Mandate for Disruption

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, November 15, 2024

 

Congratulations to Matt Gaetz on having shed his distinction as “the worst nomination for a Cabinet position in American history” after exactly one day.

 

You don’t need to dislike anti-vaxxism to dislike the idea of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. leading the Department of Health and Human Services. (Although it helps!) Start with the easy stuff: Like Gaetz, Kennedy is personally sleazy and lacks relevant experience to manage an agency of tens of thousands of people, in this case one that administers essential programs like Medicare. It’s been said that the federal government is an insurance company with an army; somehow Donald Trump has chosen grossly unqualified people to lead both of its prongs.

 

But, sure, the prospect of a well-known loon being placed atop America’s science bureaucracy is also cause for alarm. Kennedy’s crackpottery is broad and deep, extending far beyond the narrow subject of immunization. He’s into raw milk, fears that chemicals in the water are turning children transgender, and believes the jury is still out after 40 years on whether HIV causes AIDS. Last year he was caught on camera speculating that COVID had been engineered to affect certain ethnicities, like Asians and Ashkenazi Jews, less severely.

 

One of his highest priorities for the Trump administration is removing fluoride from the public water supply, to the dismay of America’s dentists.

 

If all that isn’t enough, he’s pro-choice and will wield unusual influence as HHS chief over federal policy on taxpayer-funded abortion. That was enough to persuade former Vice President Mike Pence to issue a statement on Friday morning calling on Senate Republicans to reject RFK’s nomination.

 

Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post has been and will remain a reliable cheerleader for Trump’s agenda but even its editors can’t stomach the thought of Secretary Kennedy. On Thursday the paper’s editorial board recalled that he sounded “nuts on a lot of fronts” when they met with him in May 2023 and pleaded with the president-elect to remember the lesson of last week’s victory. “Donald Trump won on promises to fix the economy, the border and soaring global disorder,” they warned. “His team needs to focus on delivering change on those fronts—not spend energy either having to defend crackpot theories or trying to control RFK Jr.’s mouth.”

 

Is that right? With apologies to Jonah Goldberg, is Trump at risk of misreading his mandate from the American electorate by nominating Kennedy?

 

The postliberal bargain.

 

It’s true, of course, that Trump didn’t win reelection because of his interest in putting a mega-crank in charge of public health. Per the exit polls, the top issues this year were the state of democracy, the economy, abortion, and immigration, not ridding America of the scourge of vaccines.

 

One could go further and argue that he didn’t “win” the election so much as Kamala Harris lost it. As I write this on Friday, with the last batches of votes still being counted on the West Coast, Trump has added a little less than 2 million votes nationally to his total from 2020 while Harris is more than 8 million votes behind Joe Biden’s pace that year. Democrats didn’t turn out in the numbers she needed.

 

And the Post is on solid ground in worrying about presidents misreading a vague mandate for “change” as a mandate to aggressively pursue the most base-pleasing elements of their agenda. Barack Obama, for instance, was elected in 2008 because Americans were sick of the failures of the Bush years—then turned around as president and rammed through Obamacare. He lost control of Congress soon after and never got it back.

 

Ditto for Democrats in 2020, when they rode Trump exhaustion to very narrow presidential and congressional victories yet aspired to enact an agenda worthy of FDR. If not for Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema standing on principle in defense of the Senate filibuster, they might have succeeded. As it is, they managed to do just enough to midwife a Trump restoration.

 

The story of modern American politics is voters choosing “change,” growing disillusioned with the results, then choosing “change” again the next chance they get—before quickly growing disillusioned with that. Take a look at the national right track/wrong track numbers dating back to Obama’s first inauguration. You’ll find no evidence of “mandates” there. Someone should tell Trump’s No. 1 supporter, who seems to think he’s leading a “revolution” that will rival America’s founding.

 

It’s surely true, then, that voters would prefer that Trump prioritize the cost of living and border security over handing public health to a guy who wants to take “a little break” for eight years on developing drugs to treat infectious diseases. If Trump fails to deliver on core concerns like inflation and immigration, he and his party will face the usual disillusionment and backlash.

 

But, contra the Post, I don’t foresee voters punishing Trump for spending political capital on nominees like Kennedy, Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard, and Pete Hegseth. There isn’t much obvious downside for him in letting his freak flag fly.

 

For starters, critics may be in denial about how popular Kennedy’s program is—not so much the anti-vax stuff specifically, perhaps, but the general “vibe.” “I would not underestimate the contingency of suburban women and moms who were drawn to RFK Jr’s Make America Healthy Again campaign, especially the pledge to take on food companies and their ingredients,” CBS reporter Caitlin Huey-Burns tweeted on Thursday. A Dispatch colleague told me that he saw evidence of the same thing while reporting from a swing state, with lots of enthusiasm from “wellness-focused low-key woo-woo types who think there are too many bad chemicals in our food.”

 

Yes, it’s absurd that fast-food addict Donald Trump is spearheading a campaign for healthier eating, and yes, it’s ridiculous that populist Republicans who sneered at Michelle Obama for the same thing are now ardent RFK admirers. Still: The fact that Kennedy’s crankish beliefs come packaged in murmurings about “chronic illness” might be enough to earn him the benefit of the doubt on his broader agenda from Americans who grew to distrust science bureaucrats during the pandemic and now get most of their health information from gonzo sources online.

 

Think of Trump’s HHS nomination as a way to officially recognize the value of, ahem, “doing your own research.” It’s called populism, baby.

 

But beyond that, I think Americans who voted for Trump did so understanding that he would seek to disrupt government in unusual ways in his second term even if they didn’t know what that might look like in its particulars or who would be staffing key positions. No one saw “Attorney General Matt Gaetz” coming, but plenty foresaw “retribution against the deep state,” seeing as how Trump hasn’t shut up about it for four years. The same goes for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard: Trump has made no secret of his disdain for “woke” generals or his interest in closer relations with traditional U.S. enemies like Russia.

 

We can argue over whether he has a specific mandate to slap 100 percent tariffs on foreign goods or to deport America’s Dreamers but I think it’s fair to say, in the words of Washington Post columnist James Hohmann, that he has a “mandate for disruption.” If that’s true, the public is likely to be more indulgent of disruptive Cabinet choices like Kennedy than we expect, just as it’s likely to be more indulgent of Trump’s authoritarian power grabs than we hope. It’s not that they favor these things, necessarily, it’s that they’re willing to let Trump experiment radically with how government works as a trade-off of (supposedly) improving their quality of life.

 

I’d go so far as to say that they have a tacit postliberal bargain with him. He agrees to address their bottom-line concerns—the cost of living, the border, crime—and they agree not to question his methods in running the executive branch. Forcing the FDA and CDC to answer to an anti-vaxxer is a small price to pay for making the trains run on time.

 

But what if we suffer a major public health disaster under Secretary Kennedy? Won’t that cause a backlash to Trump’s presidency?

 

Eh, I’m skeptical of that too.

 

Damage control.

 

Where will this supposed backlash come from? From the left?

 

Those on the left are tuning out—literally. They’re exhausted from fighting Trump for eight years as he’s grown progressively illiberal and unhinged; their reward for almost a decade of effort last week was watching a Republican win the national popular vote for the first time in 20 years. Unlike in his first term, there are no plans this time among Senate Democrats to boycott or delay confirmation hearings for the incoming president’s nominees. In fact, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a figure routinely cited as an example of a “sensible” Democrat, greeted Kennedy’s nomination warmly (and then a little less warmly) on Thursday.

 

In theory, the cavalcade of cranks nominated this week will unite Democrats in defeat while dividing Republicans in victory. In practice, there’s no reason to expect that “the Resistance” of Trump 1.0 will reemerge before his mass deportation program heats up next year. Maybe some catastrophic decision made by RFK will inspire liberals to rally, but my guess is that most of them—dispirited by public indifference to civic insanity—will simply resign themselves to letting Americans reap the whirlwind of trusting the federal government to a kakistocracy. Any backlash will be muted.

 

How about pro-lifers? Surely they’ll mobilize against Kennedy.

 

Well, no, they won’t. With due respect to Mike Pence, since 2015 “values voters” have proven themselves the cheapest dates in politics. A fun fact from last week’s exit polls: After Trump spent the past year aggressively repositioning himself as an opponent of federal abortion bans, he got a larger share of evangelical votes (82 percent) than he did against Biden in 2020 (76 percent). Maybe that’s because some evangelicals boycotted the race in protest of his abortion stance—they made up 22 percent of the electorate in this cycle versus 28 percent in the last one—but remember that he got more votes overall in this election than in the last. Perhaps evangelicals were a smaller share of the electorate this time simply due to higher turnout among non-evangelicals.

 

Most pro-lifers are anti-left more so than they’re anti-abortion and will contort themselves accordingly to justify Trump’s policies. But in the unlikely event that Kennedy does anything radically pro-choice that risks a serious backlash among evangelicals, I suspect Trump will simply overrule him and force him to take a pro-life stance. There are reasons to think RFK will be amenable, too: He knows that his political bread is being buttered by the grassroots right and his recent slipperiness on abortion reflects that.

 

What about the general public, though, including many who voted for Trump reluctantly? The new president will face trouble if they turn against Kennedy.

 

Sure, conceivably. But if there’s one shining lesson from this election, it’s that the postliberal propaganda apparatus that serves Trump has now grown so influential and sophisticated that it was able to turn a coup-plotting convicted felon into the lesser of two evils for millions of Americans. It’s probably too much to say, as Michael Tomasky recently did, that populist media was the deciding factor in his reelection—but I wouldn’t rule it out. It’s that powerful.

 

By “populist media,” we’re not just talking about Fox News and its (relatively) puny audience of 2 million to 3 million. We’re talking about the entire complex—conservative talk radio, Elon Musk’s Trump-boosting Twitter platform, major online sites like The Daily Wire and Tucker Carlson’s shop, podcasters like Joe Rogan and bro-targeted media like Barstool Sports, and a million other lesser influencers on social media networks like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram who reliably carry populist talking points to their respective audiences. 

 

There are leftist analogues to most of those, but if you’re one of those disaffected Americans seeking out countercultural alternatives to major media in the course of “doing your own research,” chances are you’re going to end up guzzling propaganda at a right-coded platform rather than at a left-coded one. Trump was the countercultural candidate in this election, unambiguously, and RFK was the most countercultural figure associated with either campaign. Alternative media will naturally tend toward sympathy for them and their agenda, particularly given the antipathy they face from the establishment.

 

All of that being so, how likely is it that news of a public health calamity caused by Kennedy’s recklessness at HHS will even reach persuadable voters? Trumpist media would strive to suppress it; to the extent they couldn’t, they’d dismiss it as an exaggeration of left-wing media and or contrive some conspiracy theory that shifts blame for it to the left. Or, failing all else, they’d aim to convince their audience that Kennedy’s calamity is actually a good thing.

 

That’s almost certainly how they’ll handle his skepticism of vaccines. “RFK’s formal merger with Trumpism will have the effect of making his view of vaccines a de rigueur tenet of MAGA politics,” Jonathan Last predicted on Friday. “People who pledge fealty to Trumpism will discover that in addition to being required to believe that Trump won the 2020 election they are also required to oppose vaccinations of all types.” It won’t just be limited to the right, though: The imprimatur of HHS will lend Kennedy’s beliefs a patina of authority that they don’t deserve. Vaccination rates will plunge among impressionable Americans, mostly on the right but not entirely. Some will needlessly fall ill and some fraction of them will die.

 

Trump propagandists will be forced to spin this as a positive development on balance, unfortunate but more than offset by the supposed “health benefits” of reducing vaccine uptake in the U.S. Many Americans will believe them, perhaps enough to neutralize the issue politically. And some won’t hear about it at all, either because their preferred media sources siloed them off from it or because they don’t consume news media at all. Guess which candidate that faction voted for next week.

 

I would not underestimate the ability of right-wing media to quarantine the damage from Kennedy’s failures, turning them into a standard 50-50 partisan issue and de facto loyalty test for Trump voters. They’ll do the same for Gaetz and the rest of the Cabinet of creeps, of course, but protecting RFK will be a special mission for them: As the starkest example among Trump’s nominees of a countercultural crank pitted against hyper-educated expert elites, he must not end up disgraced and discredited. Second only to Trump himself, he’s the face of “disruption” in this administration. Populism itself risks being discredited by association.

 

Resignation time.

 

I meant what I said last week: Kennedy should be confirmed, just as Gaetz, Gabbard, and Hegseth should be. Americans deserve the administration they voted for, even if that means suspending standard background checks and suppressing damaging disclosures for the sake of shepherding them through.

 

Disruption goes both ways, however. If HHS staffers chose to resign en masse to protest RFK’s appointment, who could blame them?

 

One could say the same for deputies at the Justice Department and the Pentagon disgusted by the thought of serving under Gaetz or Hegseth—although creating vacancies for the White House to fill with unqualified hacks will only make Trump’s task of weaponizing federal agencies against his enemies easier.

 

But there’s only so much he can do to weaponize HHS. And given the extremely high levels of scientific expertise required for some positions, he might not be able to fill certain vacancies at all.

 

There are downsides to that. Once lost, bureaucracies aren’t easily rebuilt. And one could argue that experts have a duty not to abandon American public health to Kennedy, knowing how many innocent people will be hurt. But that argument also goes both ways: How many people will be hurt if scientists lend their professional credibility to carrying out his agenda? Career staffers can’t stop him from advocating against vaccination, but they can certainly deny him a CDC bureaucracy that dutifully carries forth that toxic message.

 

Trump has an electoral mandate to disrupt the government and certain members of the government have an ethical mandate to disrupt his efforts to do so. May the best disrupter win.