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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.

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The Man Who Will Do Anything for Trump

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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.

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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.

Heading into the presidential election, voters voiced concerns about many issues: abortion, housing, the war in Gaza, immigration. But the one that really resonated at the polls had long dogged the Biden administration, appearing over and over as the top concern on voters’ minds: the economy. In the end, abortion—much as Democrats tried—wasn’t the policy issue that defined the race. Instead, millions of Americans cast their vote based on fear and anger about the state of the economy—all stoked by Donald Trump, who claimed that he was the only one who could solve America’s problems.

On Tuesday, Americans unhappy with the status quo rebuked the current administration for COVID-sparked inflation, following an anti-incumbent pattern that is playing out in elections worldwide. As my colleague Annie Lowrey wrote this week, the “everyday indignity” of heightened food prices, in particular, haunted and enraged American voters even after inflation cooled meaningfully from its 2022 peaks. Though the economy improved by many measures under President Joe Biden, the message from Democrats that you’re doing fine didn’t land—and even seemed patronizing—to Americans who saw high prices all around them. And as Annie noted, although wages have outpaced inflation in recent months, “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.”

Trump’s proposals on the economy were frequently incoherent; he scapegoated immigrants for Americans’ financial woes and made promises about tariffs that economists said would lead to higher prices. Still, voters said consistently that they felt that Trump was the right person to handle the economy (even as Kamala Harris started to close in on Trump’s lead on the issue), perhaps because of nostalgia for a pre-pandemic economy that’s unlikely to return. For all the criticism Harris faced early in her campaign for not issuing clearer policy proposals (she ultimately did), Trump was the one whose appeal was rooted largely in “vibes”: He brought heavy doses of hateful culture-war rhetoric to the race, spreading false and dangerous messages about transgender people, blaming immigrants for societal ills, and smearing women, including Harris.

Even though Trump was president just four years ago, he framed himself as the candidate of change, whereas Harris was pegged as the status-quo candidate and struggled to differentiate herself from Biden. Harris, of course, is not the incumbent president. But she was an imperfect messenger on the economy. Even as she started releasing more detailed economic-policy proposals, which included tackling price gouging and making housing more affordable, she was still the governing partner of a president whom voters blamed for inflation—a president whose policies she did not seem willing to openly break with. Trump seized on that dynamic, framing her as a continuation of the current administration and surfacing clips of Harris defending Bidenomics.

Democrats, meanwhile, tried to center abortion rights. When Harris took over for Biden, some pundits saw the issue as a strength for her. It was reasonable for Democrats to think appeals on abortion could work, Jacob Neiheisel, a political-science professor at SUNY Buffalo told me: In 2022, emphasizing abortion proved a decisive issue for Democrats in the midterm elections (though, he noted, it actually helped Democrats only in specific parts of the country—just enough to fend off a midterms “red wave”). But this time around, the economy mattered more: CNN national exit polling found that only 14 percent of voters said abortion was their top issue, compared with more than 30 percent who said that about the economy. And Trump, it seemed, managed to muddle the message on abortion enough that many voters didn’t view him as patently anti-abortion (even as Democrats emphasized that he was responsible for the fall of Roe v. Wade). More than a quarter of women who supported legal abortion still chose Trump, according to exit polling.

Fears about the future of democracy were also at the top of voters’ minds more commonly than abortion, according to CNN exit polling: 34 percent of voters said it was their top issue, suggesting that the Harris campaign’s rhetoric about the existential threats posed by Trump did have some effect on voters’ perceptions. My colleague Ronald Brownstein noted today that in national exit polling, 54 percent of voters agreed that Trump was “too extreme,” “but about one in nine voters who viewed Trump as too extreme voted for him anyway.”

For nearly a decade now, Trump has felt like the dominant figure in American politics. But as David Wallace-Wells noted in The New York Times yesterday, a Democrat has been president for 12 of the past 16 years. Democrats, he argues, for a generation now have been “the party of power and the establishment,” with the right becoming “the natural home for anti-establishment resentment of all kinds—of which, it’s now clear to see, there is an awful lot.” Ultimately, much of the dynamic in this race came down to whether voters were hopeful or fearful about their and their country’s future. When people have the choice to “vote hopes or vote fears,” Neiheisel said, “fears tend to override.”

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