R.F.K., Jr.,’s Next Move

In today’s newsletter, the uncertain future of the nation’s health. Plus:

• More on Trump’s extreme Cabinet
• The naïveté of post-election despair
• The gripping drama of “Say Nothing”

Photograph by Mark Peterson / Redux Photograph by Mark Peterson / Redux

Clare Malone 
Staff writer

In 1984, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was at one of the lowest points in his life, having just left a rehab facility following his well-publicized arrest for heroin possession, after he had overdosed on a plane. Kennedy began volunteering with an environmental organization, Riverkeeper, that was aggressively pursuing polluters of New York’s Hudson River. “He realized that this was his ticket back to legitimacy,” Alex Boyle, whose father helped found the organization, told me earlier this year, as Kennedy was making an independent run for the Presidency.

In the course of the following two decades, Kennedy became a respected, even acclaimed, member of the American environmental movement, before once again dashing his reputation by turning into one of the world’s most-prominent vaccine skeptics. He holds the widely refuted belief that vaccinating children can cause autism. “I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, ‘Better not get him vaccinated,’ ” Kennedy said, on a podcast a few years ago. In just a short time, he helped turn a small anti-vaccine organization called Children’s Health Defense into a misinformation juggernaut, whose reach grew exponentially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Kennedy once said that COVID was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people” and that “the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”

On Thursday, President-elect Donald Trump named Kennedy as his pick to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services, sending scientists into a tailspin of worry that his dangerous views on vaccines would soon be given a prominent government platform. Kennedy has campaigned against vaccine mandates in schools, and could soon oversee the very bureaucracy in charge of distributing inoculations. Trump has said that he would give Kennedy the go-ahead to “go wild on health” and “go wild on the food” and “go wild on medicines” and, in recent days, Kennedy had said that he favored firing and replacing six hundred employees of the National Institutes of Health. He is certain to have been ruminating on his plans for a while. Back in the summer, as Kennedy was on the precipice of dropping out of the race, his daughter-in-law and campaign manager told me that talks with Trump’s team were strategically oriented toward placing Kennedy into a role in the new Administration. The position of Secretary of Health and Human Services, she told me then, would be “an incredibly interesting one.”

Source photograph by Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post / Getty Source photograph by Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post / Getty

“Perhaps it was no surprise that Trump, with his demands for ostentatious displays of loyalty and his penchant for obsessive television watching, has quickly assembled the makings of a second-term Cabinet that might be better suited for a Republican reality-show casting call,” Susan B. Glasser writes. And even by that standard these picks are alarming. Read the column »

• The Naïveté Behind Post-Election Despair
• What Russia and Ukraine Want from a Second Trump Presidency
• “Say Nothing” Is a Gripping Drama of Political Disillusionment
• A Woman Wonders if She’s Human in “I’m Not a Robot”

Cartoon by Habiba Nabisubi

• Play today’s bite-size puzzle. A clue: the Rockies or the Andes, for example: five letters.

P.S. The new FX show “Say Nothing” started as a book by our staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe. For more of his absorbing reporting, read his Profile of Anthony Bourdain, as well as his investigations of the biggest hedge-fund scandal of all time and of a teen’s fatal plunge into the London underworld.

Ian Crouch contributed to this edition.