The first few weeks of Donald J. Trump’s second term in office have provided no shortage of weirdness, but the choice of Robert F. Kennedy Jr as secretary of health and human services was high on the list. Part of this strangeness stems from Kennedy himself — his descent from American royalty, his erratic and ever-shifting politics, his bizarre entanglements with the animal kingdom. He and Trump make for strange bedfellows, at least on the surface: one is a monomaniacal “health” crusader, the other a McDonald’s fanatic. Their contrast was starkly illustrated last year when Kennedy endured a Trump Force One hazing ritual.
The reality, of course, is that Kennedy’s amorphous libertarianism and interest in deregulation are right at home in the second Trump administration. He wasted no time applying the Department of Government Efficiency playbook to his new domain, reportedly firing 10 percent of the Center for Disease Control’s workforce and 1,500 employees at the National Institute of Health upon taking office. During his Senate confirmation hearings, Kennedy suggested replacing human nurses with artificial intelligence and made clear that his concern for Americans’ health does not extend to the right to access health care. Moreover, Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) program taps into a pervasive and obsessive preoccupation with health and environmental risks that has assumed a distinctly right-wing political character.
One faction within the MAHA movement is preoccupied with the imperiled human body — believing, not…
Auteur: Hanna Goldberg
