The playbook Donald Trump and his allies are using to dismantle the United States and hand it over to the rich and powerful is, by now, clear. With their words, they’ll attack wokeness and censorship, while with their actions, they’ll aggressively push a turbocharged form of both. They’ll shake their first at the elites with one hand, and stuff cash and other favors into their pockets with the other. They’ll loudly claim to fight for the working class if it involves picking on groups they hate, but behind closed doors, they’ll work to strip workers of their rights and make them poorer.
Each time, the tactic is the same: distract Trump’s own base and the US public more generally by loudly proclaiming you’re fighting a bunch of terrible things, and while they’re looking the other way, do the very thing you’re pretending to fight.
We’re seeing this playbook used again when it comes to the vaunted Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) agenda, led and devised by now–Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. So far, Trump and his allies have focused overwhelmingly on clamping down on the wacky, nonexistent problems that RFK Jr rails against.
RFK Jr, a longtime vaccine “skeptic,” is currently using his perch at HHS to launch an assault on vaccines, both those against COVID-19 and more generally against a host of diseases, emboldening Trump allies at the state level to push to further roll back life-saving vaccine requirements.
They’re also targeting fluoride in drinking water, laying the groundwork to eliminate its recommendation by the federal government as MAGA lawmakers work to ban it in their states. Now they’re also turning their attention to “chemtrails,” which you might remember as the thing your older cousin was obsessed with when his house first got dial-up internet and is such flagrant nonsense, even Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) felt the need to clarify it isn’t…
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
