Israel said the target of the strike was involved in the October 7 attacks and also worked at the charity World Central Kitchen.

Four years ago, the long-running Fox News juggernaut suddenly looked precarious. The 2020 elections proved a major threat, as viewers abandoned the network and huge lawsuits threatened its coffers. Today, Donald Trump is headed back to the White House, and he’s bringing a brigade of former Fox talent with him—a symbolic expression of the Murdoch-owned channel’s astonishing comeback.

Leading the list are Pete Hegseth, a frequent Fox presence who is nominated for secretary of defense, and Sean Duffy, a former Fox Business host (and U.S. representative) tapped to lead the Department of Transportation. They’re joined by former Fox contributors Tom Homan (border czar), Tulsi Gabbard (director of national intelligence), and Janette Nesheiwat (surgeon general); former host Mike Huckabee (ambassador to Israel); guest host Pam Bondi (attorney general); and frequent guests Michael Waltz (national security adviser) and Marty Makary (commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration). Larry Kudlow passed this time on an administration job to stay at Fox Business.

[David A. Graham: Tucker’s successor will be worse]

In some ways, this staffing strategy looks a lot like that of the first Trump administration. During that presidency, the network was closely intertwined with the White House; the Fox host Sean Hannity was sometimes called Trump’s “shadow chief of staff,” and Hannity’s colleague Tucker Carlson became the leading exponent of Trumpist ideology in the media.

But the mostly synergistic relationship faltered in November 2020. Fox was the first network to forecast that Joe Biden had won Arizona, which infuriated both the Trump camp and conservative viewers. As the Republican Party became engulfed by bogus accusations of electoral fraud, Fox found itself in an uncomfortable in-between position. The network sometimes hosted Trump-world figures who repeated false claims, but privately, hosts ridiculed them. Meanwhile, hard-line viewers became angry with Fox’s refusal to go all in on the Big Lie and started defecting to more extreme right-wing upstarts such as Newsmax and One America News Network; Trump lambasted his former Fox allies. Internally, the network was rattled, and leaders debated next steps. Rupert Murdoch had never loved Trump, and some of his children wondered whether the business would be better served by moving to the center.

Worse was to come. Fox may not have embraced voting-fraud claims as fully as other outlets, but it did air guests’ statements that machines made by Dominion, a company that makes ballot-counting-equipment, had rigged the presidential election. Dominion sued for defamation, and a legal expert told CNN that the prospect of huge payouts represented “an existential threat” to the Fox Corporation. Fox finally settled the case on the eve of a trial, in April 2023, paying $787 million, though not before damaging internal communications had emerged as part of the litigation. A week later, Carlson—the network’s most popular figure—was fired.

[Read: What does Tucker Carlson believe?]

So Fox’s return to dominance today is somewhat surprising. Perhaps it shouldn’t be. The network has led cable-news ratings for more than two decades, and weathered the loss of several prominent hosts before Carlson; as I wrote when he exited, anchors tend to need Fox more than Fox needs them.

Although Trump has sometimes tried to claim credit for Fox’s success, what really seems to have happened is that Trump and Fox rediscovered a symbiotic relationship that allowed both to rebound. A spokesperson for the network pointed out to me that Fox has covered inflation, border security, and President Biden’s apparent decline extensively, getting to those topics faster or in more depth than CNN and MSNBC did. These three issues were also among the most important in the latest presidential election. What seemed like adverse headlines for Trump, including the criminal charges against him, led to high ratings for MSNBC, but Fox still came out on top.

After years of mostly avoiding Fox, Democrats also began to appear on the channel to try to get their message out. Kamala Harris granted one of her rare national-media interviews to Fox’s Bret Baier. Her vice-presidential nominee, Tim Walz, went on Fox News Sunday two weeks running in October. And Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, an early adopter of Fox guest spots, introduced himself at the Democratic National Convention in August by joking, “Here’s a sentence I never thought I’d hear myself saying: I’m Pete Buttigieg, and you might recognize me from Fox News.”

The aftermath of the election has many on the left feeling dejected and tuning out the news. MSNBC’s numbers tanked in the week after the election, and the network’s morning-show team of Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski has endured backlash over their meeting for a reset with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. MSNBC’s parent company is also spinning it off from NBC.

[Adam Serwer: Why Fox News lied to its viewers]

The impact of nontraditional news sources, including X and podcasts, on the election has brought a new round of predictions about the demise of traditional media. But Fox’s rebound suggests a different conclusion: Perhaps the answer isn’t that people are really demanding different kinds of news; it’s that they just want conservative news. The nearly uniform shift rightward of the electorate in 2024 suggests that Fox was well positioned to both reflect and amplify voters’ mood.

Trump, meanwhile, continues to gripe about Fox decisions, likely judging that his broadsides can help shape Fox’s coverage to his liking. Shortly before the election, he demanded that the network stop airing paid ads that criticized him, whined when Baier interviewed Harris, and blasted Fox this summer after Paul Ryan, the former speaker of the House who sits on the corporation’s board, criticized him. “Nobody can ever trust Fox News, and I am one of them,” he posted, semi-grammatically. Trump’s selection of so many Fox alumni for his administration is in part a reflection of his instinct that politics is really a form of entertainment, and one of the key qualifications he seeks in any aide is looking the part. But the appointments and nominations over the past two weeks also show that, much like the viewers who left Fox after the 2020 election but have since returned, Trump may not love everything Fox does, but he can’t bring himself to leave it for good.

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On Christmas Eve of 2020, my father was admitted to the hospital with sudden weakness. My mother was not allowed to join him. She pleaded with the staff—my dad needed help making medical decisions, she said—but there were no exceptions at that grisly stage of the coronavirus pandemic. I contemplated making the trip from Maryland to New Jersey to see whether I, as a doctor, could garner special treatment until I realized that state and employer travel rules would mean waiting for a COVID test result and possibly facing quarantine on my return. In the end, my father spent his time in the hospital alone, suffering the double harm of illness and isolation.

These events still frustrate me years later; I have a hard time believing that restrictions on hospital visitation and interstate travel helped more people than they hurt. Many Americans remain angry about the pandemic for other reasons too: angry about losing a job, getting bullied into vaccination, or watching children fall behind in a virtual classroom. That legacy of bitterness and distrust is now a major political force. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is on the precipice of leading our nation’s health-care system as secretary of Health and Human Services. The Johns Hopkins professor Marty Makary has been tapped to lead the Food and Drug Administration. And the Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya is expected to be picked to run the National Institutes of Health. These men have each advocated for changes to the systems and structures of public health. But what unites them all—and what legitimizes them in the eyes of this next administration—is a lasting rage over COVID.

To understand this group’s ascent to power and what it could mean for America, one must consider their perception of the past five years. The world, as Kennedy, Makary, Bhattacharya, and their compatriots variously understand it, is dreadful: SARS-CoV-2 was likely created in a lab in Wuhan, China; U.S. officials tried to cover up that fact; and the government responded to the virus by ignoring scientific evidence, violating citizens’ civil rights, and suppressing dissent. In the face of this modern “dark age,” as Bhattacharya has called it, only a few brave dissidents were willing to flip on the light.

Makary, Trump’s pick for the FDA, presents as being in the truth-to-power mold. A surgeon, policy researcher, and—full disclosure—my academic colleague, he gained a loyal following during the pandemic as a public-health critic. Through media outlets such as Fox News and The Wall Street Journal, Makary advocated for a more reserved use of COVID vaccines: He suggested that adults who had recovered from a COVID infection, as well as children more generally, could forgo some doses; he is also skeptical of booster shots for everyone and vaccine mandates. Makary, too, thinks that public-health officials have been lying to the American people: “The greatest perpetrator of misinformation during the pandemic has been the United States government,” he told Congress last year, referring to public-health guidance that emphasized transmission of COVID on surfaces, downplayed natural immunity, encouraged boosters in young people, and promoted the efficacy of masking.

[Read: The sanewashing of RFK Jr.]

Bhattacharya, a doctor and health economist, rose to fame in October 2020 as a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated for a “focused protection” approach to the pandemic. The idea was to isolate vulnerable seniors while allowing low-risk individuals to return to their normal lives. Much of the public-health community aggressively criticized this strategy at the time, and—as would later be revealed—NIH Director Francis Collins privately called for a “quick and devastating” takedown of its premise. Twitter placed Bhattacharya on a “trends blacklist” that reduced the reach of his posts, according to internal documents released to the journalist Bari Weiss in 2022. Among conservatives and lockdown skeptics, Bhattacharya has come to be seen as a fearless truth teller who was silenced by the federal government and Big Tech. (In reality, and despite his frequent umbrage, Bhattacharya was not ignored. He met with the Trump administration and was in communication with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.)

In response to their marginalization from polite scientific society—and long before they were in line for key government positions—Makary and Bhattacharya have each sought out a public reckoning. They both called for the medical establishment to issue an apology to the American people. Makary demanded “fresh leadership” at an FDA that had made serious blunders on COVID medications and vaccines, and Bhattacharya asked for the formation of a COVID commission as a necessary first step in “restoring the public’s trust in scientific experts.” They even worked together at the Norfolk Group, a cohort of like-minded scientists and doctors that laid out what they deemed to be the most vital questions that must be asked of the nation’s public-health leaders. The gist of some of these is: Why didn’t they listen to “focused protection” supporters such as Bhattacharya and Makary? The report wonders, for instance, why Deborah Birx, a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, avoided meeting with a cadre of anti-lockdown advocates that included Bhattacharya in the summer of 2020. (“They are a fringe group without grounding in epidemics, public health or on the ground common sense experience,” Birx wrote in an email to the vice president’s chief of staff at the time.)

This sense of outrage over COVID will be standard in the next administration. Trump’s pick for surgeon general, the doctor and Fox News personality Janette Nesheiwat, has called the prolonged isolation brought about by shutdowns “cruel and inhumane,” and said that the collateral damage caused by the government’s actions was “worse than the pandemic” for most Americans. His nominee for secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, pushed for herd immunity in May 2020 and encouraged anti-lockdown protests.

[Read: Donald Trump’s most dangerous Cabinet pick]

Bhattacharya, at least, has denied having any interest in revenge. Last year he helped write an op-ed that cautioned against initiating a “Nuremberg 2.0” and instead presented scientists like himself and Makary as “apostles of evidence-based science” who are simply “calling for restoring evidence-based medicine to a pride of place in public health.”

Taken on its own, I’m sympathetic to that goal. I consider myself a fellow member of the “evidence-based medicine” movement that values high-quality data over blind loyalty to authority. I’m also of a similar mind as Makary about the FDA’s long-standing dysfunction. The COVID skeptics are correct that, in some domains, the pandemic produced too little knowledge and too much bluster. We still don’t know how well various social-distancing measures worked, what the best vaccination policy might be, or what the true origins of the virus were. I remember following the debates about these issues on Twitter, which functioned as a town square for doctors, scientists, and public-health leaders during the pandemic years. Mainstream experts tended to defend unproved public-health measures with self-righteousness and absolutism: You were either in favor of saving lives or you were one of the skeptics who was trying to kill Grandma. Nuanced conversations were rare. Accusations of “misinformation” were plentiful.

[Read: COVID science is moving backwards]

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was indeed spreading misinformation with a fire hose. (For example, he has falsely said that the COVID shots are the “deadliest vaccine ever made.”) Bhattacharya and Makary have been far more grounded in reality, but they did make their own share of mistakes during the pandemic—and they haven’t spent much time rehashing them. So allow me to reflect on their behalf: In March 2020, Bhattacharya argued that COVID’s mortality rate was likely to be much lower than anyone was saying at the time, even to the point of being one-tenth that of the flu. “If we’re right about the limited scale of the epidemic,” he wrote, “then measures focused on older populations and hospitals are sensible.” Bhattacharya continued to be wrong in important ways. A pivotal assumption of the Great Barrington Declaration was that as more healthy people got sick and then recovered, the residual risk of new infections would fall low enough that vulnerable people could safely leave isolation. This process would likely take three to six months, his group explained. SARS-CoV-2, however, is still circulating at high levels nearly five years later. At least 1.2 million Americans have died from COVID. Had effective vaccines not arrived shortly after the 2020 declaration, senior citizens might be in hiding to this day.

As for Makary, his most infamous take involved a February 2021 prediction that the United States would reach herd immunity within two months. “Scientists shouldn’t try to manipulate the public by hiding the truth,” he wrote in The Wall Street Journal. The Delta and Omicron waves followed, killing hundreds of thousands more Americans.

When I reached out to Bhattacharya, he said his early guess about COVID’s mortality rate was meant only to help describe a “range of possible outcomes,” and that to characterize it otherwise would be false. (Makary did not respond to my questions for this story.)

The incoming administration’s COVID skeptics have also expressed sympathy for still-unproved theories about the pandemic’s origin. If you want to become an evidence apostle, believing that SARS-CoV-2 came from an NIH-funded lab leak seems to be part of the deal. Kennedy wrote multiple books purporting to link Anthony Fauci, in particular, to the creation of the virus. Similarly, Makary appears in a new documentary called Thank You Dr. Fauci, which describes “a bio-arms race with China and what could be the largest coverup in modern history.” (Fauci has denied these claims on multiple occasions, including in congressional testimony. He called the idea that he participated in a cover-up of COVID’s origins “absolutely false and simply preposterous.”)

A certain amount of sycophancy toward the more bizarre elements of the coalition is also common. Makary and Bhattacharya have both praised Kennedy in extravagant terms despite his repeated falsehoods: “He wrote a 500-page book on Dr. Fauci and the medical industrial complex. A hundred percent of it was true,” Makary said of a volume that devotes multiple chapters to casting doubt on HIV as the cause of AIDS. Earlier this month, Bhattacharya called Kennedy a “disruptor” whose views on vaccines and AIDS are merely “eccentric.” (Bhattacharya has also suggested that the vaccine skeptic and conspiracy theorist Robert Malone would be an “amazing leader” for the country’s health agencies.)

Anger about the government’s response to the pandemic swept the COVID contrarians into power. Resentment was their entrée into Washington. Now they’ll have a chance to fix some genuine, systemic problems with the nation’s public-health establishment. They’ll also have the ability to settle scores.

Food and other items spoiled as hundreds of tents of displaced Palestinians flooded amid ongoing Israeli onslaught.

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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.

Related:

RFK Jr. collects his reward. The sanewashing of RFK Jr.

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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.

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The number of E. coli cases linked to onions used by McDonald’s has cracked 100. The Food and Drug Administration said in an update that the number of people sickened by the fast food bacteria outbreak has climbed from 90 to 104.

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Donald Trump is heading back to the White House. He has inflation to thank.

In poll after poll, focus group after focus group, Americans said the economy was bad—and the economy was bad because prices were too high. This was always going to be a problem for Kamala Harris. “Excess” inflation—defined as the cumulative growth of prices in one presidential term compared with the term preceding it—is highly predictive of electoral outcomes, according to the Northwestern economist Robert Gordon. It is a crucial part of how voters decide whether they are better off and want to stick with the incumbent. The measure strongly pointed to a Trump victory. Indeed, since the global post-pandemic inflation spike began, ruling parties around the world, on the left and the right, have been toppled.

Still, before this week, Democrats had good reasons to believe that they might be spared the inflation backlash. Households’ spending power improved more and faster in the United States than in other countries. On paper, families were doing better than they were before the pandemic, particularly at the low end of the income spectrum. Real wages—meaning wages adjusted for prices—jumped 13.2 percent for the lowest-income workers from 2019 to 2023; real wages for the highest-income workers climbed 4.4 percent.

[From the April 2024 issue: What would it take to convince Americans that the economy is fine?]

But voters do not make their decisions at the polls on the basis of price-adjusted time series. Nor do they seem to appreciate pundits and politicians telling them that their lived experience is somehow incorrect—that they are truly doing great; they just don’t know it.

Prices spiked more during the Biden administration than at any point since the early 1980s. In some categories, they remain unsustainably high. Home prices have jumped an astonishing 47 percent since early 2020. This has made homeowners wealthier on paper, but has priced millions of people out of the housing market. The situation with rented homes is no better. Costs are up more than 20 percent since COVID hit, and have doubled in some places. The number of cost-burdened renters is at an all-time high.

In response to inflation, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates. Inflation statistics do not include the cost of borrowing, but many Americans experienced higher rates—the supposed cure for higher prices—as making costs worse. Mortgage rates more than doubled from their pandemic-era level, adding insult to home-buying injury. The interest payment on a new-car loan has grown nearly as much. Credit-card APRs climbed to all-time highs, making many families’ buffer against month-to-month earnings and spending changes a costly one. If you include the cost of borrowing, inflation peaked at 18 percent, not 9 percent.

When asked over the past few years about their personal financial stressors, however, voters mostly haven’t focused on housing or auto loans. They overwhelmingly brought up everyday purchases, above all the price of groceries and fast food. Food inflation outpaced the overall rate for much of the Biden administration; in 2022, when inflation was 6.5 percent, the price of groceries grew by 11.8 percent. The price hikes cooled off in 2023, but prices themselves remained far higher than Americans were used to: Margarine, eggs, peanut butter, crackers, and bread all cost more than 40 percent more than they did just a few years ago. That everyday indignity seems to be what made inflation so salient for voters. The mental math families were tasked with felt excruciating. The sticker shock remained shocking.

[Annie Lowrey: The worst best economy ever]

The optimistic story for the Harris campaign was that, after a year of subdued price growth, the American people would have gotten used to higher bills and appreciated the earning power they gained from the tight labor market. Instead, anger at inflation lingered, even among tens of millions of working-class Americans who had gotten wealthier. This is not a purely economic story; it’s a psychological one too. People interpret wage gains as a product of their own effort and high costs as a policy problem that the president is supposed to solve. Going to the polls, voters still ranked the economy as their No. 1 issue, inflation as the No. 1 economic problem, and Trump as their preferred candidate to deal with it. In interviews, many voters told me they felt as if Democrats were gaslighting them by insisting that they were thriving.

Voters who expect Trump’s victory to herald a return to 2019 prices or relief from the cost-of-living crisis might be due for disappointment, though. Trump’s signature economic proposal of huge global tariffs would immediately raise the cost of household goods. And his promise to round up and deport millions of undocumented immigrants could create a labor shortage that would raise the cost of food, construction, home health care, and child care. He has offered no serious plan to address the deep, tangled problems that have made a middle-class life so unobtainable for so many Americans. Those problems preceded the Biden administration, and they will outlast the second Trump administration too.