By Nick Catoggio
Thursday, August 28, 2025
Last fall’s electorate can be divided into three groups.
The first hoped
Donald Trump would turn America into a third-world country. We call them
populists.
The second feared he would turn America into a
third-world country. We call them liberals.
The third doubted he would turn America into a
third-world country. We call them imbeciles.
The imbeciles were the swing group.
The swing voters gambled their children’s future on the
assumption that Trump 2.0 would resemble Trump 1.0—wacky, exhausting, deeply
embarrassing, but not catastrophic. (Not until the “mismanaging a
pandemic/attempting a coup” stage, at least.) The president wouldn’t act on his
worst impulses if elected, they told
themselves, and if he tried, the Serious People around him would save him
from himself.
We classical liberals in the second group warned them
that there would be no Serious People this time around, that the whole point
of another Trump presidency was to remove impediments to him following his
stupidest and most dangerous instincts. They scoffed, mumbled something about
“Trump Derangement Syndrome,” and placed their bet. They lost.
Ten months later, daily news in the U.S. is a single
story with a thousand chapters. Politically, legally, economically, and even
scientifically, America is transitioning from a first-world country into a
third-world one.
To gauge the speed of America’s third-world-ization,
economist Noah Smith
pointed out, consider just the past few weeks. Generalissimo Trump deployed
troops to
the capital, moved to seize power over setting
interest rates, partially nationalized another
American corporation, purged a few more high-ranking military
and intelligence
officials,
issued a decree purporting to ban
flag burning (sort of), and watched the FBI he commands search the home of
one of his political nemeses for reasons that may
or may not turn out to be justified.
He also put a henchman on
the federal bench, instigated an irregular redistricting push to
weaken the opposition’s chances of reclaiming power, and fired the federal
bureaucrat in charge of calculating employment numbers because
the July data made him look bad. His choice to replace her is exactly
the type of person you’d expect.
Those are things that happen routinely in “sh-thole
countries,” to borrow the president’s preferred
terminology. Draw your own conclusion about America in 2025 from the fact
that they’re happening here.
Still, despite his and his team’s best efforts,
superpowers don’t turn into sh-tholes overnight. Our courts still enjoy some
authority and our elections remain scheduled. The imbecile faction persists,
for now, in denial about the magnitude of its error last November because we
haven’t yet fully arrived at a third-world political culture. We’re still
transitioning.
That was also true of the CDC until Wednesday night, when
it took a quantum leap toward sh-thole status.
Lysenkoism.
For the same reason that swing voters supported Donald
Trump at the ballot box, wary Senate Republicans supported Robert F. Kennedy
Jr.’s nomination to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. They
didn’t believe he’d act on his worst impulses when handed the awesome
responsibility of power over life and death.
Admittedly, that wasn’t the only reason. It took an
immense amount of political cowardice for senators to sell out American public
health to a God-tier anti-vax creep because they feared the president would
primary them in their next race if they didn’t.
But I do think the Republicans who gave Kennedy the
benefit of the doubt earnestly believed he could and would be restrained. Bill
Cassidy, a medical doctor and thus the most notorious GOP vote in favor of
confirming RFK, said as much in a
floor speech in which he pledged to do the restraining himself if
necessary:
I will use my authority as Chairman
of the Senate Committee with oversight of HHS to rebuff any attempts to remove
the public’s access to life-saving vaccines without ironclad, causational
scientific evidence that can be defended before the mainstream scientific
community and before Congress. I will carefully watch for any effort to
wrongfully sow public fear about vaccines between confusing references of
coincidence and anecdote.
To this day, I have no idea what he meant by that.
Trump’s administration operates on the principle that, once the votes are
counted, it’s no longer accountable to anyone. True to form, Kennedy seemed to
stop caring about Bill Cassidy’s opinion the moment the tally on his
confirmation was announced in the Senate.
Again
and again
and again
since February, despite the senator’s warnings, RFK has targeted the public’s
faith in and/or access to vaccines. The only thing Cassidy has done to stop him
is derail
the confirmation of Dave Weldon, another vaccine skeptic, to lead the CDC.
Weldon’s more credible replacement, Susan Monarez, was confirmed last month,
nicely illustrating my point about America’s current transition stage: Her
boss, Kennedy, may be a third-world witch doctor, but she’s a first-world
scientific bureaucrat.
Or was. On Wednesday night, 28 days into her tenure, she
was fired. (Sort
of.)
According to sources who spoke to the Washington
Post, Monarez “was pressed for days by Kennedy, administration lawyers
and other officials over whether she would support rescinding certain approvals
for coronavirus vaccines.” I won’t do it without consulting my advisers, she
told him. He replied by questioning her loyalty to the Trump agenda and
demanding her resignation, prompting her to pick up the phone and call … Bill
Cassidy.
Cassidy, the great restrainer, then called the secretary
to complain. Not only did Kennedy not back off, he allegedly grew angrier at
Monarez for involving the senator in their dispute. By nightfall she was
gone—as were four
other department chiefs at the agency, all of whom resigned in protest. One
cited
the “intentional eroding of trust in low-risk vaccines,” adding of Kennedy’s
anti-vax efforts that he had “never experienced such radical non-transparency,
nor have I seen such unskilled manipulation of data to achieve a political end
rather than the good of the American people."
Like the imbecile swing voters of America, Bill Cassidy
gambled that a second Trump administration would be a lot of sound and fury
that ultimately signified nothing, or at least not much. Kennedy would be a
figurehead prone to babbling irresponsibly yet ineffectively in interviews
about vaccination, the senator likely imagined, with hard-nosed policy
decisions about vaccines left to the Serious People at the CDC.
He placed his bet and lost, realizing too late that being
a Serious Person is disqualifying in this administration.
And so a first-world public health agency, the most
well-known of its kind on Earth, is about to become a third-world soapbox for
voodoo and superstition. The day before Monarez was fired, Kennedy said
at a Cabinet meeting that his department would soon have an announcement about
unnamed “interventions” that are “clearly almost certainly causing autism,”
which sounds suspenseful but is exactly the opposite. He arrived at the
conclusion he wanted to reach on that subject long ago and is working backward
to support it, enlisting “researchers” who
he knows will tell him what he wants to hear.
As for the Serious People who would supposedly guarantee
our access to vaccines, a few hours before Monarez was canned, RFK’s FDA
released its recommendations for
COVID-19 immunizations this fall. The shot should no longer be authorized
for adults under 65 unless they suffer from some underlying health condition,
it said, which would mean those in that group who want to protect themselves
will need to find a doctor willing to prescribe it off-label and perhaps have
to pay full freight for the privilege. As a result, “access will be greatly
reduced, thus so will demand,” virologist Angela
Rasmussen explained. “In the years to come, vaccine manufacturers may
withdraw from the U.S. market altogether.”
Which has been the
plan from the start, of course.
America at last has its own Trofim Lysenko, a crank
whose screwy ideas about science gained influence over policy not because of
their methodological rigor but because their contrarianism reflected the
prejudices of a feral populist revolutionary movement. (Socialism
without socialism!) You tell me: Is a country that’s transitioning from
relying on vaccines to prevent disease—including brain cancer,
perhaps—to relying on Ivermectin and beef
tallow more or less of a sh-thole than it used to be?
The only good news is that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is
unlikely to rack up a body count as large as his Soviet predecessor. But he’s
sure gonna try.
The resignation dilemma.
And so we return to an old and recurring moral dilemma:
Did Monarez’s deputies do the right thing by resigning?
I think they did. Although, for reasons I’ve explained
before, that would have been a harder question during the president’s first
administration.
The excuse for Trump voters the first time around was
that they didn’t know what they were getting into. They didn’t want to be
governed by Hillary Clinton, so they rolled the dice on the new guy, not
knowing what he was capable of. We all make mistakes, and it’s cruel to let
someone suffer terribly for a mistake when you might be able to prevent it.
So the Serious People stuck around in his first term,
doing their noble best to contain the damage he caused and accidentally
convincing voters in the process that
reelecting him wouldn’t be risky. Health bureaucrats in particular might
have felt obliged at the time to grit their teeth and endure whatever chaos and
indignity he visited upon them, particularly during a pandemic: To a great
extent, the point of medicine is to rescue human beings from their own poor
decisions.
But it’s harder to make that argument in Trump’s second
term.
You can still make it. Today at The Bulwark,
Jonathan
Last foresaw the terrible consequences to public health from the U.S.
transitioning fully to a third-world model. “The U.S. government will no longer
be a reliable vector for information about medical science,” he wrote. “Real
scientists will leave the country. Research will move to Europe and China.
Innovation will happen elsewhere as one more American industry succumbs to the
poisonous effects of corruption. Oh, and Americans will get sick.” A
conscientious CDC deputy might consider all of that and resolve to stay on and
fight Lysenkoism for the sake of the public good.
But saving Americans from their own terrible choices again,
after they doubled down on the president last year, feels a bit like restarting
a dying patient’s heart only to have him immediately light up a cigarette. At
some point, you’re under no further obligation to restrain someone who’s bent
on destroying himself from doing so.
Voters didn’t make a “mistake” this time by electing
Trump. They watched him mismanage the pandemic and plot a coup in broad
daylight, and they chose to bring him back. Nor were they blindsided when
Kennedy, one of his most prominent surrogates on the trail, landed in the
administration. The president’s campaign was quite
enthusiastic about RFK’s program and how it might be implemented.
Populists wanted Lysenkoism, and imbeciles were willing
to tolerate it as a trade-off for cheaper groceries. So what’s left to talk
about? The Serious People should resign and give Americans what they voted for.
Let them learn their lesson the hard
way.
“But children will be harmed,” you might say. Yes, and
that’s a strong argument against bureaucrats resigning. Kids are in the line of
fire here. Just explain to me how a well-meaning health official who resolves
to stay on the job to protect children from Lysenkoism is supposed to succeed.
In Trump’s first term, a deputy stood a fair chance of changing
the president’s mind
about a horrible
decision he was planning. He had enough Serious People around him that a
consensus in favor of reversal might plausibly form among advisers, pressuring
him to relent. In his second term, nearly all of the Serious People have been
excluded to facilitate zealotry in policymaking. If Kennedy is willing to have
Trump fire the new CDC chief after 28 days for refusing to launder his anti-vax
propaganda, why would anyone else at the agency think they’ll get through to
him?
Kennedy has been at this for decades. Just
yesterday he stood at a microphone and babbled about his supposed ability to
diagnose “mitochondrial
challenges” in the faces of children when he passes them in the airport.
He’s a bona fide nut. Neither he nor the president is going to listen to
reason. The political project they’re part of has been designed to make
listening to reason as difficult as possible.
Despite their best efforts, the Serious People will not
protect kids from this insanity. They’ll be fired in due course if they try, as
Monarez was. The most productive thing they can do if they’re employed by this
administration is resign noisily rather than lend the credence of their
profession to witch-doctoring that will eventually lead thousands of parents to
let their children die of preventable diseases. If every credible scientist in
Trump’s government bailed out, the spectacle of their departure might help
discredit the forthcoming voodoo about vaccines supposedly causing autism.
The best-case scenario for public health until 2029 is
that no one except the populists pays the slightest bit of attention to the
federal government’s medical recommendations. Mass resignations would encourage
that.
But if that’s not enough, I think resigning is also
compelled by basic dignity. Refusing
to participate in a corrupt enterprise is a mark of good character and an
act of moral hygiene. What Trump and Kennedy are doing is indecent, and decent
people being involved in it both obscures that fact and subjects those people
to temptations to behave indecently themselves. Ask Marco Rubio or Mike Lee.
If Bill Cassidy had any dignity left, he would resign
from the Senate, admit that the president and RFK had made a schmuck out of
him, and devote himself to rebutting the administration’s vaccine
disinformation over the next several years. Yes, the person who replaces him in
the Senate would be a MAGA zombie, but so what? Cassidy voted like a MAGA
zombie when he confirmed Kennedy. A senator who bows to the president
reluctantly rather than enthusiastically is still bowing.
Instead, I assume he’ll slog on to his Senate race next
fall and vote to confirm whichever Weldon-ish kook Trump nominates to replace
Monarez at the CDC. Having already done his part to accelerate America’s
transition into a third-world country, there’s really no point in him holding
things up any further.
No comments:
Post a Comment