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The RFK Jr. Effect

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2024 › 11 › the-rfk-jr-effect › 680683

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This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Among Donald Trump’s recent Cabinet nominations is a pick that has alarmed the scientific community: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for secretary of Health and Human Services. With this choice, Trump has further elevated a conspiracy-minded vaccine skeptic with no medical background, whose views are often not rooted in science. I spoke with my colleague Yasmin Tayag, who covers health, about the damage RFK Jr.’s proposals could do to Americans’ trust in public health—whether he is confirmed or not.

The Elevation of Fringe Beliefs

Lora Kelley: As you’ve written, some of Robert F. Kennedy’s concerns—such as taking on ultra-processed foods and removing toxins from the environment—seem appealing to Americans across the political spectrum, yet his proposed solutions for these problems could pose a danger to Americans. Could you help me understand the gap between some of his seemingly commonsense proposals and the fringe ideologies behind them?

Yasmin Tayag: A lot of Kennedy’s health proposals actually make sense to me: investing in regenerative agriculture, and increasing access to preventive health care, and even removing toxins from the environment are things that sound good to pretty much anyone, regardless of their political party. Kennedy, of course, was until recently a Democrat, and a lot of his environmental and health concerns do reflect the things that the left has historically worried about.

The problem is that when you start looking at how he’s going to execute on these goals, you realize that his track record of proposing solutions is not based in science. We can all agree that it’s a good idea to take toxins out of the environment, but we might not all agree that fluoride is a toxin, as Kennedy seems to suggest. And so you have to ask: How is Kennedy going to make these decisions?

He’s a science skeptic, even though he claims to be a champion of science that lets people make their own decisions about their health. His view is that science as an institution has been so corrupted by corporate influence—he’s always railing against Big Pharma—that anything that comes out of the science institution that we’ve long relied on is bad.

Lora: Even if he doesn’t get confirmed, could Kennedy’s nomination still have an impact on Americans’ trust in public health?

Yasmin: Kennedy being so publicly considered for such a prominent health role has already given legitimacy to the fringe ideas that he’s entertained over the years. He’s said in the past that he believes 5G cellular technology controls our behavior, and he has implied that antidepressants are linked to mass shootings.

For a lot of the public, this might be their first time really having to think about health topics such as fluoridation. If this is not something you think about normally, and all of a sudden, here’s this guy all over the news, talking about his doubts about things that have long been accepted as scientific fact, I think it’s reasonable that people would also start feeling confused. The fact that he is in the public eye and getting a lot of airtime to discuss his skepticism is, at the very least, putting a spotlight on these fringe beliefs and, at worst, making them seem more legitimate than they are.

Lora: Given that bird flu may be a growing threat, how do you anticipate Kennedy might respond to a pandemic as the head of HHS?

Yasmin: It’s unlikely that we would see anything close to a streamlined public-health response, in part because Kennedy is so skeptical of vaccines. That could mean a hesitation to invest in the production of vaccines, or a lack of encouragement for Americans to use them. But I think the broader impact might be if he continues to legitimize the view that vaccines are something to be afraid of. People may refuse to take them.

During the height of the coronavirus pandemic, we had people who believed in science leading HHS, and the response was pretty mediocre: inconsistent communication, inadequate testing, little coordination between state and federal agencies. But at least the interventions made sense from a scientific perspective. With someone who does not believe in basic health principles, we may see an unpredictable response—or even no response.

Lora: What kind of power does this role actually come with?

Yasmin: If Kennedy becomes secretary of HHS, he’s going to have an enormous influence on American public health—he would oversee the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, Medicare and Medicaid, and the Administration for Children and Families, among others. And on top of overseeing all of those departments, he would also be the primary adviser to the president on health. So he would be the one telling Donald Trump what health priorities should be. That’s a really scary prospect, because a lot of Kennedy’s perspective on the world doesn’t seem to be rooted in any kind of scientific reality, at least not a mainstream one. He wouldn’t always be able to implement his ideas directly—removing fluoride from water, for example, can happen only at the state and local level—but his endorsement alone could go a long way.

His appointment, though he still needs to be confirmed, seems plausible to me. Kennedy’s audience is a big one—MAGA meets woo-woo, as our colleague Elaine Godfrey has called it—that could further expand support for Trump. But there are still a number of Republican senators he’ll have to win over. Some might take issue with his views on health. Others may feel threatened by his plans to remove corporate influence from the government—Big Pharma, for example, has long provided campaign money to both parties. Kennedy’s plans to overhaul food and pharmaceuticals would also require a ton of regulation, which is exactly what Republicans don’t want. The biggest pitfall for Kennedy would be if his goals run up against Trump’s economic priorities. He was an environmental lawyer, so he’s very anti-oil, whereas Trump is deeply pro-oil. In his past speeches, Trump has said that Kennedy can do whatever he wants, as long as he doesn’t “touch the oil.” I could see Trump or others in the party pushing back on him for that reason.

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Today’s News

Speaker Mike Johnson reportedly urged the House Ethics Committee to not publicly release its probe into former Representative Matt Gaetz’s alleged sexual misconduct and illicit drug use. Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz had a call about the future of the Ukraine war. It was their first conversation since late 2022. Trump selected North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum to be the Interior Department secretary last night; if confirmed by the Senate, Burgum would oversee the country’s public lands.

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Illustration by Diego Mallo. Source: Mark Peterson / Redux.

The Man Who Will Do Anything for Trump

By Elaina Plott Calabro

Kash Patel was dangerous. On this both Trump appointees and career officials could agree.

A 40-year-old lawyer with little government experience, he joined the administration in 2019 and rose rapidly. Each new title set off new alarms.

When Patel was installed as chief of staff to the acting secretary of defense just after the 2020 election, Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, advised him not to break the law in order to keep President Donald Trump in power. “Life looks really shitty from behind bars,” Milley reportedly told Patel. (Patel denies this.)

Read the full article.

Taxonomy of the Trump Bro

found 10 Nov The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2024 › 11 › taxonomy-of-the-trump-bro › 680608

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The MAGA hats were flying like Frisbees. It was two weeks before Election Day. Charlie Kirk, the Millennial right-wing influencer, had been touring college campuses. On this particular Tuesday, he’d brought his provocations to the University of Georgia. Athens, where the school’s main campus is located, is an artsy town in a reliably blue county, with a famed alternative-music scene. (R.E.M., the B-52s, and Neutral Milk Hotel are among the many bands in the city’s lore.) But that afternoon, the courtyard outside the student center was a sea of red, with thunderous “U-S-A!” chants echoing off the buildings. Kirk had arrived on a mission: to pump up Gen Z about the return of Donald Trump. He was succeeding.

I was standing in the back of the crowd, watching hundreds of young guys with their arms outstretched, hollering for MAGA merch. Once a stigmatized cultural artifact, the red cap is now a status symbol. For a certain kind of bro, MAGA is bigger than politics. MAGA makes you manly.

MAGA, as this week affirmed, is also not an aberration. At its core, it remains a patriarchal club, but it cannot be brushed off as a passing freak show or a niche political sect. Donald Trump triumphed in the Electoral College, and when all the votes are counted, he will likely have captured the popular vote as well. Although it’s true that MAGA keeps growing more powerful, the reality is that it’s been part of mainstream culture for a while. Millions of Americans, particularly those who live on the coasts, have simply chosen to believe otherwise.

Democrats are performing all manner of autopsies, finger-pointing, and recriminations after Kamala Harris’s defeat. Many political trends will continue to undergo examination, especially the pronounced shift of Latino voters toward Trump. But among all the demographic findings is this particular and fascinating one: Young men are more conservative than they used to be. One analysis of AP VoteCast data, for instance, showed that 56 percent of men ages 18–29 supported Trump this year, up 15 points from 2020.

Depending on where you live and with whom you interact, Trump’s success with young men in Tuesday’s election may have come as a shock. But the signs were there all along. Today, the top three U.S. podcasts on Spotify are The Joe Rogan Experience, The Tucker Carlson Show, and The Charlie Kirk Show. All three hosts endorsed Trump for president. These programs and their massive audiences transcend the narrow realm of politics. Together, they are male-voice megaphones in a metastasizing movement across America. In 2023, Steve Bannon described this coalition to me as “the Tucker-Rogan-Elon-Bannon-combo-platter right.” Trump has many people to thank for his victory—among them men, and especially young men with their AirPods in.

Trump can often be a repetitive bore when speaking in public, but one of his more interesting interviews this year was a conversation with dude-philosopher Theo Von. As my colleague Helen Lewis wrote, Trump’s “discussion of drug and alcohol addiction on Theo Von’s This Past Weekend podcast demonstrated perhaps the most interest Trump has ever shown in another human being.” (Trump’s older brother, Fred Trump Jr., died of complications from alcoholism at the age of 42.) Similarly, five days before the election, Trump took the stage with Carlson for a live one-on-one interview. The two bro’d out in an arena near Phoenix, and that night, Trump was especially freewheeling—and uncharacteristically reflective about the movement he leads. (Trump looks poised to win Arizona after losing it in 2020.)

It’s not just one type of talkative bro who has boosted Trump and made him more palatable to the average American. Trump has steadily assembled a crew of extremely influential and successful men who are loyal to him. Carlson is the preppy debate-club bro. Rogan is the stoner bro. Elon Musk is the tech bro. Bill Ackman is the finance bro. Jason Aldean is the country-music bro. Harrison Butker is the NFL bro. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the crunchy-conspiracist bro. Hulk Hogan is the throwback entertainer bro. Kid Rock is the “American Bad Ass” bro. And that’s hardly an exhaustive list. Each of these bros brings his own bro-y fandom to the MAGA movement and helps, in his own way, to legitimize Trump and whitewash his misdeeds. Some of these men, such as Kennedy and Musk, may even play a role in the coming administration.

My colleague Spencer Kornhaber wrote this week that Democrats are losing the culture war. He’s right, but Trumpism extends even beyond politics and pop culture. I’ve been thinking a lot about that day I spent at the University of Georgia. Students I spoke with told me that some frat houses off campus make no secret of their Trump support, but it seemed less about specific policies and more about attitude. That’s long been the open secret to Trump: a feeling, a vibe, not a statistic. Even Kirk’s “free speech” exercises, which he’s staged at colleges nationwide for a while now, are only nominally about actual political debate. In essence, they are public performances that boil down to four words: Come at me, bro! Perhaps there is something in all of this that is less about fighting and more about acceptance—especially in a culture that treats bro as a pejorative.

These Trump bros do not all deserve sympathy. But there’s good reason to try to actually understand this particular voting bloc, and why so many men were—and are—ready to go along with Trump.

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

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Today’s News

A federal judge granted Special Counsel Jack Smith’s request to pause the election-subversion case against Trump after his presidential victory. The Department of Justice charged three men connected to a foiled Iranian assassination plot against Trump. Trump named his senior campaign adviser Susie Wiles as his White House chief of staff. She will be the first woman to hold the role.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

The Strange History Behind the Anti-Semitic Dutch Soccer Attacks

By Franklin Foer

Among the bizarrest phenomena in the world of sports is Ajax, the most accomplished club in the storied history of Dutch soccer … Ajax fans tattoo the Star of David onto their forearms. In the moments before the opening kick of a match, they proudly shout at the top of their lungs, “Jews, Jews, Jews,” because—though most of them are not Jewish—philo-Semitism is part of their identity.

Last night, the club that describes itself as Jewish played against a club of actual Jews, Maccabi Tel Aviv. As Israeli fans left the stadium, after their club suffered a thumping defeat, they were ambushed by well-organized groups of thugs, in what the mayor of Amsterdam described as “anti-Semitic hit-and-run squads.”

Read the full article.

What Trump Sees Coming

found 3 Nov The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2024 › 11 › what-trump-sees-coming › 680504

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Maybe it was always building to this: thousands of people singing and dancing to “Macho Man,” some sporting neon safety vests, others in actual trash bags, a symbolic expression of solidarity with their authoritarian hero whose final week on the campaign trail has revolved around the word garbage.

Where will the MAGA movement go from here? Trump had an answer last night, at least for the short term. He wasn’t telegraphing an Election Day victory—he was preparing, once again, to label his opponents “cheaters” and to challenge a potential defeat.

The evening’s host, Tucker Carlson, said that for most of his life as a journalist, he’d imagined that one would have to be “bereft of a soul” to stand onstage and support a politician. “And here I am with a full-throated, utterly sincere endorsement of Donald Trump.”

On with the show.

As I wandered around Desert Diamond Arena, in Glendale, Arizona, last night, this iteration of Trumpism felt slightly different, if not wholly novel. Nine years ago, Trump held one of his first MAGA rallies not far from this venue. “Donald Trump Defiantly Rallies a New ‘Silent Majority’ in a Visit to Arizona” read a New York Times headline from July 11, 2015. Charlie Kirk, one of last night’s warm-up speakers, put it thusly: “This state helped launch the movement that has swept the globe.” All of the elements Trump needed to stoke the fire back then were still here last night: the Mexican border debate, inflamed racial tensions, metastasizing political extremism. Trump’s movement has grown, and his red MAGA hat has become a cultural touchstone. As the Arizona sun set, though, his nearly decade-long campaign of fear and despotism also had a surprising air of denouement.

Trump told Carlson he doesn’t like to look back. But last night, as he rambled (and rambled), he was sporadically reflective about all that had led to this point in his life. Trump sat in a leather chair with just a handheld mic—no teleprompter, no notes. He mostly ignored Carlson’s questions and instead tossed out ideas at random—what he calls “the weave.” In reality, it’s less lucid than he believes; more of a zigzag across years of personal triumphs and troubles. Remember “Russia, Russia, Russia”? Remember the “China virus”? Remember the time he courageously pardoned Scooter Libby? Remember how good he used to be at firing people on The Apprentice? Remember the crowd at that one Alabama rally? All of this, in his mind, amounted to something akin to a closing argument.

The event was a hurricane-relief benefit billed as Tucker Carlson Live With Special Guest Donald J. Trump. But Carlson barely spoke. Instead, he sat back in his own chair, occasionally picking at his fingers, looking somewhat mystified that this was where he’d ended up in his career, hosting Inside the Authoritarian’s Studio. He had taken the stage to the sounds of Kid Rock, but he looked as preppy as ever in a navy blazer, a gingham shirt, a striped tie, and khakis. He insisted, twice, that he had bent the knee to Donald Trump without shame. Trump, he marveled, had shown him what a sham D.C. was. He lamented how those inside the Beltway treated Trump “like he was a dangerous freak, like he’d just escaped from the state mental institution.”

Carlson has grown more radical since Fox News fired him. Last night, he claimed, for instance, that the CIA and the FBI have been working with the Democratic Party to take Trump down. He implied that funding for Ukraine isn’t going to the military but is instead lining the pockets of the Washington elite: “Have you been to McLean recently?”

The man he unabashedly endorsed, meanwhile, again spoke of “the enemy within,” and attacked the enemy of the people (the media). Trump once again demeaned his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, as a “low-IQ individual” and “dumb as a rock.” He claimed that members of the January 6 “unselect committee” had burned, destroyed, and deleted all the evidence it had collected because, in the end, they found out that Nancy Pelosi was at fault (this bit was especially hard to follow). He called for enlisting the “radical war hawk” Liz Cheney into combat: “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”

Trump blew some of his usual autocratic dog whistles, saying, for instance, that anyone who burns an American flag should be sentenced to a year in prison. He suggested that loyalists and extremists will fill his next administration, should it exist. He implied that he’d bring in Elon Musk to find ways to slash the federal budget, and let Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic and a conspiracy theorist, examine public-health matters. “He can do anything he wants,” Trump said of Kennedy.

But perhaps the most meaningful moment of the night was when Trump said matter-of-factly that he won’t run for president again. He instead hinted that his vice-presidential nominee, J. D. Vance, will be a top 2028 contender. Win or lose, this was it, his last dystopian rodeo. Trump spoke almost wistfully about suddenly approaching the end of his never-ending rally tour. He sounded like a kid moving to a new neighborhood and a new middle school. He told his friends he’d miss them. “We’ll meet, but it’ll be different,” he said. He was in no rush to leave the stage.

The big question going into Tuesday’s election is whether the MAGA movement will fizzle out should Trump lose. Although Trump himself seems more exhausted than usual these days, his supporters are as fired up as ever. “Fight! Fight! Fight!” chants— a reference to Trump’s now-infamous response to the July attempt on his life—broke out among the crowd as people waited to pass through Secret Service checkpoints. I passed a man in a brown wig, a pink blazer, and a green top that read Kamala Toe, the words gesturing toward his crotch. I saw a woman wearing gold Trump-branded sneakers, and many people with Musk’s Dark MAGA hat. The latter seemed particularly notable: In addition to getting behind Vance, Trump might be inclined to pass the torch to another nonpolitician—namely, someone like Musk.

For now, though, Trump is returning to his conspiratorial election denialism. Four years ago, he tried to undermine the results in Arizona, Georgia, and other states. Last night, he singled out Pennsylvania. (A day earlier, his campaign had filed a lawsuit in the state, alleging voter suppression.) “It’s hard to believe I’m winning, it seems by a lot, if they don’t cheat too much,” he said, alleging malfeasance in York and Lancaster counties. Whether he succeeds or fails, the detritus that Trump has left behind will likely linger. “Look around, Mr. President, because there’s a lot of garbage here!” Charlie Kirk said earlier in the night. “Go to the polls on Tuesday and make sure that we all ride that big garbage truck to Washington, D.C.,” Kennedy, who was one of the warm-up speakers, implored.

Trump, though, opined with uncharacteristic nostalgia: “When I was a young guy, I loved—I always loved the whole thing, the concept of the history and all of the things that can happen.” He sounded fleetingly earnest. He has undoubtedly cemented his place in history. Or, as Carlson put it earlier in the night: “Almost 10 years later, he has completely transformed the country and the world.”

Today’s News

The White House altered its transcript of President Joe Biden’s call with Latino activists, during which official stenographers recorded that Biden called Trump supporters “garbage,” according to the Associated Press. The White House denied that Biden had been referring to Trump voters. During a meeting in Moscow, North Korea’s foreign minister pledged to support Russia until it wins the war against Ukraine. The price of Donald Trump’s social-media stock fell another 14 percent today, amounting to a loss of more than 40 percent over three days.

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