Let us pause the various constitutional crises, geopolitical showdowns, and DOGE dramas to make a simple observation: Donald Trump seems kind of busy, no?

In recent days, he kicked off what the media have dubbed “Tariff Week” by declaring Sunday, February 9, Gulf of America Day. This occurred as he flew to New Orleans to become the first-ever sitting U.S. president to attend the Super Bowl and just before Fox News aired a Super Bowl Sunday/Gulf of America Day interview, a presidential news-making tradition that Joe Biden had blown off the past two years, in which Trump, among other things, (1) reiterated that Canada should become the 51st U.S. state, (2) declined to endorse Vice President J. D. Vance as his successor (“but he’s very capable”), and (3) referred to Gaza as a “demolition site.”

Trump spent much of the afternoon and evening getting fussed over by billionaires, celebrities, and other dignitaries in front of 127.7 million viewers, during the most watched television broadcast in history. He received mostly cheers when his ubiquitous mug was shown on the Caesars Superdome big screen before the game, which he watched with his daughter Ivanka and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell from a 50-yard-line suite. He closed out his weekend by stirring up bad blood with Kamala Harris supporter Taylor Swift via Truth Social (“BOOED out of the Stadium”) and ordering his Treasury secretary to terminate the bipartisan menace of the penny.

[Read: A Super Bowl spectacle over the gulf]

After a brief overnight respite, the Trump-centric events kept hurtling forth in a flurry of perpetual motion—also known as Monday and Tuesday. Trump imposed 25 percent duties on all steel and aluminum imports; pardoned former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich; and threatened that “all hell is gonna break out” if Hamas does not release all Israeli hostages by Saturday at noon. He signed an executive order that calls for a halt to all federal purchases of those flaccid paper straws (which, let’s face it, are as annoying as pennies), and another directing all federal agencies to cooperate with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to “significantly” reduce the federal workforce. This came a few hours after he held an Oval Office meeting with Jordan’s King Abdullah II in which the president reasserted, in reference to Gaza, “We’re going to take it, we’re going to hold it, we’re going to cherish it.”

In summation: Yes, Trump definitely does seem kind of busy.

Opinions, of course, vary about whether this is a good or a catastrophic kind of busy. And for what it’s worth, several federal judges have declared themselves hostile to Trump’s executive orders. Regardless, these rapid-fire feedings of attention-seizing fodder represent a fundamental ethic of Trump 2.0: Frenetic action—or at least the nonstop impression thereof—seems very much the point. And notwithstanding the whiplash, turbulence, and contradiction of it all, people seem to like it so far.

In a CBS News/YouGov poll released Sunday, 53 percent of the 2,175 U.S. adults surveyed said that they approved of the job Trump is doing, a higher share than at any point in his first go-round. Perhaps more revealing, the poll’s respondents described these first weeks of the 78-year-old president’s term as “energetic,” “focused,” and “effective.” They might not necessarily approve of what Trump has been energetic, focused, and effective about doing (pardoning the January 6 perpetrators, for example) or not doing (66 percent said Trump hasn’t paid enough attention to lowering prices for goods and services). But Trump has created a sense of action, commotion, disruption, and maybe even destruction that many voters seem to welcome for now. At the very least, there is nothing sleepy about any of this.

“He said he was going to do something, and he’s doing it,” one woman told a Bulwark focus group of Biden-turned-Trump voters conducted in the days after Trump returned to the White House. At this point, the fact of this “something” seems to be trumping the substance of it. The woman said she works in clinical research at a hospital and interacts with people who might lose National Institutes of Health grants to Trump and Musk’s barrage of cuts; she described a work environment that has been thrown into chaos.

“Like, what do we do? We have no idea, the CEO has no idea. We’re confused a little bit,” the woman said. “I’m not saying it’s the right move, the wrong move,” she added. “But it’s definitely like, Something’s happening. He’s actually doing something.”

[Read: The strategy behind Trump’s policy blitz]

Sarah Longwell, the Bulwark publisher who runs the focus groups, told me that Trump appears to be benefiting from “Joe Biden’s complete lack of communication” during his time in office. Longwell said she repeatedly heard from voters that they had no idea what Biden wanted to do in office, or what he was doing. “He created this huge vacuum of presidential communication that Trump is now filling,” Longwell said.

She added that Biden also presents a cautionary example of how a president’s initial popularity can be fleeting. Four years ago, at this same point, voters were sounding quite appreciative of having someone in office who was not constantly in their faces. Biden was seen as restoring “normalcy” after the tumultuous, COVID-dominated, and violent end of Trump’s first term. He polled in the low 60s in a March 2021 CBS survey, was still getting compared to Franklin D. Roosevelt, and enjoyed a popularity that would last until the summer of 2021, when Afghanistan went south and inflation headed north.

A hallmark of presidential honeymoons is that presidents tend to look better when they act in ways that contrast with their predecessor, especially when their predecessor was unpopular. Another hallmark of those honeymoon periods: They tend not to last. In other words, Trump should cherish this while he can—or until all hell breaks out and people start pining again for normalcy.

Hours after being sworn in, President Donald Trump began targeting migrants seeking refuge or asylum. He brought the entire refugee system to a halt, preventing the resettlement of tens of thousands of already screened refugees and stopping the admission of thousands of Afghan refugees. He also ended humanitarian parole for immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, “leaving more than 500,000 already living here in legal limbo,” according to ProPublica.

But there’s one group of “refugees” Trump is ready to welcome.

I bet you can guess.

Last week Trump signed an executive order stating that his administration would “promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation.” Many hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people around the world are fleeing state-related persecution and would love to come to the United States. Hundreds of thousands of them are already here, working and contributing to their communities. Some of them have already been victims of vicious slander from Trump and his vice president, J. D. Vance. The Trump administration has closed its door to all of them, except for one white ethnic group in South Africa.

Land reform is a complicated issue in South Africa. Since the 1994 end of apartheid—a system of forced racial separation and domination that granted full rights only to South Africa’s white minority while categorizing nonwhite South Africans as inferior—racial inequality in South Africa has barely budged. The 7 percent of the South African population that is white remains much wealthier than the rest of the population. Black South Africans own only 4 percent of the land while white South Africans own about three-quarters, a consequence of the apartheid government’s half-century-long practice of forcibly seizing land from Black South Africans and displacing millions into “homelands” used to maintain the fiction of a white South African majority. Laws also prevented Black South Africans from owning land outside the cramped territory allotted to them.

Last month, South Africa passed a law that allows the expropriation of land if it is unused or the public has a need for it. In some cases, it would allow the government to do so without compensating the owners. Afriforum, an Afrikaner group, called the government’s policy “irresponsible.” But the South African government insists that it is not seeking large-scale expropriation. Its foreign minister compared the policy to eminent-domain laws in the United States. Neighbouring Zimbabwe, whose government confiscated much of its white farmers’ land, has suffered from dire economic consequences, and South Africa clearly isn’t interested in redistributing wealth in a way that collapses the economy. A coalition of organizations representing white South Africans stated categorically that their members are not interested in Trump’s offer: “We may disagree with the ANC, but we love our country.”

Trump’s executive order also stopped aid to South Africa, which was already dealing with the devastating aftermath of the USAID freeze. The order may, in part, have been the result of the influence of his wealthy donors, who include far-right billionaires with roots in South Africa, such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and David Sacks. But the idea that white South African farmers have been targets of state oppression and ethnic violence has been a cause célèbre on the American right for a while now.

It was a focus of Tucker Carlson’s now-defunct Fox News program, where he claimed that land reforms meant to address apartheid-era injustices were the “definition of racism.” (He also complained about efforts to address discrimination against Black farmers, which is apparently fine.) Carlson’s coverage led Trump, the last time he was in office, to order then–Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to look into “farm seizures” and already disproved reports of “large scale killings” of white farmers. Experts on the topic dismissed these inflammatory allegations as white-nationalist propaganda; one former ambassador to South Africa called Trump’s rhetoric “dangerous and poisoned” and accused him of spreading “a white-supremacist meme from the darkest place he can find.”

Violence against white people in South Africa is certainly not unheard of—the country’s murder rate is very high. But white South Africans, including farmers, are much less likely to be murdered than Black South Africans. Living standards for white South Africans also remain very high, with only 1 percent in poverty, compared with 64 percent of Black South Africans.

Whether or not any white South Africans take Trump up on his offer to come to the United States, the offer itself tells us a great deal about the Trump administration.

Even if one accepted the idea that white South Africans were being persecuted, and that as a result they deserved special dispensation as refugees, it does not follow that they are the only people in the world who do. The Trump administration has withdrawn protections from people fleeing leftist regimes in places such as Venezuela and Cuba, as well as from people fleeing right-wing ones in places like Afghanistan. It has stated that its policy is to accept as few refugees as possible. It then chose to roll out the red carpet for one particular set of white people. That, itself, is functionally an apartheid immigration policy: One set of lenient rules for white people, and another merciless set for everyone else.

The Trump administration insists that it wants to “forge a society that is color-blind and merit-based,” but this immigration policy shows that is obviously false. When the administration says decisions are “color-blind and merit-based,” it most likely means We see you as white, and therefore worthy. And that is a sweeping ideological worldview, not a narrow rubric that can be confined to immigration.

What a glorious time to be an ethically challenged politician. President Donald Trump began yesterday by pardoning Illinois’s eminently corrupt former Governor Rod R. Blagojevich, who’d tried to auction off a U.S. Senate seat. Last night, Trump extended his mercies to the indicted New York Mayor Eric Adams. The message is twofold and rather elemental: Prosecutors are not to be trusted. And bowing to Trump will yield rewards even for newly minted loyalists.

The Justice Department acted as the mayor’s agent of deliverance, directing the local U.S. attorney to drop the corruption case against him. Adams faced daunting and highly credible federal accusations that he’d accepted more than $100,000 in flight upgrades and airline tickets and collected contributions from wealthy foreigners who are not legally allowed to contribute to campaigns.

Adams’s reign has been plagued by many other scandals. Many in his inner circle at City Hall have come under federal, state, and city investigation and resigned in the past year. In December, his chief adviser was indicted on charges of bribe taking.

Adams has denied breaking the law. Quite remarkably, the memo from the Justice Department’s acting No. 2 official, Emil Bove III, says the agency reached its decision without even assessing the strength of the evidence against the mayor or the legal theories used in the indictment.

The motives proffered by Bove are baldly political. The federal indictment under which Adams labored had “unduly restricted” the mayor’s ability to devote his energies to the president’s policy agenda. While in private practice, Bove represented Trump in three criminal cases. Presumably, he is well practiced at keeping a straight face while advancing preposterous arguments.

[Read: The low comedy of Eric Adams’s indictment]

In fact, Bove is extending a quid pro quo that was neither hidden nor subtle. He noted that the Justice Department reserves the right to reinstate charges against Adams at some future date, the suggestion being that the mayor’s behavior could determine his fate. Remain shoulder to shoulder with Trump on immigration, warn New York school principals and homeless-shelter managers against ill-considered displays of conscience such as demanding that ICE produce search warrants, and the mayor can expect to remain out of the legal dock.

Adams expressed no qualms about this deal, as he so rarely displays any hint of embarrassment at his self-serving behavior. Adams’s defenders argue that this was just penny-ante grubbing about for small-time benefits and merited a slap on the wrist rather than an indictment. That ignores the fact that his alleged corruption of the campaign-finance system helped him obtain fraudulent millions of dollars in matching funds. Safety may have been at stake: Prosecutors said that Adams obtained some of his upgrades and hotel rooms in exchange for pressuring the fire department to stifle concerns about building violations and speed approval of a new office building for a Turkish consulate.

Adams pursued the dropping of charges with single-minded energy. He traveled to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump and worked to snare an invitation to his inauguration. He appeared on an online show hosted by Tucker Carlson, the Trump ally and former Fox News personality who is sailing ever faster toward the kookier ports of the far right. When asked of late to criticize the president, Adams has kept silent. “If I do disagree,” the mayor told the press, “I will communicate with him directly.”

[Read: Eric Adams’s totally predictable MAGA turn]

His knee remains artfully bent now. He recently told the city’s law office to instruct city employees to cooperate wherever possible with federal immigration officials.

Adams learned of the dropping of charges while enjoying a meal with the Republican billionaire John Catsimatidis at Gallaghers, a high-priced steakhouse. The billionaire is said to have proved helpful in this matter. Did he pick up the mayor’s tab? A shrug is perhaps the best response. Because at this point, who would bother to investigate?

The Trump administration’s attempt to eliminate USAID is many things: an unfolding humanitarian nightmare, a rollback of American soft power, the thin end of a wedge meant to reorder the Constitution. But upon closer examination, it is also an outbreak of delusional paranoia that has spread from Elon Musk throughout the Republican Party’s rank and file.

Several days ago, the administration began promoting the theory that USAID was secretly directing a communist conspiracy of unknown dimensions. Musk, who is running point on Donald Trump’s efforts to unmask and destroy this internal conspiracy, claimed on X, “USAID was a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America.” Trump, adopting an uncharacteristic tone of more-in-sadness-than-in-anger, told reporters in the Oval Office: “I love the concept, but they turned out to be radical-left lunatics.”

Soon Musk declared that he had uncovered explosive evidence for this belief: The agency had funneled $8 million to Politico. Why exactly the Marxist plotters at USAID would select Politico as the vehicle for their scheme—its owner, the German media giant Axel Springer, has right-of-center politics with a strong pro-Israel tilt—has not been fully explained. But Musk’s discovery soon rocketed across X, the social-media platform he owns and uses promiscuously, and became official government policy.

“LOOKS LIKE BILLIONS OF DOLLARS HAVE BEEN STOLLEN AT USAID, AND OTHER AGENCIES, MUCH OF IT GOING TO THE FAKE NEWS MEDIA AS A ‘PAYOFF’ FOR CREATING GOOD STORIES ABOUT THE DEMOCRATS,” Trump wrote on his own social-media site, Truth Social. “THE LEFT WING ‘RAG,’ KNOWN AS ‘POLITICO,’ SEEMS TO HAVE RECEIVED $8,000,000 … THIS COULD BE THE BIGGEST SCANDAL OF THEM ALL, PERHAPS THE BIGGEST IN HISTORY!”

[Jonathan Lemire: Elon Musk is president]

In fact, USAID has not given millions to Politico. The agency subscribed to E&E News by Politico, a premium service that provides detailed, fairly boring, and decidedly noncommunist coverage of energy and environmental policy. Most of Politico’s paying subscribers, according to its editors, work in the private sector. Many of them are lobbyists, who are also, as a rule, unreceptive to communist ideology, and who pay for comprehensive coverage of the inner workings of Congress and the federal bureaucracy, which holds little interest for a general audience.

Government officials themselves also subscribe to Politico and other paywalled news sources. This is because, far from masterminding intricate conspiracies, public employees are often just trying to figure out what’s happening using the same information sources available to the public. Thus USAID spent $24,000 on E&E subscriptions for its staff in 2024, and $20,000 the year before. The $8 million figure encompasses Politico subscriptions across the entire executive branch. Musk has been conspiratorially describing these subscriptions as “contracts,” as if the government is paying Politico for something other than articles about the government.

If USAID is a secret left-wing plot, leftists themselves have not been let in on the secret. Actual Marxists despise USAID, which they consider a tool of American imperialism. Jacobin, a self-consciously radical-socialist journal, has spent years railing against the agency for “stealthily advancing the interests of the Salvadoran corporate class,” working to “augment center-right parties throughout much of the Global South,” and even having the effrontery to fund a rock band that criticized Hugo Chávez, among other nefarious capitalistic schemes.

Some leftists have noticed the Trump administration’s efforts to eliminate the hated agency, and they’re not angry. The journalist Ryan Grim, who has decidedly left-wing views on foreign policy, has optimistically asked whether Trump’s crusade against USAID indicates a desire “to unwind and reorient American empire.”

The left-wing critique of USAID is considerably more grounded in reality than Musk’s is. Although the agency carries out humanitarian works, those programs have a dual purpose of advancing American soft power and resisting propaganda from hostile countries—originally from the Soviet bloc, and today from China. Not long ago, USAID’s strongest advocates included some of the most anti-communist (and thus conservative) members of Congress. As recently as 2022, Republican Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, who now praises Trump’s crackdown on the agency, was calling for it to boost staffing in order to more efficiently disburse humanitarian aid to Ukraine.

[Russell Berman: Trump’s assault on USAID makes Project 2025 look like child’s play]

The process by which Musk came to his conclusions does not inspire great confidence. His expertise lies mostly outside public policy. He arrived in Washington, D.C., and quickly set out to prove that he could identify at least $1 trillion in annual waste and fraud, a figure wildly out of scale with the conclusions of every serious expert. He claims to be working 120 hours a week, yet is posting on X at a manic pace, sending more than 3,000 tweets a month, at all hours of the night. Musk has acknowledged that he has a prescription for ketamine, a drug that can cause unpredictable behavior if abused. Last year, The Wall Street Journal reported that people close to Musk worry that his recreational drug use—including “LSD, cocaine, ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms,” according to the article—was driving his erratic behavior and could adversely affect his businesses. (His attorney accused the Journal of printing “false facts,” and told the paper that Musk is “regularly and randomly drug tested at SpaceX and has never failed a test.”)

It is entirely possible that Musk genuinely thinks he has stumbled upon a vast conspiracy, rather than an anodyne plan to give public employees access to a rather staid news source. Every response he has made to outside criticism tracks the most typical paranoid thought process. He believes that politicians criticize him because they, too, are collecting “kickbacks and bribes.” He has accordingly interpreted all opposition to his moves as just more proof that he is onto something big.

The ultimate conspiracy that Musk thinks he has uncovered goes far beyond even USAID. On Wednesday, Musk reposted an X post claiming that “all the elections are rigged and fake, all the liberal media outlets have no audience and are kept alive by USAID funding. All their politicians and political pundits are paid by USAID to say what the government wants.” Musk’s commentary: “Yes.”

Any well-functioning political party would laugh off such claims as kookery. Musk, however, has attained a unique place of power because of his simultaneous position as Trump’s proxy and the owner of a powerful communications platform. X is teeming with accounts repeating and amplifying Musk’s firehose of nonsense, spinning it into a grand narrative in which Musk has heroically exposed a left-wing, taxpayer-funded cabal that has orchestrated various disasters behind the scenes.

What remains of the conservative establishment has mostly defaulted to applying a sheen of rationality to Musk’s paranoid fantasy. “Mr. Musk sometimes blows hot air, and he needs to be watched to stay within legal guardrails,” a Wall Street Journal editorial gently scolded. “But he’s also hitting targets that have long deserved scrutiny and reform, which helps explain the wailing over the U.S. Agency for International Development.”

[Hana Kiros: America can’t just unpause USAID]

“The tofu-eating wokerati at the USAID are screaming like they’re part of a prison riot, because they don’t want us reviewing the spending,” Republican Senator John Kennedy told Fox News’s Sean Hannity. “But that’s all Mr. Musk is doing. And he’s finding some pretty interesting stuff.”

The result is that Musk’s most fervent devotees can believe that he has broken open a globalist plot responsible for stealing elections and manufacturing consent for the liberal agenda, while more responsible figures can pretend he’s doing nothing more than auditing funds for waste. This is the same justification process that enabled Trump’s insurrection after the 2020 election: The true believers said Trump had uncovered massive voter fraud, while the Republicans who knew better claimed he just wanted to use his legal right to count the votes and make sure the result was legit.

The Republican establishment may now be calculating that the smart move is to go along with Trump’s and Musk’s delusions. Just cancel some government-agency news subscriptions, maybe zero out a few spending programs, and wait for the howling mob to move on to new obsessions. But if the Republican Party’s leaders have proved anything over the past decade, it’s that the paranoid demagogues they think they can control are usually controlling them.

Donald Trump campaigned, in part, on returning political power to American Christians. “If I get in, you’re going to be using that power at a level that you’ve never used before,” Trump promised a room full of religious news broadcasters in February 2024. “With your help and God’s grace, the great revival of America begins on November 5.” At different campaign events, he vowed both that Christian leaders would have a line “directly into the Oval Office—and me” and that he would create a federal task force to “stop the weaponization of our government against Christians.” Now, not even three weeks into his new term, he has begun down quite the opposite path.

Among the Trump administration’s first efforts were orders that delivered a stunning blow to humanitarian organizations, including the suspension of foreign aid pending review, the halting of refugee-resettlement programs, the dismantling of USAID, and the freezing of all federal grants that normally flow to nonprofit organizations such as Catholic Charities USA, the official domestic relief agency of the Catholic Church. Catholic Charities represents a network of 168 local groups nationwide offering disaster assistance, meals, and housing for people in need, and refugee services and programs for migrants. According to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, the freeze was part of a broader effort to root out “wokeness,” though it’s difficult to match that descriptor to this particular organization. And although the freeze on federal grants and loans was paused two days after Trump signed the order, many organizations are still unable to access funds.

[Read: You can’t just unpause USAID]

Late last month, hundreds of leaders from Catholic relief and aid organizations met for the annual Catholic Social Ministry Gathering in Washington, D.C. What ensued was “a scene of real panic,” Stephen Schneck, the chair of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, told me. “They were in shock, and they were disturbed, and they were feeling really panicky about the situation and wondering what to do.” Schneck recalled speaking with an attendee from El Paso, Texas, who was suddenly unable to buy diapers for babies in his charity’s care. “And this happened with no warning, no extensions,” Schneck said. “It just happened overnight.” Catholic agencies providing relief overseas were also affected by the freeze on foreign aid, which came with a stop-work order that suspended operations.

Along with the shutdown of federal funding for so many Catholic charitable organizations, Trump also revoked a Joe Biden–era policy that prevented Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from apprehending people in or near “sensitive locations” such as churches and schools. The change elicited a statement from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which registered its dismay at the transformation of places for “care, healing, and solace into places of fear and uncertainty for those in need,” and called for “a better path forward that protects the dignity of all those we serve, upholds the sacred duty of our providers, and ensures our borders and immigration system are governed with mercy and justice.”

The statement set off a back-and-forth between the bishops and Vice President J. D. Vance, who responded to the bishops on Face the Nation late last month, saying that “the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops needs to actually look in the mirror a little bit and recognize that when they receive over $100 million to help resettle illegal immigrants, are they worried about humanitarian concerns? Or are they actually worried about their bottom line?” The USCCB followed up with another statement, saying that “faithful to the teaching of Jesus Christ, the Catholic Church has a long history of serving refugees … In our agreements with the government, the USCCB receives funds to do this work; however, these funds are not sufficient to cover the entire cost of these programs. Nonetheless, this remains a work of mercy and ministry of the Church.”

[Read: Bishop Budde delivered a truly Christian message]

Vance, speaking with the Fox News host Sean Hannity, provided further Catholic reasoning for his administration’s approach to migrants and refugees, arguing that he thinks it’s “a very Christian concept that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world”—a statement to which the bishops have not responded. If they did, however, I imagine they would point out that Jesus addresses this matter in his Sermon on the Mount, saying, “If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” The Christian mandate is more arduous than Vance’s account seems to allow.

Catholic politicians disputing the bishops’ witness to the faith is nothing new, though the allegations of avarice and corruption are somewhat surprising, and presage bitter conflict ahead. Perhaps that could be helpful, insofar as it would sharply distinguish the teaching of the Church from certain politicized versions of Catholicism tailored to the ideological preferences of their confessors. The Church is called to be a sign of contradiction—a bulwark of Christian priorities against the demands of the political and cultural eras that the faithful pass through. Comporting with political and cultural demands is what politicians do; the degree to which Catholic politicians do the same is the degree to which they ought to suspect themselves spiritually compromised. Perhaps they all are, and perhaps so are we.

In fact, the tendency of humankind to be self-serving and deceitful is part of what makes me believe that Christianity is at its purest and most beautiful when it is counterintuitive and unwieldy—that is, when it is least amenable to human convenience. The command to love even those who aren’t your kith and kin is an excellent example of just that. The command to serve the weakest and most outcast members of society is another. Thus, the decision to love and serve the stranger, the refugee, and the foreigner with charity is a hallmark of the Christian faith, such that a government crackdown on this work seems to be a threat to Christian practice itself, or an attempt to reshape it into something else altogether.

Ron Johnson may be the most anti-vaccine lawmaker in Congress; he’s the kind of guy who says he’s “sticking up for people who choose not to get vaccinated” while claiming without valid evidence that thousands have died from COVID shots. This morning, at the Capitol, Johnson walked over to his Senate Finance Committee colleague Bill Cassidy, a doctor and a passionate advocate for vaccination, and gave him an affectionate pat on the shoulder. The two of them had just advanced Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination to lead the Department of Health and Human Services to the Senate floor.

The committee vote, which was held this morning in a room crammed to capacity with what appeared to be roughly equal numbers of Kennedy’s skeptics and devotees, certainly fit with the behavior of a compliant GOP. But it was still surprising in its way, if only because, until this morning, Cassidy had been so clearly wary of giving the nation’s highest role in public health to a prominent anti-vaccine activist. At last week’s confirmation hearings, he seemed like he might even be prepared to cast his vote with the opposition. That didn’t happen.

Whether you like Kennedy or not, the hearings showed that he lacks the basic qualifications to hold this office. He knows very little about the nearly $2 trillion behemoth that he would be tasked with running. He flubbed the basics of programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, and seemed wholly unaware of an important law that governs emergency abortions. The hearings also called attention to a passel of health-related conspiracy theories that RFK Jr. has floated in the past, including that Lyme disease was developed as a bioweapon, that COVID is “ethnically targeted” to infect Caucasians and Black people (and spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people), and that standard childhood vaccinations are damaging or deadly.

As of last Thursday, Kennedy appeared to have unwavering support from the committee’s Republicans, who occupy 14 of its 27 seats—with one notable exception: Cassidy. Prior to taking office, the Louisiana senator had personally led a campaign to vaccinate 36,000 kids against hepatitis B. In an interview with Fox News last month, he said that RFK Jr. is “wrong” about vaccines. And in early 2021, Cassidy joined six other GOP senators in voting to convict Donald Trump on charges of “incitement of insurrection.” The doctor had voted his conscience before. It seemed possible that he would do so once again.

Cassidy made no attempt to hide his skepticism of RFK Jr. during Thursday’s hearing. He spoke up at one point to correct the record after his Republican colleague Rand Paul worked up the crowd of pro-Kennedy spectators by disparaging the practice of vaccinating babies for hep B. Later on, he paused to cite a meta-analysis disproving Kennedy’s often-stated belief that childhood vaccines may be a cause of autism. (Cassidy also explained the concept of a meta-analysis for those in the room and people watching at home.) When RFK Jr. cited his own evidence for being skeptical of vaccines, referring to a paper from a little-known journal, Cassidy put on his reading glasses, peered at his iPad, and reviewed the evidence firsthand. At the end of the hearing, he reported that he’d found “some issues” with the paper, and then implored Kennedy to disavow mistruths about vaccine safety. “As a patriotic American, I want President Trump’s policies to succeed in making America and Americans more secure, more prosperous, healthier. But if there’s someone that is not vaccinated because of policies or attitudes you bring to the department, and there’s another 18-year-old who dies of a vaccine-preventable disease [...] It’ll be blown up in the press,” he warned. “So that’s my dilemma, man.”

Cassidy’s “dilemma” hardly went unnoticed by RFK Jr.’s supporters. Calley Means, a proponent of Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again campaign, said last weekend on The Charlie Kirk Show that MAHA moms are now “camping out at [Cassidy’s] office.” (I did not see any tents or sleeping bags outside his door this morning.) Other MAHA leaders, including the anti-vaccine activist Del Bigtree, have also issued political threats to any lawmakers who might try to stop Kennedy’s confirmation. “Anyone that votes in that direction, I think, is really burying themselves,” Bigtree told me and a group of other reporters last week.

Cassidy, for his part, wasn’t saying much about his personal deliberations. His only official social-media post from the weekend quoted a Bible verse from the Book of Joshua: “Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged,” it read in part. “Be strong and courageous.”

When he arrived at the committee room this morning, Cassidy was somber. He stared straight ahead, his brow furrowed. He’d been verbose at last week’s hearings, but now he said only a single word—“aye”—and left the room. In a social-media post that went up this morning, Cassidy explained that he’d received “serious commitments” from the Trump administration that made him comfortable with voting yes. Speaking later on the Senate floor, he added that RFK Jr. had promised to “meet or speak” with him multiple times a month, that the Trump administration would not remove assurances from the CDC’s website that vaccines do not cause autism, and that the administration would give his committee notice before making any changes to the nation’s existing vaccine-safety-monitoring systems. “It’s been a long, intense process, but I’ve assessed it as I would assess a patient as a physician,” Cassidy said. “Ultimately, restoring trust in our public-health institution is too important, and I think Senator Kennedy can help get that done.”

Even if Cassidy had voted no, his vote may not have mattered in the end. Under normal circumstances, a nomination that got voted down by the Senate Finance Committee would be dead in the water—but these were not normal circumstances. Majority Leader John Thune could still have scheduled a vote by the full Senate, at which point Kennedy would have been kept from office only if at least three other Republicans had joined Cassidy in opposition.

It’s still not a sure thing that Kennedy will be confirmed by the full Senate. Other Republicans, including Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, have raised concerns about Kennedy’s anti-vaccine activism. But the odds of RFK Jr.’s defeat are shrinking, and Cassidy’s thumbs-up may one day be remembered as the mirror image of John McCain’s thumbs-down from 2017, when that independent-minded senator doomed Trump’s efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Faced with an opportunity to make the same sort of stand, Cassidy folded. Now the American public is at the whims of the administration’s promises.