirmation.
Even without Gaetz, Trump’s selections remain a crazy salad. Tulsi Gabbard is an unimaginably bad choice for Director of National Intelligence. In mentioning some of the flaws that make her such a terrible pick, I neglected to note her opposition to the killing of Qasem Soleimani, Iran’s head terrorist, without a declaration of war. Trump has rightly touted this operation as one of the major successes of his first term. Gabbard disapproved.
With Gaetz gone, Robert Kennedy Jr. runs at least even with Gabbard in the race to be Trump’s worst nominee. Erick Erickson calls Kennedy “a privileged, hedonistic, serial adulterer, abortion advocate whose overall world view is progressivism tinged with hedonistic contrarianism. He adds:
[Kennedy’s] views on vaccines overall are not grounded in science. He has repeatedly been caught lying about vaccines and medicines to advance his views. His views were, not that long ago, heralded by the Hollywood left. . . .
He is to healthcare what Al Gore is to global warming and shares Al Gore’s environmental alarmism. In fact, Barack Obama considered making Kennedy the Director of the Environmental Protection Agency.
People on the right have regularly, of late, been making the mistake that because someone agrees with us on one thing, they must agree on most things. But Kennedy does not. He is a progressive environmental activist who has strung together both truth and fiction related to food and healthcare who had the active attention and support of the left until Kennedy challenged Joe Biden.
I’m not concerned about Kennedy’s privilege or even his hedonism. I am concerned about his progressivism, his looseness with facts, and his conspiracy theories (see below).
Heather Mac Donald calls Kennedy a “mixed bag.”
Admirable in his defense of free speech, especially when it came to rebutting the pseudo-expertise of the public health establishment during the Covid hysteria, eloquent in his criticism of lockdowns and masks, he nevertheless has a long history of feminized, New-Agey objections to sound medical interventions, such as vaccines and fluoridated water.
Allowing parents to opt out of childhood vaccination may appeal to libertarian instincts for choice, but it also allows parents to be free riders on others’ pro-social decisions. A goal of capping drug prices, which Kennedy shares with Trump, shows a lamentable misunderstanding of the need for researchers to recoup the costs of their risky investments.
As to Kennedy’s obsession with chemicals, Mac Donald writes:
Kennedy’s background in environmental litigation is always on display. Environmental litigation focuses obsessively on chemicals. Kennedy ties Americans’ worsening health to those chemicals. He is fixated on the dyes that make processed junk food more brilliant. He wants to get rid of the artificial coloring in Froot Loops. He wants more regulation of preservatives and pesticides.
But chemicals, like plastic bags, are our friends, responsible for far more good than harm. Chemicals are not responsible for the obesity epidemic (though preservatives do enable the phalanx of packaged snacks that surround Americans in every transportation hub and nearly every retail environment). It is also absurd to imply that American environmental agencies have been lax in their regulation of chemicals. . . .
Blaming corporate or social forces for bad decisions within an individual’s control is a left-wing impulse. Americans need to hear a hard truth: they are eating themselves to death. Only they can restore their bodies to their proper shape and function.
I agree with Heather that Kennedy has some worthwhile views. However, Trump can do better than picking a mixed bag to run the Department of HHS. And that job is certainly not suitable for an indiscriminate conspiracy theorist.
Kennedy’s list of conspiracy theories is lengthy: Vaccines cause autism. COVID may have been a “plandemic”—one designed to spare Jews and Chinese people. The government is using 5G networks to “control our behavior.” WiFi is making us unhealthy. The FDA is waging a “war on public health.” HIV doesn’t cause AIDS. Nefarious actors may be deliberately releasing massive amounts of chemicals into the environment through chemtrails — vapors left by high flying airplanes — in order to make us sick and/or for other evil purposes.
Maybe Trump sees Kennedy as a visionary. Maybe he promised Kennedy the job in exchange for an endorsement. Either way, the Senate should reject this nomination.
If Kennedy’s nomination fails, Dr. Jay Bhattachary, reportedly Trump’s choice to lead NIH, would be a good replacement. Bhattachary is a professor of medicine, economics, and health research policy at Stanford. He’s also the director of Stanford's Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging.
During the pandemic, Bhattachary co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration. It denounced then-current lockdown policies, arguing that they are “producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health.” It called keeping students out of school “a grave injustice.” It advocated that the then-current policy be replaced by a policy of “Focused Protection.” This policy would “allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk.”
The Great Barrington Declaration is controversial, though I don’t think there’s a serious dispute that keeping students out of school was a serious mistake. If nominated, Bhattachary may have to convince a majority of Senators that the Great Barrington Declaration got it mostly right.
I believe it did. And if the U.S. faces another pandemic, I would rather have Bhattachary handling the response than Dr. Fauci and the others who set Covid response policy during Trump’s first administration.
More to the point, I would rather have Bhattachary in charge than Robert Kennedy Jr.