Trump’s nomination of Bobby Kennedy Jr. to lead HHS is the third panel in the triptych of eyebrow-raising, populist picks he has made this week, the other two being Matt Gaetz for AG and Tulsi Gabbard for DNI.

All three have received the full treatment that Establishment Washington reserves for populists and heretics. They have been branded “conspiracy theorists” (which in this day and age is akin to the fifth vital sign) and traitors. All have said some wacky stuff. Kennedy and Gaetz, for their part, have been accused of various indiscretions and Neronian depravities.

We want to make a few observations about RFK, Jr., in particular, but first a word about what this says about Trump and his priorities. Selecting RFK Jr. to oversee pharma, Gaetz to oversee justice, and Gabbard to oversee the IC can only be interpreted as a shift to war footing against the Deep State. Trump has selected as his targets the departments that did the most to undermine and resist his presidency the first time around. During Trump One, he sent the Good Cops to these departments; conservatives with conventional Washington pedigrees like Alex Azar, Jeff Sessions, and Dan Coats. Now he’s sending the Bad Cops to put the Swamp creatures in a small room all night and shine a bright light in their faces until they fess up about where the bodies are hidden. We’ll see if that works, or if they are outfoxed, embarrassed, and disgraced by hostile bureaucracies, their partners in the media, and perhaps their own actions.

A more conventional explanation for these picks is that Trump is just being a pragmatic manager of his coalition. He knows MAGA is a broad movement, encompassing squares and oddballs alike, so he has rewarded the squares with various posts that matter to them (he picked Burgum, for goodness takes) and the oddballs with posts that matter to them. Ideologically, it’s a bit of a mess, but coalitions always are.

But now let’s talk about RFK Jr. If you want to know more about the man, we recommend his wide-ranging interview with Tablet’s David Samuels. We want to discuss what he means for policy. Two things.

The first is public health. RFK stumped with Trump under the wide banner of “MAHA,” or Make America Healthy Again. The pitch is straightforward: Americans are unhealthier than we have ever been, despite our incredible wealth. We are fat, suffer from chronic disease at very high rates, and die young. A New York Times headline, whose release paired exquisitely with the RFK announcement, sums up the problem: Three-Quarters of U.S. Adults Are Now Overweight or Obese. 

RFK blames pesticides, artificial food additives, pollutants, and pharmaceuticals for this health crisis, pushed by profit-driven corporations that have utterly captured the government bodies supposed to be regulating them. Anyone whose social-media algorithm has introduced them to “Parent Instagram” knows that these ideas have mass appeal, particularly as they involve children. Anyone with an ounce of skepticism knows there is probably some truth to the allegations. Comparing the ingredients in European foods with their equivalents in America—then looking at the respective populations—is an exercise in radicalization. 

But MAHA also encompasses plenty of half-baked and frankly unhinged woo-woo, as well. RFK’s belief that the childhood vaccine schedule causes autism is the most notorious example. It is hardly the only one.

Whether RFK succeeds will depend, in large part, on what he prioritizes and whether his messaging is big tent or fringey. If he focuses on issues with mass appeal and mobilizes the nation’s concerned parents by, for example, curtailing food dyes, preservatives, and other artificial ingredients in our food, he will have done a great service for the country. If he takes on the public-health tyrants who ruled us during Covid and forces them to come clean about the Wuhan lab, Americans would cheer it. There are even productive things we could imagine him doing on (gasp) vaccines, such as ending the quasi-religious way they are talked about, as if chemicals injected into the body could never cause harm. But he could easily marginalize himself through fringe appeals and crusades, particularly on vaccines, while doing legitimate damage to public health. We’ll see if he is capable of walking the tightrope.

The second set of issues to consider are social issues, notably abortion. HHS is the contested battle space between social conservatives and progressives, overseeing regulation of the abortion pill, conscience protections for health care workers, and vast amounts of federal funding for health entitlements. In Trump I, Alex Azar and deputies like Roger Severino were rock solid on these issues. 

RFK is far from a social conservative. Then again, Donald Trump is, too. If we’ve learned anything from the past eight years, it’s that partners can come from the unlikeliest places. 

We shouldn’t expect RFK to back federal limits on abortion (which is Trump’s emphatic official position, anyway). But there may be common ground on regulation of the abortion pill. RFK has said “we ought to know what the side effects are, what the risks are, [and] what the benefits [are].” Perhaps he could be persuaded to bring back stricter risk evaluation and mitigation strategy (REMS) for the abortion pill, which the Biden administration scrapped. Common ground could also be found on puberty-blocking drugs, cross-sex hormones, and other Big Pharma interventions for kids that think they’re transgender. Those issues fit nicely with the “MAHA” agenda, and social conservatives could emphasize them more.

Many pro-life groups and social conservatives are sounding the alarm about RFK’s nomination, but we spoke to one Senate staffer for a social-conservative leader who offered a more balanced appraisal. If RFK can promise to support religious freedom for healthcare professionals and make concessions on the abortion pill, perhaps he could be confirmed. 

Are you ready to MAHA?

Policy News You Need To Know

#Chyna — Congressman Moolenaar, chair of the China Committee, has introduced legislation to revoke China’s PNTR status. In five years, this idea has gone from the very fringe to something approaching China-hawk consensus. Decoupling ahead.

SEE ALSO: Exclusive: Rubio and Moolenaar Introduce Bill to Discourage Investment in China

#Tax #EVs — Reuters reports the Trump transition team wants to kill the (insanely regressive and expensive) $7,500 per vehicle tax credit for electric vehicles as part of tax negotiations next year. Of course, people are linking this policy with Elon Musk. The 3D chess theory is that since Tesla sells more electric cars than its competitors, this hurts it less than its competitors, and therefore is a net positive for Tesla, and therefore Evil Elon is using his government influence to line his pockets. Maybe? This could be too much 3D chess. You can just straightforwardly see that ending subsidies for an industry is bad for that industry. It’s very unclear whether the EV industry has reached maturity where it can survive without subsidies. Also, conservatives have always hated the EV credits for thirty-seven different reasons and are on the warpath looking for pay-fors ahead of the upcoming tax reform fight, so EV tax credits were always a top candidate for the chopping block, even in a world where Elon had never gotten involved in politics. 

#Education — AEI’s Max Eden, who is always worth reading, makes a very interesting argument, in a piece co-authored with Amy Haywood: “Pete Hegseth as Defense Secretary Could Transform Education.” We don’t often think about it, but DoD “manages 161 schools serving about 65,000 students,” who are children of service members. Write the authors, “the Biden administration turned these schools into woke indoctrination factories, featuring a diversity, equity, and inclusion chief who posted racially disparaging remarks about white people on social media, curriculum designed to make white students cry, and secret gender transitions.” Hegseth is famously an anti-woke crusader. Fixing DoD schools is a worthy goal in its own right, of course, but doing that “could be the tip of the spear for a broader transformative effort.” Fixing schools requires not just high-level concepts, but “a full scope and sequence of scaffolded lesson plans; attendant teachers’ manuals; psychometrically aligned, content-rich accountability tests; professional development training; and much more.” DoD schools could be the laboratory for this. Very interesting indeed!

#Immigration — At The Free Press, Madeleine Rowley interviews Tom Homan about the logistics of mass deportation, raising such thorny questions as: how do you deport illegal immigrants from, say, China or Venezuela if those countries won’t take them back? This specific question has been a big issue in European immigration politics, and the best answer seems to be: pay some third-party (poor) country to host them. 

#DEI #CompetencyCrisis — The Manhattan Institute’s Judge Glock and Reade Ben examine ideological and demographic trends among directors of the nation’s 12 Federal Reserve Banks. They find that Fed leaders are becoming more diverse, measured by the colors of the rainbow, but are less likely to have such trivial characteristics like… banking experience.

#HigherEd — Cato’s Andrew Gillen has released a study showing that both state funding and tuition revenue have increased significantly at public colleges and universities in the past four decades. This finding complicates the standard argument from said schools that they are only raising tuitions because of disinvestment from public sources. Not that anyone who has walked around a college campus the past decade could reasonably think these institutions are strapped for cash.

#IndustrialPolicy — Fred Bauer has an interesting Q&A with Marc Fastau and Ian Fletcher on their new book, Industrial Policy for the United States. They discuss recent efforts to reindustrialize and provide historical examples, including active measures that supported the growth of the rail network and the aviation industry. 

#AI — Researchers used an AI model to “interpret and generate genomic sequences at a vast scale,” which they claim as a major advance in our ability to “comprehend and engineer biology.” This could have the potential to engineer and create new life, and do it at scale. Dystopia, utopia, or snake oil? You decide.

#Economy — AEI’s Jim Pethokoukis surveys Wall Street and government predictions about labor productivity growth. He reminds policymakers that America’s unexpectedly strong performance on this metric post-Covid has made Americans better off than the Euro Poors.

#LGBT — Are free markets the friend of social conservatives? WSJ’s Barton Swaim says yes, citing commercial pressure campaigns that have forced companies to stop shilling transgenderism to children and focus on selling normal products. We think he glosses over the pharmaceutical industry’s role in promoting transgenderism—a fact that reflects less well on capitalism red in tooth and claw—but he is certainly correct that boycotts have emerged as a powerful tool conservatives can use alongside direct political power.

#Media — Dylan Byers notes that CNN and MSNBC both recorded their lowest viewership in the 25-54 demo in a quarter-century this week. Regime media in shambles. 

Friday Essays

Christopher Caldwell buries the modern Democratic Party and its “21st century coalition of wealth and woke” in The Times. 

More Dems in disarray. Bridget Phetasy, a comic who was on the left, then the unwoke left, then endorsed Trump last cycle, reflects in The Spectator on how she learned the Democrats had a Man Problem way back in 2016.

Isabella Redjai reviews Melania Trump’s memoir for IM1776, taking readers from communist Slovenia to the New York fashion scene to the White House—twice.

The Blaze’s lifestyle vertical gathers some of the finest anons and dissidents on the Internet to analyze Trump’s victory. Not your typical pundit roundup, and that’s the point.

Louise Perry offers a bleak assessment of liberal modernity at First Things, writing that technological innovation is a failing god, “we are running on the fumes of the accomplishments of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries,” and modern man is failing to reproduce himself in sufficient quantities to keep the lights on. This is your blackpill for the week, if you are so inclined. Happy Friday!