Kennedy's plans to ban dyes in cereals and fluoride in water could get major pushback from the food industry.

Of all the promises, from quixotic to horrifying, that Donald Trump has made about the next four years, the one that seems least likely to be fulfilled is his vow to “defeat anti-Semitism.” He has nominated a slew of cranks who have dabbled in the oldest conspiracy theory of them all, a belief that Jews control the world.

Over the past decade or so, pernicious lies about Jewish villainy have drifted into the mainstream of American life. That’s a fact Trump acknowledges when he talks about his plans to “defend Jewish citizens in America.” But he tends to focus on the problem at college campuses, which constitutes an incomplete diagnosis. It allows Trump to ignore his own complicity in unleashing the worst wave of anti-Jewish sentiment in generations.

In his first administration, Trump provided rhetorical cover for supporters who blared hateful sentiments—those “very fine people,” Kanye West, and others. This time, he’s placing them in the line of presidential succession. If confirmed, this crew would comprise the highest-ranking collection of White House anti-Semites in generations.

Take Matt Gaetz, Trump’s nominee for attorney general. He is a fierce opponent of the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which would curtail federal funding for institutions of higher education that fail to address the hatred of Jews when it flourishes on their campuses. There are principled reasons for rejecting the bill. But in the course of arguing against it, Gaetz revealed himself. He asserted that the legislation’s definition of anti-Semitism would penalize the belief that the Jews killed Jesus. This wasn’t a point Gaetz made in the spirit of protecting free speech. He fervently believes it himself. “The Bible is clear. There is no myth or controversy on this,” he posted on X. This is the canard from which the whole Western tradition of anti-Semitism flows, a belief officially repudiated by the Catholic Church at the Second Vatican Council nearly 60 years ago.

And it wasn’t a stray expression. In 2018, Gaetz invited Charles Johnson, a notorious figure on the alt-right, to attend the State of the Union address as his guest. Johnson is a textbook example of a Holocaust denier. He insists that only 250,000 Jews died—and only of typhus—during World War II. In a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” session, he wrote that he agreed with a commenter “about Auschwitz and the gas chambers not being real.” When confronted with Johnson’s record, Gaetz admitted that he hadn’t properly vetted Johnson before extending him an invitation. Even so, he told Fox Business that Johnson is “not a holocaust denier.” That defense, given all the evidence about Johnson presented to him, is tantamount to an endorsement.

The essence of conspiracism is the description of the hidden hand, the ubiquity of all-powerful evildoers. That is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s overriding intellectual habit. He believes that the CIA killed his uncle, and he attributes autism to vaccines. In 2023, he was caught on video suggesting that COVID-19 might be a bioweapon. Espousing such a theory should be disqualifying for the job of running America’s public-health system. But he went further. He said that the disease was designed to attack Caucasians and Black people. “The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” (In case it needs saying, this is false.) As a well-practiced conspiracist, he knew to append his theory with a disclaimer, adding, “We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not,” as if he were merely asking an innocent question. And when confronted with his own words, he denied any ill intent: “I haven’t said an anti-Semitic word in my life.”

[Read: The sanewashing of RFK Jr.]

But his insinuation echoed the medieval Christian libel that Jews had poisoned the wells of Europe, unleashing the Black Death. Kennedy’s winking accusation also mimics a strain of white-supremacist pseudoscience, which asserts that Ashkenazi Jews are a distinct race from Caucasians. According to this bizarre, and bizarrely prevalent, theory, that’s what makes Jews so pernicious: They can pass for white people while conspiring to undermine them.

Not so long ago, these sorts of comments would have rendered a nominee unconfirmable—or at least would have necessitated an excruciating apology tour. But anti-Semitism is no longer taboo. And it’s telling that Trump has adopted Elon Musk as a primary adviser, because Musk is a chief culprit in the lifting of that taboo.

When Musk bought Twitter in 2022, he reversed a ban imposed by the company’s previous regime that kept anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers off the platform. Under his ownership, anti-Jewish voices became unavoidable fixtures on the site, broadcasting their bigoted theories without any fear of consequences.

One reason they have little to fear is that Musk has displayed sympathy for their worldview. Like them, he harps on the wickedness of George Soros, whom he once likened to the comic supervillain Magneto, a mutant who plots to wipe out humanity. (Like Soros, Magneto is a Holocaust survivor.) This comparison almost explicitly admits its exaggeration of Jewish nefariousness. And if the thrust of his sentiments wasn’t clear enough, he emphatically endorsed a tweet claiming that “Jewish communities have been pushing … dialectal hatred against whites.”

For a time, Musk refuted his critics by smearing them. He accused the Anti-Defamation League, the nation’s leading Jewish civil-rights group, of orchestrating a campaign to destroy him. Eventually, to fend off an advertiser boycott, he apologized, visited Auschwitz, and called himself “aspirationally Jewish.”

The presence of these conspiracists doesn’t suggest that Trump will pursue policies that provoke Jewish suffering. His support for Israel might even win him the approval of a growing segment of organized Jewry. Instead, the danger posed by his appointees is that their mere presence in high office will make American anti-Semitism even more permissible; they will make conspiracies about Jews socially acceptable. Indeed, that might already have happened. Trump just proposed the most anti-Semitic Cabinet in recent history, and that fact has barely elicited a peep.

At a rally in Las Vegas in September, the reggaeton star Nicky Jam came onstage in a Make America Great Again hat and endorsed Donald Trump. “We need you. We need you back, right? We need you to be the president,” he said. But after a comedian at Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden last month called Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage,” the singer—whose father is Puerto Rican and who was raised partly on the island—had second thoughts.

“Never in my life did I think that a month later, a comedian was going to come to criticize my country and speak badly of my country, and therefore, I renounce any support for Donald Trump,” Nicky Jam said.

He had no right to be surprised. Trump himself had previously gone after Puerto Rico—he punished its leaders for criticizing him after Hurricane Maria, and sought to swap it for Greenland—but even if Nicky Jam had missed or forgotten that, he had to know who Trump was.

Nicky Jam was ahead of the curve. Since the election, Trump has moved swiftly to do things he’d said he’d do, and yet many people—especially his own supporters—seem stunned and dismayed. This is absurd. Surprise was perhaps merited in late 2016 and early 2017, when Trump was still an unknown quantity. But after four years as president, culminating in an attempt to erase an election he lost, Trump has demonstrated who he is. Somehow, the delusion of Trump à la carte—take the lib-owning, take the electoral wins, but pass on all of the unsavory stuff—persists.

In an article about how Trump’s transition is “shocking the Washington establishment,” Peter Baker of The New York Times writes: “Nine years after Mr. Trump began upsetting political norms, it may be easy to underestimate just how extraordinary all of this is.” He’s right that the aberrant nature of the picks may be overlooked, as I have warned, yet it is also true that the actual unpredictability of them is overestimated.

[From the January/February 2024 issue: Trump isn’t bluffing]

On K Street, Politico reports, health-care-industry lobbyists can’t believe that Trump has nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. They were “expecting a more conventional pick,” even though Trump emphasized Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda late in the campaign, and even though Kennedy said that Trump had promised him control of HHS. To be sure, Kennedy is a shocking and disturbing pick, as Benjamin Mazer and my colleague Yasmin Tayag have recently written for The Atlantic, but his nomination should not come as a surprise—especially for people whose entire business proposition is being highly paid to advise clients on how Washington actually works. (The influence peddlers reportedly hope that senators will block Kennedy. The fact that they’re still waiting for someone else to solve their problems is further evidence of how little they’ve learned, years into the Trump era.)

Meanwhile, the New York Post, a key pillar of Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing media juggernaut, is similarly jittery about the Kennedy choice. Back when Kennedy was a thorn in President Joe Biden’s side, threatening to run against him in the Democratic primary, the Post’s editorial board was all too happy to elevate him. Now the board condemns his nomination and tells us that it came out of a meeting with him last year “thinking he’s nuts on a lot of fronts.” The columnist Michael Godwin, who beamed on November 9 that Trump’s victory “offers the promise of progress on so many fronts that it already feels like Morning in America again,” was back a week later to complain that “it’s not a close call to say” that Kennedy and Matt Gaetz, Trump’s pick for attorney general, are “unfit” for the roles.

The lobbyists and editorialists are in good company, or at least in some sort of company. On Capitol Hill, Republican senators say they are shocked by many of Trump’s Cabinet picks. Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who notoriously professed surprise when Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, is “shocked” at the Gaetz nomination. Gaetz’s House Republican colleagues are “stunned and disgusted.”

Reactions to Pete Hegseth’s nomination as secretary of defense are less vitriolic, if no less baffled. “Wow,” Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska told NBC. “I’m just surprised, because the names that I’ve heard for secretary of defense have not included him.” Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana was even blunter. “Who?” he said. “I just don’t know anything about him.”

[David A. Graham: The Trump believability gap]

If this is true, the senators could perhaps do with some better staff work. Hegseth was a real possibility to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs in the first Trump administration; more to the point, he was a prominent figure on Fox News, which is a dominant force in the Republican Party, from whose ranks Trump has repeatedly drawn appointees.

Staffers at the affected agencies have also expressed shock and horror at the prospect of an Attorney General Gaetz, a Defense Secretary Hegseth, or a Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.

Ordinary Americans may also be taken aback. As I reported last month, Trump critics were concerned about a “believability gap,” in which voters opposed some of Trump’s big policy ideas, sometimes quite strongly, but just didn’t trust that he would really do those things. Although they perhaps deserve more grace than the Republican officials and power brokers who are astonished, they also had ample warning about who Trump is and how he’d govern.

Throughout his presidential campaign, Trump vowed to deport undocumented immigrants en masse. He’s appointing officials such as Stephen Miller and Tom Homan who are committed to that, and yesterday morning, Trump confirmed on Truth Social a report that he would declare a national emergency and use the military to conduct mass deportations. And yet, when the roundups start in January, many people are somehow going to be taken by surprise.

When I was taking German in college in the early years of this millennium, I once stumbled upon a word that appeared foreign even when translated into English: Diphtherie, or diphtheria. “What’s diphtheria?” I wondered, having never encountered a single soul afflicted by this disease.

Diphtheria, once known as the “strangling angel,” was a leading killer of children into the early 20th century. The bacterial infection destroys the lining of the throat, forming a layer of dead, leathery tissue that can cause death by suffocation. The disease left no corner of society untouched: Diphtheria killed Queen Victoria’s daughter, and the children of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and Cleveland. Parents used to speak of their first and second families, an elderly woman in Ottawa recalled, because diphtheria had swept through and all their children died.

Today, diphtheria has been so thoroughly forgotten that someone like me, born some 60 years after the invention of a diphtheria vaccine, might have no inkling of the fear it once inspired. If you have encountered diphtheria outside of the historical context, it’s likely because you have scrutinized a childhood immunization schedule: It is the “D” in the DTaP vaccine.

Vaccine breakthroughs over the past two centuries have cumulatively made the modern world a far more hospitable place to be born. For most of human history, half of all children died before reaching age 15; that number is down to just 4 percent worldwide, and far lower in developed countries, with vaccines one of the major drivers of improved life expectancy. “As a child,” the vaccine scientist Stanley Plotkin, now 92, told me, “I had several infectious diseases that almost killed me.” He ticked them off: pertussis, influenza, pneumococcal pneumonia—all of which children today are routinely vaccinated against.

But the success of vaccines has also allowed for a modern amnesia about the level of past human suffering. In a world where the ravages of polio or measles are remote, the risks of vaccines—whether imagined, or real but minute—are able to loom much larger in the minds of parents. This is the space exploited by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., one of the nation’s foremost anti-vaccine activists and now nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services. It is a stunning reversal of fortune for a man relegated to the fringes of the Democratic Party just last year. And it is also a reversal for Donald Trump, who might have flirted with anti-vaccine rhetoric in the past but also presided over a record-breaking race to create a COVID vaccine. Kennedy has promised that he would not yank vaccines off the market, but his nomination normalizes and emboldens the anti-vaccine movement. The danger now is that diseases confined to the past become diseases of the future.

Walt Orenstein trained as a pediatrician in the 1970s, when he often saw children with meningitis—a dangerous infection of membranes around the brain—that can be caused by a bacterium called Haemophilus influenzae type b or Hib. (Despite the name, it is not related to the influenza virus.) “I remember doing loads of spinal taps,” he told me, to diagnose the disease. The advent of a Hib vaccine in the 1980s virtually wiped these infections out; babies are now routinely vaccinated in the first 15 months of life. “It’s amazing there are people today calling themselves pediatricians who have never seen a case of Hib,” he says. He remembers rotavirus, too, back when it used to cause about half of all hospitalizations for diarrhea in kids under 5. “People used to say, ‘Don’t get the infant ward during diarrhea season,’” Orenstein told me. But in the 2000s, the introduction of rotavirus vaccines for babies six months and younger sharply curtailed hospitalizations.

To Orenstein, it is important that the current rotavirus vaccine has proved effective but also safe. An older rotavirus vaccine was taken off the market in 1999 when regulators learned that it gave babies an up to one-in-10,000 chance of developing a serious but usually treatable bowel obstruction called intussusception. The benefits arguably still outweighed the risks—about one in 50 babies infected with rotavirus need hospitalization—but the United States has a high bar for vaccine safety. Similarly, the U.S. switched from an oral polio vaccine containing live, weakened virus—which had a one in 2.4 million chance of causing paralysis—to a more expensive but safer shot made with inactivated viruses that cannot cause disease. No vaccine is perfect, says Gregory Poland, a vaccinologist and the president of the Atria Academy of Science & Medicine, who himself developed severe tinnitus after getting the COVID vaccine. “There will always be risks,” he told me, and he acknowledges the need to speak candidly about them. But vaccine recommendations are based on benefits that are “overwhelming” compared with their risks, he said.

The success of childhood vaccination has a perverse effect of making the benefits of these vaccines invisible. Let’s put it this way: If everyone around me is vaccinated for diphtheria but I am not, I still have virtually no chance of contracting it. There is simply no one to give it to me. This protection is also known as “herd immunity” or “community protection.” But that logic falls apart when vaccination rates slip, and the bubble of protective immunity dissolves. The impact won’t be immediate. “If we stopped vaccinating today, we wouldn’t get outbreaks tomorrow,” Orenstein said. In time, though, all-but-forgotten diseases could once again find a foothold, sickening those who chose not to be vaccinated but also those who could not be vaccinated, such as people with certain medical conditions and newborns too young for shots. In aggregate, individual decisions to refuse vaccines end up having far-reaching consequences.

Evolutionary biologists have argued that plague and pestilence rose in tandem with human civilization. Before humans built cities, back when we still lived in small bands of hunter-gatherers, a novel virus—say, from a bat—might tear through a group only to reach a dead end once everyone was immune or deceased. With no one else to infect, such a virus will burn itself out. Only when humans started clustering in large cities could certain viruses keep finding new susceptibles—babies or new migrants with no immunity, people with waning immunity—and smolder on and on and on. Infectious disease, you might then say, is a necessary condition of living in a society.

But human ingenuity has handed us a cheat code: Vaccines now allow us to enjoy the benefits of fellow humanity while preventing the constant exchange of deadly pathogens. And vaccines can, through the power of herd immunity, protect even those who are too young or too sick to be effectively vaccinated themselves. When we get vaccinated, or don’t, our decisions ricochet through the lives of others. Vaccines make us responsible for more than ourselves. And is that not what it means to live in a society?

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the bear-fondling, gravel-voiced Camelot scion, is President-Elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, where presumably he will “go wild on health,” to quote Trump. His nomination has raised concerns among public-health experts because many of Kennedy’s views on health are, well, wild.

To be sure, among Kennedy’s battier ideas are a few reasonable ones, such as reducing obesity and cracking down on direct-to-consumer drug commercials and conflicts of interest among researchers. But these are eclipsed by some troubling ones, such as the ideas that common cooking oils are poisonous, that fluoride doesn’t belong in tap water, and that childhood vaccines are questionable.

What if Kennedy did, in fact, go wild on health, get his way, and remake America in his own image? If his worst ideas come to pass, experts tell me, heart attacks might increase, dental infections might spike, and children might needlessly die of completely preventable diseases.

[Read: RFK Jr. collects his reward]

Even if he is confirmed as health secretary, Kennedy’s influence on some of these domains might be limited. Most public-health measures—including water fluoridation and vaccines—are a matter for states and localities, not the federal government. (This is why different states had such different COVID-19 responses.) But even so, a Secretary Kennedy would have a prominent perch from which to espouse his ideas, and his position would give him a veneer of credibility that he has not earned. Right-leaning states and judges might listen, and adapt local policies to suit his worldview. At the very least, parents who support Trump and Kennedy might take the administration’s views into account when making decisions for their families.

Let’s begin with seed oils, which keep popping up in Kennedy’s speeches and media clips. (He even mentioned them while suspending his presidential bid.) Kennedy has called seed oils, which include common cooking oils such as canola oil and sunflower oil, “one of the most unhealthy ingredients that we have in foods,” and says Americans are being “unknowingly poisoned” by them.

Kennedy believes that seed oils cause “body-wide inflammation” and disease. But this isn’t true, Christopher Gardner, a nutrition scientist at Stanford, told me. In fact, replacing foods high in saturated fat, such as butter, with those high in unsaturated fat, such as canola oil, has been proven again and again to lower cholesterol levels and reduce the risk of heart disease. To the extent that seed oils are bad, Gardner said, it’s because they often show up in highly processed junk and fast food.

And Kennedy’s solution to this supposed health crisis—to replace seed oils with beef tallow—is troubling. (Several of his seed-oil clips end with a promo of red Kennedy swag that reads MAKE FRYING OIL TALLOW AGAIN.) Whatever you do with seed oil, “don’t replace it with beef tallow,” Gardner said. “That’s friggin’ nuts.” Replacing all the oil you eat with beef fat can cause cholesterol to pile into plaques in your arteries, impeding the flow of blood. “That’s how you get a heart attack,” Gardner said.

Kennedy has also said he wants to remove fluoride from tap water, claiming that the compound is an “industrial waste associated with arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and thyroid disease.”

There is some risk associated with excessive fluoride intake: Consuming fluoride above a level of 1.5 milligrams a liter—about twice the level that’s in most fluoridated tap water—has been linked to lowered IQ in children. Fluoridated water can also cause light stains on teeth, which affect about 12 percent of people in the United States.

But researchers say these risks are generally worth it because the consequences of removing fluoride from the water are much worse. Fluoride helps strengthen tooth enamel, and it also fights off the acid that attacks our teeth any time we eat carbohydrates. If the teeth lose this battle, decay can set in—and if the decay goes untreated, it can cause excruciating pain and, in extreme cases, pus-filled abscesses. “There will certainly be an increase in dental decay if fluoride is removed from the drinking water,” Gary Slade, a dentistry professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told me. Slade found in a study that fluoride in drinking water reduces decay by 30 percent in baby teeth and 12 percent in permanent teeth.

Some cities and countries have removed fluoride from the water, and kids’ dental health suffered as a result. After Israel ceased water fluoridation in 2014, dental treatments in a clinic in Tel Aviv increased twofold across all ages. In Canada, after Calgary ceased water fluoridation in 2011, second graders there experienced more cavities than those in Edmonton, where water was still fluoridated. After Juneau, Alaska, ceased water fluoridation in 2007, children younger than 6 underwent more cavity-related dental procedures—at a cost of about $300 more a year per child. Some cities have even reintroduced fluoride into the water supply after noticing an uptick in tooth decay among children.

Kennedy is perhaps most infamous for his skepticism of vaccines, and this is also likely the issue where his views are most consequential and worrisome. Although Kennedy sometimes shies away from calling himself anti-vaccine, he is the founder of the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense and once wrote a (now-retracted) magazine story on the (false) link between vaccines and autism. He’s called vaccines “a holocaust” and has claimed that “there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.” A co-chair of the Trump-Vance transition team has said that Kennedy would be given access to federal health data in order to assess the safety of vaccines.

Though school vaccine requirements are determined by states, a prominent national-health figure casting doubt on vaccines’ safety can influence both state policy and individual parents’ decisions to vaccinate. If vaccination rates do drop, among the diseases that health experts worry will return is measles, the most contagious of the vaccine-preventable diseases.

A person infected with measles is most contagious right before they develop symptoms. They can infect others simply by sharing their air space; tiny droplets infected with measles can hang in the air for two hours “like a ghost,” Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told me.

Kids with measles are sick and miserable. They’re photophobic—afraid of the light—and may struggle to breathe. Before the measles vaccine came along in 1963, 48,000 people were hospitalized with measles each year in America, many with pneumonia or inflammation of the brain. Five hundred of them died each year. When Samoa suffered a measles outbreak in 2019, 83 people died, out of a population of just 200,000.

Measles can also weaken the immune system, Matthew Ferrari, a biology professor at Penn State, told me. For two to three years after contracting measles, you’re likely to be hit harder by flu and other viruses. In rare cases, measles can cause a chronic form of brain inflammation that leads to a gradual loss of mental faculties and motor skills, and eventually, death.

[John Hendrickson: The first MAGA Democrat]

Measles is such a menace, in fact, that giving people “a choice” about whether to vaccinate their kids, as Kennedy often suggests, is not sufficient. People who have received two doses of the MMR vaccine are 97 percent protected against measles. But about 9 million people, including kids who are undergoing chemotherapy or who are on some kinds of immunosuppressants, can’t get vaccinated. These individuals rely on herd immunity from other vaccinated people, and when more than 5 percent of people choose not to be vaccinated, herd immunity suffers.

“Is it your right to catch and transmit a potentially fatal infection? No, it’s not,” Offit said. “You are part of this society, and you have to recognize that what you do affects other people.” Offit told me he’s already talked with pediatricians who say parents are hesitant to get their children vaccinated because of what they’ve heard Kennedy say.

Of course, there is a way to prevent Kennedy from having this much influence over public health: The Senate could reject his nomination. But that would require Republicans to stand up to Trump, which is a wild idea in itself.

Sign up for Being Human, a newsletter that explores wellness culture, mortality and disease, and other mysteries of the body and the mind.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nominee to be the next secretary of Health and Human Services, is America’s most prominent vaccine skeptic. An advocacy organization that he founded and chaired has called the nation’s declining child-immunization rates “good news,” and referred to parents’ lingering doubts about routine shots as COVID-19’s “silver lining.” Now Kennedy may soon be overseeing the cluster of federal agencies that license and recommend vaccines, as well as the multibillion-dollar program that covers the immunization of almost half the nation’s children.

Which is to say that America’s most prominent vaccine skeptic could have the power to upend, derail, or otherwise louse up a cornerstone of public health. Raising U.S. vaccination rates to where they are today took decades of investment: In 1991, for example, just 82 percent of toddlers were getting measles shots; by 2019, that number had increased to 92 percent. The first Trump administration actually presided over the historic high point for the nation’s immunization services; now the second may be focused on promoting vaccines’ alleged hidden harms. Kennedy has said that he doesn’t want to take any shots away, but even if he were to emphasize “choice,” his leadership would be a daunting test of Americans’ commitment to vaccines.

In many ways, the situation is unprecedented: No one with Kennedy’s mix of inexperience and paranoid distrust has ever held the reins at HHS. He was trained as a lawyer and has no training in biostatistics or any other research bona fides—the sorts of qualifications you’d expect from someone credibly evaluating vaccine efficacy. But the post-pandemic era has already given rise to at least one smaller-scale experiment along these lines. In Florida, vaccine policies have been overseen since 2021 by another noted skeptic of the pharmaceutical industry, State Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo. (Kennedy has likened Ladapo to Galileo—yes, the astronomer who faced down the Roman Inquisition.) Under Ladapo’s direction, the state has aggressively resisted federal guidance on COVID-19 vaccination, and its department of health has twice advised Floridians not to get mRNA-based booster shots. “These vaccines are not appropriate for use in human beings,” Ladapo declared in January. His public-health contrarianism has also started spilling over into more routine immunization practices. Last winter, during an active measles outbreak at a Florida school, Ladapo abandoned standard practice and allowed unvaccinated children to attend class. He also seemed to make a point of not recommending measles shots for any kids who might have needed them.

Jeffrey Goldhagen, a pediatrics professor at the University of Florida and the former head of the Duval County health department, believes that this vaccine skepticism has had immense costs. “The deaths and suffering of thousands and thousands of Floridians” can be linked to Ladapo’s policies, he said, particularly regarding COVID shots. But in the years since Ladapo took office, Florida did not become an instant outlier in terms of COVID vaccination numbers, nor in terms of age-adjusted rates of death from COVID. And so far at least, the state’s performance on other immunization metrics is not far off from the rest of America’s. That doesn’t mean Florida’s numbers are good: Among the state’s kindergarteners, routine-vaccination rates have dropped from 93.3 percent for the kids who entered school in the fall of 2020 to 88.1 percent in 2023, and the rate at which kids are getting nonmedical exemptions from vaccine requirements went up from 2.7 to 4.5 percent over the same period. These changes elevate the risk of further outbreaks of measles, or of other infectious diseases that could end up killing children—but they’re not unique to Ladapo’s constituents. National statistics have been moving in the same direction. (To wit: The rate of nonmedical exemptions across the U.S. has gone up by about the same proportion as Florida’s.)

All of these disturbing trends may be tied to a growing suspicion of vaccines that was brought on during COVID and fanned by right-wing influencers. Or they could be a lingering effect of the widespread lapse in health care in 2020, during which time many young children were missing doses of vaccines. (Kids who entered public school in 2023 might still be catching up.)

In any case, other vaccination rates in Florida look pretty good. Under Ladapo, the state has actually been gaining on the nation as a whole in terms of flu shots for adults and holding its own on immunization for diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis in toddlers. Even Ladapo’s outlandish choice last winter to allow unvaccinated kids back into a school with an active measles outbreak did not lead to any further cases of disease. In short, as I noted back in February, Ladapo’s anti-vaccine activism has had few, if any, clear effects. (Ladapo did not respond when I reached out to ask why his policies might have failed to sabotage the state’s vaccination rates.)

  

If Florida’s immunization rates have been resilient, then America’s may hold up even better in the years to come. That’s because the most important vaccine policies are made at the state and local levels, Rupali Limaye, a professor and scholar of health behavior at Johns Hopkins University, told me. Each state decides whether and how to mandate vaccines to school-age children, or during a pandemic. The states and localities are then responsible for giving out (or choosing not to give out) whichever vaccines are recommended, and sometimes paid for, by the federal government.  

But the existence of vaccine-skeptical leadership in Washington, and throughout the Republican Party, could still end up putting pressure on local decision makers, she continued, and could encourage policies that support parental choice at the expense of maximizing immunization rates. As a member of the Cabinet, Kennedy would also have a platform that he’s never had before, from which he can continue to spread untruths about vaccines. “If you start to give people more of a choice, and they are exposed to disinformation and misinformation, then there is that propensity of people to make decisions that are not based on evidence,” Limaye said. (According to The New York Times, many experts say they “worry most” about this aspect of Kennedy’s leadership.)

How much will this really matter, though? The mere prominence of Kennedy’s ideas may not do much to drive down vaccination rates on its own. Noel Brewer, a behavioral scientist and public-health professor at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, told me that attempts to change people’s thoughts and feelings about vaccines are often futile; research shows that talking up the value of getting shots has little impact on behavior. By the same token, one might reasonably expect that talking down the value of vaccines (as Kennedy and Ladapo are wont to do) would be wasted effort too. “It may be that having a public figure talking about this has little effect,” Brewer said.

Indeed, much has been made of Kennedy’s apparent intervention during the 2019 measles crisis in Samoa. He arrived there for a visit in the middle of that year, not long after measles immunizations had been suspended, and children’s immunization rates had plummeted. (The crisis began when two babies died from a vaccine-related medical error in 2018.) Kennedy has been linked to the deadly measles outbreak in the months that followed, but if his presence really did give succor to the local anti-vaccine movement, that movement’s broader aims were frustrated: The government declared a state of emergency that fall, and soon the measles-vaccination rate had more than doubled.

As head of HHS, though, Kennedy would have direct control over the federal programs that do the sort of work that has been necessary in Samoa, and provide access to vaccines to those who need them most. For example, he’d oversee the agencies that pay for and administer Vaccines for Children, which distributes shots to children in every state. All the experts I spoke with warned that interference with this program could have serious consequences. Other potential actions, such as demanding further safety studies of vaccines and evidence reviews, could slow down decision making and delay the introduction of new vaccines.

Kennedy would also have a chance to influence the nation’s vaccine requirements for children, as well as its safety-and-monitoring system, at the highest levels. He’d be in charge of selecting members for the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which makes recommendations on vaccines that are usually adopted by the states and result in standardized insurance coverage. He’d also oversee the head of the CDC, who in turn has the authority to overrule or amend individual ACIP recommendations.

Even if he’s not inclined to squelch any determinations outright, Kennedy’s goal of giving parents latitude might play out in other ways. Brewer, who is currently a voting member of ACIP (but emphasized that he was not speaking in that capacity), said that the committee can issue several different types of rulings, some of which roughly correspond to ACIP saying that Americans should rather than may get a certain vaccine. That distinction can be very consequential, Brewer said: Shots that are made “routine” by ACIP get prioritized in doctor’s offices, for instance, while those that are subject to “shared clinical decision-making” may be held for patients who ask for them specifically. Shifting the country’s vaccination program from a should to a may regime “would destroy uptake,” Brewer told me.

Those would seem to be the stakes. The case study of vaccine-skeptical governance that we have in Florida may not look so dire—at least in the specifics. But Kennedy’s ascendancy could be something more than that: He could steer the public-health establishment off the course that it’s been on for many years, and getting back to where we are today could take more years still.

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.

Donald Trump appears to experience the world through the glow of a television screen. He has long placed a premium on those who look the part in front of the camera. Paging Dr. Mehmet Oz.

Trump has picked Oz to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. CMS, as the agency is known, falls under the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Last week, Trump nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to serve as HHS secretary. As you may have guessed, Kennedy and Oz are not only friends but kindred spirits. Oz is a global adviser at iHerb, a for-profit company that offers “Earth’s best-curated selection of health and wellness products at the best possible value.” He and Kennedy, two relative outsiders, are now positioned to enjoy a symbiotic relationship within Trump’s chaotic ecosystem.

Oz was last seen running for a Pennsylvania Senate seat in 2022. He lost to John Fetterman, who, despite dealing with the aftereffects of a stroke, carried the state by five points. Throughout that race, Oz struggled to combat the perception that he was a charlatan and carpetbagger who primarily lived in New Jersey. (Fetterman’s team repeatedly tagged Oz as an out-of-touch elitist, trolling him, for example, when he went grocery shopping for crudités and lamented high prices.) After that electoral defeat, Oz’s political dreams seemed all but dashed. But he wisely remained loyal to Trump—a person who has the ability to change trajectories on a whim.

In the pre-Trump era, it might have been a stretch to describe CMS administrator as an overtly political position. But Oz’s objective under Trump couldn’t be clearer. In a statement, Trump, using his reliably perplexing capitalization, telegraphed that Oz will bring a certain ethos to the job—a little MAGA, a little MAHA. Oz, Trump promised, will “cut waste and fraud within our Country’s most expensive Government Agency, which is a third of our Nation’s Healthcare spend, and a quarter of our entire National Budget.” And, because he’s Trump, he mentioned Oz’s nine daytime Emmy Awards.

Some 150 million Americans currently rely on the agency’s insurance programs, including Medicaid, Medicare, and Obamacare. Oz has been a proponent of Medicare Advantage for All. Though that sounds like the Medicare for All initiative championed by progressives such as Senator Bernie Sanders, the two programs are quite different. At its core, Medicare for All would set the U.S. on a path toward nationalizing health care. Trump would never go for that. But Medicare Advantage already exists within America’s patchwork private/public system, and Oz might push to strengthen it. He could also face budgetary pressure to weaken it. Oz’s own health-care views haven’t remained consistent. Though he once praised the mandatory universal models of Germany and Switzerland, as a Republican politician he threw his support behind privatized Medicare.

When asked about Oz’s nomination, Fetterman, his former opponent, told CNN: “As long as he’s willing to protect and preserve Medicaid and Medicare, I’m voting for the dude.” Some people were pissed. Victoria Perrone, who served as the director of operations on Fetterman’s Senate campaign, called out her old boss on social media: “Dr. Oz broke his pledge to ‘do no harm’ when he said red onions prevent ovarian cancer. My sis died of OC in 6/2022. This is a huge personal betrayal to me. We know he won’t protect the Medicaid that paid for her treatments,” Perrone posted on X. “I feel like I’ve been duped and 2 years of working on your campaign was a waste,” she added.

The above argument is illustrative of another reality Trump acknowledged in announcing his pick: “Make America Healthy Again” keeps growing. Oz, Trump declared, “will work closely with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to take on the illness industrial complex, and all the horrible chronic diseases left in its wake.” He went a step further, promising that Oz will bring “a strong voice to the key pillars of the MAHA Movement.” Oz holds degrees from Harvard and Penn, and he worked as a professor of surgery at Columbia. In spite of that pedigree, Oz has spent years facing credible accusations of medical quackery for his endorsement of dietary supplements. In 2014, he received a dramatic dressing-down on Capitol Hill. Senator Claire McCaskill read three statements that Oz had made on his eponymous show:

“You may think magic is make-believe, but this little bean has scientists saying they’ve found the magic weight-loss cure for every body type: It’s green coffee extract.”

“I’ve got the No. 1 miracle in a bottle to burn your fat: It’s raspberry ketone.”

“Garcinia cambogia: It may be the simple solution you’ve been looking for to bust your body fat for good.”

Oz’s defense that day was that his job was to be a “cheerleader” for the Dr. Oz audience. “I actually do personally believe in the items I talk about in the show. I passionately study them. I recognize oftentimes they don’t have the scientific muster to present as fact, but nevertheless, I would give my audience the advice I give my family,” he testified.

He emerged from that hearing largely unscathed. Two years later, Oz would go on to read what he claimed were Trump’s medical records on that same show. He famously praised Trump’s testosterone levels and supposed all-around health. Four years after that, once Trump was president, Oz sent emails to White House officials, including Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, pushing them to rush patient trials for hydroxychloroquine, an unproven treatment for COVID.

In the next Trump administration, those are the sorts of exchanges Oz could be having with Kennedy—or with Trump himself. How did we get here? Oz landed this gig because he’s good on TV, yes, but also because, when he entered the political arena, he fully aligned himself with Trump. The 47th president rewards loyalty. If there’s one thing that’s become clear from his administration nominations so far, it’s that.

Some of Trump’s appointments will be less consequential than others. Anything involving the health and well-being of tens of millions of Americans is inarguably serious. Oz’s confirmation is not guaranteed, but his selection has already confirmed that nothing about Trump 2.0 is mere bluster.

Related:

Trump is coming for Obamacare again. (From January) Why is Dr. Oz so bad at Twitter? (From 2022)

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Another theory of the Trump movement What the men of the internet are trying to prove Arash Azizi: The problem with boycotting Israel

Today’s News

Republican members of the House Ethics Committee blocked the release of the investigation into the sexual-misconduct and drug-use allegations against former Representative Matt Gaetz. Jose Ibarra, who was found guilty of killing Laken Riley on the University of Georgia campus, was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole. Trump tapped former WWE CEO Linda McMahon, who previously led the U.S. Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term, to be the secretary of education.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Drought is an immigration issue, and Trump’s climate policies are designed to ignore that, Zoë Schlanger writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Video by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Sources: Archive Films / Getty; Internet Archive; Prelinger Associates / Getty.

Put Down the Vacuum

By Annie Lowrey

The other night, a friend came over. A dear friend. A friend who has helped me out when I’ve been sick, and who brought over takeout when I had just given birth. Still, before he arrived, I vacuumed.

I thought about this while reading the Gender Equity Policy Institute’s recent report on gender and domestic labor. The study finds that mothers spend twice as much time as fathers “on the essential and unpaid work” of taking care of kids and the home, and that women spend more time on this than men, regardless of parental and relationship status. “Simply being a woman” is the instrumental variable, the study concludes.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The cancer gene more men should test for We’re about to find out how much Americans like vaccines. Apple lost the plot on texting. What going “wild on health” looks like

Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Getty

Read. If you feel upset about the election, these seven books are a prescription for rage and despair, Ruth Madievsky writes.

Gather. Group fitness classes aren’t just about exercise—they’re also a ridiculous, perfect way to make friends, Mikala Jamison writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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.

As president-elect, Donald Trump has the right to name the people he wants in his Cabinet. Some of Trump’s nominations, such as Senator Marco Rubio to lead the State Department, are completely ordinary. A few are ideological red meat for Republicans. Others are gifts to Trump loyalists.

Four of these nominees, however, are dangerous to the security of the United States and to the well-being of its people: Pete Hegseth (Defense), Tulsi Gabbard (Office of the Director of National Intelligence), Matt Gaetz (Justice), and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Health and Human Services). The Senate must turn back these nominations, and do so en bloc.

The Gaetz and Kennedy nominations are apparently already in trouble, and more than enough has been written about them. Gaetz is an accused sexual predator (he has long denied the allegations); ironically, he is the least dangerous of this pack. Yes, as attorney general he would green-light every raving demand from MAGA world for investigations into Trump’s enemies, but in a strange blessing, he is also likely to be completely incompetent. The Department of Justice, as Trump himself learned during his first term, is packed to the rafters with very sharp lawyers who would almost certainly jam up any of Gaetz’s unconstitutional orders. Gaetz’s tenure at Justice would be a national humiliation and destructive to the rule of law, but it would also likely be very short.

The RFK Jr. nomination is, in a word, pathetic. Most of his views are little more than pure anti-science kookery, and if he is confirmed, Americans—and especially their children—will be in peril from this anti-vaccine crusader. But he would be a danger to the health of individual Americans (especially those who watch too much TV and spend too much time on the internet) rather than to the continued existence of the United States.

Which brings me to Gabbard and Hegseth.

Tulsi Gabbard, as I wrote last week, is unqualified for the job of DNI, but she is also a security risk: I have held security clearances for most of my adult life, and had I worked in any federal office next to her, I would have had no compunction about raising her as an “insider threat” because of her political views and her shady international connections. (As a member of Congress in 2017, she held meetings with the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad outside of U.S. government channels—an obvious problem for anyone seeking a senior role in national security.)

Gaetz, Kennedy, and Gabbard are terrible choices. The Hegseth nomination, however, is easily the most dangerous and irresponsible of all of Trump’s picks. (Gabbard is a significant hazard, but she would not have a gigantic army at her disposal, and she would not be involved with the control of nuclear weapons.) Like the other three in this group, Hegseth is shockingly unqualified for the job he’s been asked to take, but in this case, the Senate is faced with a proposal to place a TV talking head at the top of the Pentagon and insert him into the nuclear chain of command.

Hegseth has made personal choices that make him unfit to lead the DOD, including his extramarital affairs (which apparently helped tank his chances to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs in Trump’s first administration) and a payoff to a woman who claimed that he’d sexually assaulted her. He denies the assault allegation, but in any case, adultery is a criminal violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and can be a career-ending mistake for a member of the armed forces.

I will leave aside whether Hegseth’s tattoos identify him as a white supremacist. Hegseth denies the claim. But some of Hegseth’s ink is popular with extremists; that’s why one of his own military comrades reported him as an insider threat in the first place—and not, as Hegseth and some whining conservatives claim, because he is being persecuted as a Christian. I knew many people in federal service with patriotic tattoos. (I have one myself, and no, it’s none of your business where it is.) I am also a Christian who wears a cross—one that I had blessed in a church—every day. That’s not what any of this is about.

Hegseth’s defenders seem unable to understand that neither Hegseth nor anyone else has a right to be the secretary of defense: If the nominee made choices earlier in life that would now undermine his effectiveness in the job, then that’s his problem, not the Pentagon’s. But even if Hegseth were not an example of a sexist, MAGA-bro culture—his statements about women in the military are particularly noxious—the Senate is still faced with the problem that he’s utterly unqualified.

A former Army major, he has no serious background in national-security or defense issues beyond his military service. (And how that service ended is apparently now a matter of some dispute.) He has not worked anywhere in the defense world: not in any of its agencies, not with any of its industries, not with any of its workforce in any capacity. He has never managed anything of any significant size.

Not only would he be incapable of administering America’s largest government department, but he’d also be in a position of terrifying responsibility for which he is unprepared. Imagine an international crisis, perhaps only a year or two from now. President Trump is facing a situation that could be rife with danger to the United States and our allies—perhaps even one that involves nuclear threats. At this dire moment, Trump turns to …

Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard?

The Senate must do everything in its constitutional power to stop this. Trump won the election, but no president has an absolute right to his Cabinet nominations: The Constitution requires the Senate to consent to those nominations. Trump has already warned that if the Senate balks, he will subvert this process by using “recess appointments,” in effect a demand that the Senate take a walk and let Trump do whatever he wants—to consent, in other words, to autocracy.

Incoming Majority Leader John Thune and others who still might care about their duty to the nation have time to go to Trump, right now, and tell him that these four nominations are DOA. They could tell Trump that it is in his own interest—the only interest he recognizes—not to risk multiple defeats. And if the Senate folds and decides to take these up one at a time, Trump will wear them down, likely accepting that Gaetz must be a Succession-style “blood sacrifice,” in return for which Trump gets everyone else. For Thune—who, one assumes, does not wish to begin his tenure as a statelier version of Senator Tommy Tuberville, the MAGA obstructionist who held up military promotions for months—accepting such a deal would be a huge strategic error.

Whomever Trump nominates as replacements will likely be dangerous in their own way. But these four nominees have to be stopped—and right now.

Related:

The thing that binds Gabbard, Gaetz, and Hegseth to Trump The perverse logic of Trump’s nomination circus

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

He was the world’s longest-held death-row inmate. He was also innocent. How Trump could make Congress go away for a while Thomas Chatterton Williams: Is wokeness one big power grab? Europe braces for Trump.

Today’s News

President Joe Biden authorized Ukraine yesterday to use U.S.-supplied long-range missiles for strikes inside Russia, according to U.S. officials. Russia said today that the decision would escalate international tensions and add “fuel to the fire” of the war. Trump confirmed on Truth Social that his administration is planning to declare a national emergency and enlist the military to carry out a mass-deportation program targeting undocumented immigrants. Trump picked Brendan Carr, a member of the Federal Communications Commission and a Project 2025 contributor, to lead the FCC.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: Learning where famous musicians sleep and what they eat can feel like finally glimpsing the unknowable, Isabel Fattal writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Justin Chung for The Atlantic

How Jimmy O. Yang Became a Main Character

By Shirley Li

Jimmy O. Yang had been trying to make it as an actor for years—cobbling together bit parts in network sitcoms, auditioning for nameless roles such as “Chinese Teenager #1”—when he was cast in a new HBO series. The show, Silicon Valley, was a comedy about a group of programmers at a Bay Area start-up incubator; his character, Jian-Yang, was an app developer who spoke in broken English.

It was a small guest role, but he saw it as an opportunity.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

There’s no longer any doubt that Hollywood writing is powering AI. Researchers are finally unraveling how the mind processes nothing. Trump’s New York sentencing must proceed, Randall D. Eliason argues. American kakistocracy Making government efficient again

Culture Break

Focus Features

Watch (or skip). Conclave (out now in theaters) treats Catholic theology as mere policy, like the membership rules at Augusta National. It’s even worse than The Da Vinci Code, Matthew Schmitz writes.

Examine. In a market with thousands of dog toys, Lamb Chop, the 1960s puppet, has somehow become ubiquitous.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Power-hungry presidents of both parties have been concocting ways to get around Congress for all of American history. But as Donald Trump prepares to take office again, legal experts are worried he could make the legislative branch go away altogether—at least for a while.

Several of Trump’s early Cabinet nominees—including Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and former Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii—have drawn widespread condemnation for their outlandish political views and lack of conventional qualifications. Their critics include some Senate Republicans tasked with voting on their confirmation. Anticipating resistance, Trump has already begun pressuring Senate GOP leaders, who will control the chamber next year, to allow him to install his picks by recess appointment, a method that many presidents have used.

The incoming Senate majority leader, John Thune of South Dakota, has said that “all options are on the table, including recess appointments,” for overcoming Democratic opposition to Trump’s nominees. But Democrats aren’t Trump’s primary concern; they won’t have the votes to stop nominees on their own. What makes Trump’s interest in recess appointments unusual is that he is gearing up to use them in a fight against his own party.

[Read: The perverse logic of Trump’s nomination circus]

If Senate Republicans block his nominees, Trump could partner with the GOP-controlled House and invoke a never-before-used provision of the Constitution to force Congress to adjourn “until such time as he shall think proper.” The move would surely prompt a legal challenge, which the Supreme Court might have to decide, setting up a confrontation that would reveal how much power both Republican lawmakers and the Court’s conservative majority will allow Trump to seize.

“None of this has ever been tested or determined by the courts,” Matthew Glassman, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Government Affairs Institute, told me. If Trump tries to adjourn Congress, Glassman said, he would be “pushing the very boundaries of the separation of powers in the United States.” Although Trump has not spoken publicly about using the provision, Ed Whelan, a conservative lawyer well connected in Republican politics, has reported that Trumpworld appears to be seriously contemplating it.

Trump could not wave away Congress on his own. The Constitution says the president can adjourn Congress only “in case of disagreement” between the House and the Senate on when the chambers should recess, and for how long. One of the chambers would first have to pass a resolution to adjourn for at least 10 days. If the other agrees to the measure, Trump gets his recess appointments. But even if one refuses—most likely the Senate, in this case—Trump could essentially play the role of tiebreaker and declare Congress adjourned. In a Fox News interview yesterday, Speaker Mike Johnson would not rule out helping Trump go around the Senate. “There may be a function for that,” he said. “We’ll have to see how it plays out.”

Presidents have used recess appointments to circumvent the Senate-confirmation process throughout U.S. history, either to overcome opposition to their nominees or simply because the Senate moved too slowly to consider them. But no president is believed to have adjourned Congress in order to install his Cabinet before. “We never contemplated it,” Neil Eggleston, who served as White House counsel during President Barack Obama’s second term, told me. Obama frequently used recess appointments until 2014, when the Supreme Court ruled that he had exceeded his authority by making them when Congress had gone out of session only briefly (hence the current 10-day minimum).

[Watch: What’s behind Trump’s controversial Cabinet picks]

Any attempt by Trump to force Congress into a recess would face a few obstacles. First, Johnson would have to secure nearly unanimous support from his members to pass an adjournment resolution, given Democrats’ likely opposition. Depending on the results of several uncalled House races, he might have only a vote or two to spare at the beginning of the next Congress. And although many House Republicans have pledged to unify behind Trump’s agenda, his nominees are widely considered unqualified, to say the least. Gaetz in particular is a uniquely unpopular figure in the conference because of his leading role in deposing Johnson’s predecessor Kevin McCarthy.

If the House doesn’t block Trump, the Supreme Court might. Its 2014 ruling against Obama was unanimous, and three conservative justices who remain on the Court—John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito—signed a concurring opinion, written by Antonin Scalia, saying they would have placed far more restrictions on the president’s power. They wrote that the Founders allowed the president to make recess appointments because the Senate used to meet for only a few months of the year. Now, though, Congress takes much shorter breaks and can return to session at virtually a moment’s notice. “The need it was designed to fill no longer exists,” Scalia, who died in 2016, wrote of the recess-appointment power, “and its only remaining use is the ignoble one of enabling the president to circumvent the Senate’s role in the appointment process.”

The 2014 ruling did not address the Constitution’s provision allowing the president to adjourn Congress, but Paul Rosenzweig, a former senior official in the George W. Bush administration and an occasional Atlantic contributor, told me that the conservatives’ concurrence “is inconsistent with the extreme executive overreach” that Trump might attempt: “As I read them, this machination by Trump would not meet their definition of constitutionality.”

Thanks in part to those legal uncertainties, Trump’s easiest path is simply to secure Senate approval for his nominees, and he may succeed. Republicans will have a 53–47 majority in the Senate, so the president-elect’s picks could lose three GOP votes and still win confirmation with the tiebreaking vote of Vice President–Elect J. D. Vance. But the most controversial nominees, such as Gaetz, Kennedy, Gabbard, and Pete Hegseth (Trump’s choice for defense secretary), could struggle to find 50 Republican votes. And as Thune himself noted in a Fox News interview on Thursday night, Republicans who oppose their confirmation are unlikely to vote for the Senate to adjourn so that Trump can install them anyway.

Thune, who had been elected as leader by his colleagues only one day before that interview, seems fine with helping Trump get around Democrats. Letting Trump defy Thune’s own members and neuter the Senate is a much bigger ask. Then again, if Trump takes his power play to the limit, the new majority leader won’t have a say at all.

At its best, a presidential biopic can delve into the monomaniacal focus—and potential narcissism—that might drive a person to run for the White House in the first place. That’s what Oliver Stone did in 1995’s Nixon, dramatizing the 37th president’s downfall with the exhilarating paranoia of the director’s best work. Though guilty of some fact-fudging, Stone retained empathy for Richard Nixon’s childhood trauma and lifelong inferiority complex, delivering a Shakespearean tragedy filtered through a grim vision of American power. As Nixon (played by a hunched, scotch-guzzling Anthony Hopkins) stalks the halls of a White House engulfed by scandal, and stews with jealousy at the late John F. Kennedy, the presidency never seemed so lonely.

A presidential biopic can also zoom in on a crucial juncture in a leader’s life: Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln explored its protagonist’s fraught final months, during which he pushed, at great political risk, for a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery. Spielberg’s film was captivating because it didn’t just re-create Lincoln’s famous speeches, but also imagined what the man was like behind the scenes—in backroom dealings, or in contentious confrontations with his wife, Mary Todd. Like its 1939 predecessor, Young Mr. Lincoln, the film wisely limits its scope; focusing on a pivotal period proves a defter approach than trying to capture the full sprawl of a president’s life, a task better left to hefty biographies.

And then there’s a movie like this year’s Reagan, the Ronald Reagan biopic starring Dennis Quaid. Reagan is a boyhood-to-grave survey of the 40th president’s life and administration, with a chest-beating emphasis on his handling of the Cold War that blurs the line between biopic and Hollywood boosterism. Filmed with all the visual panache of an arthritis-medication commercial, the movie is suffocating in its unflagging reverence for its titular hero. In its portrayal of Reagan’s formative years, secondary characters seem to exist primarily to give mawkish pep talks or to fill the young Reagan’s brain with somber warnings about the evils of communism. “God has a purpose for your life, something only you can do,” his mother tells him after he reads scripture at church. Later, in college, he is disturbed by a speech from a Soviet defector, who visits a local congregation and lectures wide-eyed students that they will not find a “church like this” in the U.S.S.R.

Unlike Lincoln, the film seems incapable of imagining what its protagonist was like in private moments or ascribing any interior complexity to him. Even his flirty exchanges with his wife, Nancy, feel like they were cribbed from a campaign ad. “I just want to do something good in this world,” he tells his future spouse on a horseback-riding date. “Make a difference.” The portrayal isn’t helped by the fact that the 70-year-old Quaid is digitally de-aged and delivers his lines in a tinny imitation of the politician’s voice. A bizarre narrative device further detaches the audience from Reagan’s perspective: The entire movie is narrated by Jon Voight doing a Russian accent, as a fictionalized KGB agent who surveilled Reagan for decades and is now regaling a young charge with stories of how one American president outsmarted the Soviet Union.

They say history is written by the winners. But sometimes the winners like to put on a bad accent and cosplay as the losers. Yet despite heavily negative reviews, Reagan remained in theaters for nearly two months and earned a solid $30 million at the box office, playing to an underserved audience and tapping into some of the cultural backlash that powered Donald Trump’s reelection. The film’s success portends a strange new era for the presidential biopic, one in which hokey hagiography might supplant any semblance of character depth—reinforcing what audiences already want to hear about politicians they already admire.

In retrospect, Lincoln, with its innate faith in the power of government to do good, was as much a product of the “Obamacore” era—that surge of positivity and optimism that flooded pop culture beginning in the early 2010s—as Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway smash Hamilton. But the arrival of the Trump era threw cold water on those feel-good vibes, and since Lincoln, presidential biopics have largely failed to connect with crowds. Two lightweight depictions of Barack Obama’s young adulthood arrived in 2016, but neither reckoned with his complicated presidency. In 2017, Rob Reiner delivered the ambivalent and uneven LBJ, which sank at the box office and made little impression on audiences. Meanwhile, Martin Scorsese developed and seemingly abandoned a Teddy Roosevelt biopic.

In development for more than a decade, Reagan emerges from a more plainly partisan perspective. Its producer, Mark Joseph, once called The Reagans, the 2003 TV movie starring James Brolin, “insulting” to the former president. Though Reagan director Sean McNamara expressed hope that his film would unite people across political lines, its source material, The Crusader, is a book by Paul Kengor, a conservative who has written eight books about Reagan and who presently works at a right-wing think tank. And its star, Dennis Quaid, is among Hollywood’s most prominent Trump supporters. In July, Quaid appeared on Fox News live from the Republican National Convention, proclaiming that Reagan would help Americans born after 1985 “get a glimpse of what this country was.”     

The notable presidential biopics of the past were prestige pictures that at least tried to appeal to a wide swath of the moviegoing public, across political spectrums. Even 2008’s W., Stone’s spiritual sequel to Nixon—inferior by far, and disappointingly conventional in its biographical beats—is hardly the liberal excoriation many viewers might have expected from the director; it was even criticized for going too easy on George W. Bush. Released during the waning months of his presidency, when Bush-bashing was low-hanging fruit for audiences, the film portrays the 43rd president as a lovable screwup with crippling daddy issues. As Timothy Noah argued in Slate at the time, “W. is the rare Oliver Stone film that had to tone down the historical record because the truth was too lurid.”

Instead, new entries like Reagan and Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice, the more nuanced film, reflect the market demands of a more fragmented moviegoing public—and reality. Rarely do two movies about the same era of American history have so little audience overlap. Set from 1973 to 1986, The Apprentice portrays Trump (Sebastian Stan) as a young sociopath-in-training, dramatizing his rise to business mogul and his relationship with mentor Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), a Svengali of capitalist chicanery molding a monster in his own image. In the most shocking scenes, the film depicts Trump brutally raping his wife, Ivana, and undergoing liposuction surgery. (Ivana accused Trump of rape in a 1990 divorce deposition, then recanted the allegation decades later. Trump’s campaign has called the movie a “malicious defamation.”) The film, in other words, gives confirmation—and a sleazily gripping origin story—to those who already believe Trump is a malevolent con man and irredeemable misogynist. It knows what its viewers want.

[Read: How the GOP went from Reagan to Trump]

So, seemingly, does Reagan, which shows its protagonist primarily as the Great Communicator who tore down that wall. But as the Reagan biographer Max Boot recently wrote, “the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union were primarily the work of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev—two consequences of his radically reformist policies … Reagan did not bring about Gorbachev’s reforms, much less force the collapse of the Soviet Union.” Reagan resists such nuance, hewing instead to a predictable hero’s narrative. Soviet leaders are swathed in visual clichés: grotesque men sipping vodka in cigar-filled rooms.

Meanwhile, the film renders Reagan’s domestic critics without sophistication or dignity. As Matthew Dallek chronicles in his book The Right Moment, Reagan spent much of his 1966 campaign to become California’s governor sensationalizing and condemning marches protesting the Vietnam War at UC Berkeley, and later called for a “bloodbath” against the campus left. In the film, we see Reagan, as the state’s governor, calling in the National Guard to crack down on Berkeley protesters, but we never learn what these students are protesting; Vietnam is scarcely referenced. (A nastier incident, in which Reagan-sent cops in riot gear opened fire on student protesters and killed one, goes unmentioned.)

A less slanted film might have interrogated the conflict between Reagan’s anti-totalitarian Cold War rhetoric and his crackdown on demonstrators at home. It might also have reckoned with the president’s devastating failure to confront the AIDS epidemic, a fact the movie only fleetingly references, via a few shots of ACT UP demonstrators slotted into a generic montage of Reagan critics set to Genesis’s “Land of Confusion.” But Reagan remains tethered to the great-man theory of history, in which Reagan single-handedly ended the Cold War, preserved America’s standing in the world, and beat back lefty Communist sympathizers. A match-cut transition, from a shot of newly retired Reagan swinging an axe at his ranch to young “wallpeckers” taking axes to the Berlin Wall in 1989, literalizes the message for grade-school viewers: The Gipper brought down the wall himself. It’s not that the movie is too kind to Reagan—but by flattening him in this way, it robs him of the conflicts and contradictions that made him a figure worth thinking about today.

In this way, too, Reagan forms a curious contrast to Nixon. A central message of Stone’s film is that even if Nixon had wanted to end the Vietnam War, he was powerless to act against the desires of the deep state (or “the beast,” as Hopkins’s Nixon calls it). In a defining scene, a young anti-war demonstrator confronts the president. “You can’t stop it, can you?” she realizes. “Because it’s not you. It’s the system. The system won’t let you stop it.” Nixon is stunned into stammering disbelief.

Indeed, Stone’s trilogy of films about U.S. presidents (JFK, Nixon, and W.) all reflect some paranoia about the dark forces of state power. (The unabashedly conspiratorial JFK suggests that Kennedy was eliminated by the CIA and/or the military-industrial complex because he didn’t fall in line with their covert objectives.) They are stories of ambitious leaders whose presidencies were hijacked or truncated by forces beyond their comprehension—movies whose villains are shadowy figures operating within the bowels of the U.S. government. It’s not just Stone’s view of state power that makes his films more interesting; it’s that he takes into account forces larger than one man, regardless of that man’s own accomplishments.   

Reagan’s vision of the institution is more facile. Its hero is endowed with near-mythical power to end wars and solve domestic woes; its villains are as clearly labeled as a map of the Kremlin. The film’s simplistic pandering vaporizes complexity and undercuts the cinematic aims of a presidential biopic. It’s a profitable film because it instead adheres to the market incentives of modern cable news: Tell viewers what they want to hear, and give them a clear and present enemy.     

In his 2011 book, The Reactionary Mind, the political theorist Corey Robin argues that the end of the Cold War had proven unkind to the conservative movement by depriving it of a distinct enemy. For today’s GOP, a good adversary is hard to find—in the past few years, its leaders have grasped around haphazardly in search of one: trans people, Haitian immigrants, childless women. (And, as always, Hillary Clinton.) In Reagan, though, the world is much simpler: There’s an evil empire 5,000 miles away, and a California cowboy is the only man who can beat it. It’s a flat narrative fit for one of his old B movies.

​​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.