Kicking Out the Crazy

By Noah Rothman

Friday, April 17, 2026

 

Washington Post reporter Brianna Sack’s interpretation of Cameron Hamilton’s reportedly forthcoming nomination to lead the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a bureau he was forced out of last year after he publicly opposed FEMA’s dissolution, is probably correct.

 

“Hamilton’s potential return suggests that Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin is moving away from previous efforts to undercut the autonomy of the nation’s emergency management and response system championed by his predecessor, Kristi L. Noem,” she wrote.

 

Whether she was acting on the president’s orders or not, defenestrating Hamilton probably seemed like a good idea at the time — especially to the figures in this administration who have their ear closest to online chatter. After all, as Donald Trump said early in his second term, “I think we’re going to recommend that FEMA go away.”

 

A predictable sequence of events followed: Democrats objected in emotive and theatrical ways; Republicans reacted to that melodrama by embracing with equal zeal FEMA’s dismemberment; and when Hamilton contradicted the president, he became a figure of contempt among the very-online right, perhaps convincing the equally very-online Homeland Security director to prosecute the issue.

 

But Noem is gone. And, with the help of a federal judge who put a halt to some preliminary efforts by the administration to scale back FEMA programs, so, too, are the political incentives to which she unwisely responded.

 

Perhaps something similar is taking place inside the Department of Health and Human Services.

 

“President Trump has selected Dr. Erica Schwartz, a physician and vaccine supporter, as his nominee to become the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,” the New York Times reported Thursday, “the clearest signal yet that the White House is veering away from Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s vaccine skepticism in the lead up to the midterm elections.”

 

Kennedy himself expressed perfunctory support for Schwartz’s nomination. Still, the secretary’s anti-vaccine associates were nevertheless comfortable providing the Times with on-the-record quotes castigating Trump’s selection to head the CDC. Deep down, Kennedy may object. But, once again, the Trump administration seems to have decided that advancing an anti-vaccine agenda was more trouble than it was worth.

 

“Last month, a federal judge ruled that Mr. Kennedy and his advisers had made “arbitrary and capricious” changes to the schedule that were not backed up by scientific evidence, the Times notes. And while the report contends that HHS has “taken other steps” that “might allow” the secretary to “skirt the ruling,” it nevertheless concedes the most crucial point: “The Trump administration has not appealed the ruling,” the dispatch read.

 

It’s easy to overstate what is, at best, a nascent trend. And yet, while it may be a result of duress, on the margins, the Trump administration is pivoting away from the fringes of American intellectual life to which it was once so attracted.