When it comes to the Cabinet-level positions of the second Donald Trump administration, it’s a solid rule of thumb to assume that the more often you see the name of any individual evoked in the news media, the more horrifying their contributions have probably been to either the rise of American fascism, or the death of scientific rigor … or both. Consider, for instance, the horrifying shit that immediately swims to mind when someone says “Pete Hegseth,” or “Kristi Noem,” or even EPA administrator Lee Zeldin, a guy waging war against the very environment his job title tells us he’s meant to be “protecting.” Contrast them with the truly forgotten cabinet members–can you recall a single instance when you saw a news headline mentioning Scott Turner, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development? I sure as hell can’t. Does this person actually exist, or do any of us care enough to check? Perhaps I’ll get around to it at some point, but right now I want to talk about the Cabinet member I’ve become increasingly fascinated by; the guy I’m now convinced is the saddest and most broken man to have been swallowed up by this administration–Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
You can of course devote reams of copy just to the oddities surrounding RFK Jr., a man who seems to emit a sort of field that generates insane headlines anywhere in his vicinity. We’re talking about the guy who, in the course of treatment for what he called mercury poisoning brought on by his own diet, discovered that he had a literal brain worm that had eaten portions of his cerebrum and then died in his skull. We’re talking about the former heroin addict-turned-HHS-Secretary who once said he dumped a dead bear cub in New York City’s Central Park. And yeah, we’re talking about the guy who just last week was revealed to have once cut off the penis of a dead raccoon he found on the side of the road, “so that he could examine it later.” Why do so many of this man’s stories involve interactions with roadkill? That none of this shit is normal should absolutely go without saying. Let’s consider that a given, okay?
Harvard admissions officer : under hobbies and interests u wrote “i collect raccoon dicks”
RFK jr : yes lmao
Harvard admissions officer, sighing : its a good thing you’re a kennedy
RFK jr : yes lmao
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— hammancheez (@hammancheez.bsky.social) Mar 23, 2026 at 6:26 PM
With all that said, however, the thing that so fascinates me about RFK Jr. is the way the man has sacrificed literally everything he’s ever claimed or pretended to believe in, or felt passionately about, for the sake of proximity to power, only to be humiliated by his patron deity, Donald Trump, over and over and over again. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sold his soul to the devil, and that devil proceeded to laugh at him, chew the shriveled soul up and spit it back in his face. Even Kennedy’s fiefdom of Health and Human Services is increasingly no longer his own, instead being co-opted by an executive branch that believes Kennedy’s deeply unpopular vaccine views in particular are weighing down the entire party in advance of November’s oncoming midterm elections, to the point that “aides close to Donald Trump have reportedly stepped in to manage the Health Department in an attempt to sway public opinion of the president back into favorable waters,” according to The New Republic.
Typically, when you sell your soul, the seller is supposed to get something valuable in the bargain–in Kennedy’s case, the mandate to “go wild on health” in the words of Donald Trump, to embrace all of his most conspiratorial dreams born in the depths of a heroin and brain-worm binge and turn them into terrifying reality. That was what Kennedy was supposed to get in exchange for kissing the ring, but instead he’s both seen his attempted execution of that deranged platform undone by judges pointing out the obvious illegality of his actions, and lost the faith of a White House that increasingly sees him as a liability. And along the way, RFK Jr. has likewise managed to betray every single member of his Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, pissing off an army of freshly aggrieved suburban moms and maxxx-benching chads who are angry he’s gone back on so many of his own promises in his pursuit of power.
It’s been an incredible year of failure and betrayal for RFK Jr., frankly, that has left him as perhaps the most genuinely pathetic of all the Trump lapdogs. So let’s examine some of the many, many things that have gone wrong, and how Kennedy transformed over the years from an ardent defender of the environment into a pusher of deadly medical conspiracy theories.
The Kennedy Who Was
It can be easy to forget that this version of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. bears almost no resemblance at all to the RFK Jr. who existed for the first few decades of his professional career. Any examination of the man should no doubt take his undoubtedly traumatic childhood into account, given that it involved the loss of his uncle, President John F. Kennedy when he was 9, and then the assassination of his father Robert F. Kennedy when he was 14 years old, attending Georgetown Preparatory School in the Washington D.C. suburbs. He would reportedly turn to drug experimentation as a fairly understandable coping mechanism in the years that followed, which rapidly progressed to a long addiction to hard drugs such as cocaine and heroin. Kennedy has stated that he spent 14 years addicted to heroin in particular, including during the period when he was sworn in as assistant district attorney for Manhattan in 1982. He resigned from that position in 1983 after failing the New York bar exam, and ended up being arrested in September of the same year for heroin possession in South Dakota. He entered a drug treatment center, and has subsequently claimed that his addiction/drug use ended at this point–the efficacy of that treatment being something he has seemingly forgotten entirely, given that he more recently said that he thinks addicts should be sent to government “wellness farms” for years, where they would be forced to grow organic foods.
The most disgusting person posing as a healthcare advocate.
Let alone Secretary of Health.
Disgrace is all the cabinet of Trump brings to the world.
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— Señor e LIAS (@theeliasrework.bsky.social) Feb 13, 2026 at 12:57 PM
In the two decades or so after his drug treatment, though, Kennedy followed the sort of path that wouldn’t be seen as particularly unusual for someone bearing his famous last name. He became an environmental attorney, working at the nonprofit Riverkeeper for decades while dedicating himself to causes that were unambiguously liberal coded. He sued corporations such as General Electric to stop discharging pollution in the Hudson River and clean up existing contamination. He represented the NAACP in a lawsuit against a planned garbage transfer station that was to replace a public park in Ossining, New York, successfully getting Westchester County to reopen the park for nearby poor and minority communities. He likewise forced the reopening of another park that the city had closed to the public to convert into a police gun range, and represented indigenous tribes in Canada and Latin America in lawsuits to protect their native lands against energy and resource-extraction projects in wild areas. He was, in other words, a dyed-in-the-wool, tree-hugging Democrat.
But then the 2000s rolled around, and RFK Jr. seemingly began to change as he increasingly developed an interest in conspiratorial thinking, alternative medicine and fad diets. This is when his “vaccine hesitancy” first began to express itself, and when Kennedy began advocating for stricter regulation surrounding childhood vaccines or accusing existing vaccines of containing toxic materials or having unintended, damaging effects. He began writing on the subject, despite having no medical background or relevant experience in the topic during his years as an environmental lawyer. This notably culminated in a 2005 article he wrote called “Deadly Immunity,” which appeared in both Rolling Stone and Salon, alleging that the government had conspired to cover up a connection between thimerosal (a trace element no longer contained in vaccines) and childhood neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism. Doctors and scientists quickly pointed out that the piece was riddled with errors, leading to Salon issuing no fewer than five corrections, before eventually retracting the piece entirely years later. As the publication’s editor-in-chief at the time, Joan Walsh, later put it: “We were besieged by scientists and advocates showing how Kennedy had misunderstood, incorrectly cited, and perhaps even falsified data … It was the worst mistake of my career. I probably should have been fired.”
From that point on, Kennedy’s obsession with the danger presented by vaccines became one of his defining qualities, while he simultaneously rushed to praise alternative treatments for various diseases without applying any of the same rigor he claimed was necessary in the reevaluation of vaccines that had already been tested for half a century. He joined anti-vaccine advocacy group Children’s Health Defense in 2015 and became its chair from 2015-2023, during the period when the group began spending millions on anti-vaccine Facebook advertising in the build-up to the COVID-19 pandemic. He spread anti-vaccine sentiment in Samoa, leading to plunging vaccination rates and a measles outbreak that killed more than 80 people. He became enthusiastically ready to commit himself to literally any health-related conspiracy theory in his vicinity, whether it was coming out against the fluoridation of drinking water, or claiming that 5G cellphone towers might be causing brain cancer. If you’re wondering how far this attitude can go, well, in January of 2024 he claimed that Lyme disease was “highly likely to have been a military weapon” created by the United States. Maybe deer ticks are all a bunch of tiny robots as well?
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— Seth Trueger (@mdaware.org) Mar 24, 2026 at 8:25 PM
This descent into health-based hucksterism is no doubt what first drew Kennedy into an orbit that shared space with Donald Trump’s own devotees, with whom he found common ground in both an openness to conspiracy theories and an interest in “alternative” medicine. Without MAGA, the spin-off concept of “MAHA” could hardly exist, but it’s worth noting that throughout the 2010s Kennedy continued to represent regular people in his capacity as a lawyer against powerful agricultural, chemical and pharmaceutical corporations. Notably, he served as a co-counsel in the case Johnson v. Monsanto Co., wherein a California jury found that use of the commercial weedkiller Roundup had contributed to a man’s non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, ultimately awarding him $78 million. That judgment would set a precedent for waves of litigation against Monsanto, the result of which ended up being owner Bayer agreeing to pay more than $10 billion in order to settle tens of thousands of similar suits. The entire ruling was predicated upon Kennedy proving that the herbicide, based on the active ingredient glyphosate, was toxic, a position that he would ultimately be forced to effectively abandon earlier this year.
This is the thing, when it comes to RFK Jr.–he’s so deeply invested in so many schemes at once, so open to believing seemingly anything, that even his own devotees frequently end up split down the middle on any given one of his pet beliefs, and he historically spent just as much time advocating for his followers as he did feeding them bullshit. Some portions of the MAHA platform, as a result, poll far better than others. The vast majority of Americans, for instance, generally support Kennedy’s desire to remove artificial ingredients and dyes from food, and even elements of his much-publicized, redesigned food pyramid generally fit nutritionist advice, even if they completely fail to do things like define “ultra-processed foods” or offer the slightest bit of guidance on alcohol consumption. But that stuff is broadly popular in a way that his anti-vaccine meddling simply isn’t, which results in the MAHA faithful often being torn in two directions at once.
As for Trump, one might wonder why he would target RFK Jr. as a cabinet-level member of his second administration, beyond payback/cronyism for the fact that Kennedy agreed to suspend his own 2024 presidential campaign and endorse Trump. I ultimately think this comes down on some level to prestige, with Trump loving the novelty of someone with the luxurious “Kennedy” name in a subservient position to himself. That name is a sparkly, famous one, and the notoriously tacky Trump has always been motivated by surrounding himself with sparkly, famed, expensive things. This holds true in pretty much every sector, with Trump always preferring anyone famous or charismatic to anyone who is not, regardless of whether they’re his political allies or enemies. It’s why he’s so chummy with the likes of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani–Trump simply sees a young, popular star in the making and instinctively wants to rub elbows with him like the New York socialite he was raised to be. RFK Jr. was invited into the administration under the same pretense–Trump collecting a “Kennedy” like he would any other piece of memorabilia, even as he demolished the Jackie Kennedy Garden at the White House to make way for his infamous ballroom.
Which brings us to all of the ways the Kennedy has failed spectacularly in the course of the gig, putting himself into the doghouse of both his all-important benefactor and the grassroots MAHA movement that believed in him.
The Many Defeats and Betrayals of RFK Jr.
Since taking office as the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services at the beginning of the second Trump administration, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has applied the same scattershot, “do everything” lack of focus to the department’s myriad health-related responsibilities. He’s attempted, among other things, to prune the government’s recommended childhood vaccination schedule, ban gender-affirming care for minors, overseen the five-year update of the department’s dietary guidelines, and run roughshod through the Centers for Disease Control as if the goal was to make sure as many people were infected by measles as possible. And most everywhere he’s attempted any kind of radical change, RFK Jr. has failed when he ran up against the realities of operating within the sphere of the law. His proudest victory to date, in fact, is probably standing in the background while Trump signed an executive order allowing children the option to drink marginally fattier whole milk in their school lunches, as opposed to the other milk they were drinking the day before. As a corollary, his job duties also now involve having to pretend to unabashedly enjoy the music of Kid Rock. Or in other words, it’s all going really well.
If RFK Jr.’s first year in office was supposed to have a more significant signature moment than that, it would have been in his attempt to completely remake the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, whose 17 existing members he fired en masse upon taking the position, filling the committee entirely with his own hand-picked lackeys, most of whom have absolutely no background in vaccines. Anyone who objected, Kennedy fired, including former CDC director Susan Monarez, who said she was fired “for refusing to approve any changes to vaccine recommendations without first seeing the scientific evidence behind them.” Like many other Trump agencies, they simply haven’t bothered appointing a permanent replacement since, instead rolling with a series of random, “temporary” fill-ins. Against this backdrop of chaos, Kennedy’s handpicked Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices attempted to bypass the CDC entirely and reduce the slate of recommended childhood vaccines from 17 to 11, ludicrously arguing that by telling the public that fewer vaccines were trustworthy, it would increase public trust in vaccines. This would have resulted in children no longer receiving vaccines for serious illnesses such as hepatitis B and measles. But a judge stepped in just two weeks ago to completely reverse everything the committee has done over the course of the last year, observing that the changes they had made had seemingly been “arbitrary and capricious,” and not based on science. This effectively restored the preexisting vaccine schedule recommendation, meaning that on this front RFK Jr. has achieved precisely zero over the course of the last 15 months.
When Susan Monarez was fired as #CDC director, the administration knew it has 210 days to nominate a replacement. Today is Day 210 & no nominee. Finding someone who can gain Senate approval & Sec Kennedy’s approval may be proving to be challenging. www.statnews.com/2026/03/25/c…
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— Helen Branswell 🇨🇦 (@helenbranswell.bsky.social) Mar 25, 2026 at 5:36 PM
More or less the same story has played out when it comes to gender-transition care for minors, which Kennedy attempted to declare uniformly “do not meet professionally recognized standards” as a backdoor attempt to ban such procedures. This month, a federal judge in Oregon ruled that RFK Jr. had again overstepped any kind of legal authority he possesses here, giving relief to hospitals and doctors that choose to provide such treatments in states where they are legal. Kenendy’s HHS had been threatening to investigate any institute that prescribed gender-transition medication for minors, with the threat that it would strip them of being able to receive any kind of federal Medicare or Medicaid payments. So on this front of the culture war, Kennedy has also seemingly achieved zilch.
Then there’s Kennedy’s wider war with the Centers for Disease Control itself, which he’s referred to in the past as “the most corrupt agency at HHS and maybe the government,” which sounds like exactly the sort of thing you’d want the director of your parent department to say. In the early days of the second Trump administration, he simply stood back and allowed Elon Musk’s infantile DOGE employees to wantonly hack at various jobs within the CDC, which has been estimated to have lost nearly 20% of its overall staff since January of last year. Daniel Jernigan, a former CDC center director, observed that “I’ve never seen an agency that is responsible for the health of 340 million Americans be so willy-nilly.” The CDC staff that remains, meanwhile, tell anyone who will listen that the CDC has since been rendered leaderless, as the aforementioned, fired director Susan Monarez testified to the Senate that RFK Jr. was pushing public health toward a “very dangerous place.”
That dangerous place has included, for one, the highest number of measles cases since 1991, and the first death of a child from measles in the United States in more than 20 years. The 2026 pace for the disease is currently on pace to blow by next year’s numbers and establish a new modern record since the disease was declared eliminated from the U.S. in 2000. And despite its resurgence, RFK Jr. has refused throughout to explicitly recommend the extremely effective measles vaccine without backtracking and reservations, despite it having been continuously tested in the United States for more than 60 years at this point. Instead, during the initial outbreak in Texas that killed two children and led to the still-ongoing outbreaks around the country, Kennedy praised a variety of unrelated treatments with no proven efficacy for treating measles, rather than attempting to persuade parents to protect their children from getting sick in the first place. As Demetre C. Daskalakis, the former director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, put it in a damning statement to the New York Times:
Even as the outbreak grew, RFK was still just praising the doctors who were giving snake-oil treatments like budesonide, a corticosteroid, and clarithromycin, an antibiotic, to kids with measles and saying how they saved hundreds of lives, which was absolute garbage. We were asked to add those treatments to the measles guidelines. We managed to mitigate that by including the words on the guidelines but saying that none of these were proven. Giving people the wrong medicines delayed lots of care for lots of kids.
There’s little doubt that the subsequent attention that has been given to the resurgence of measles has decreased Kennedy’s standing in the eyes of the Trump administration, as have hastily announced and then retracted incidents such as when HHS announced in January that it would be arbitrarily cutting more than $2 billion from addiction and mental health program funding, only to completely reverse course on that decision within 24 hours, presumably after word came down from on high that the optics looked pretty bad. Even Kennedy’s MAHA faithful could increasingly see at this point that the convictions of the movement’s leader had a tendency to disappear as soon as his benefactor, Trump, voiced any kind of displeasure.
This dynamic, which was hinted at throughout 2025, has truly exploded into the public view in a pathetic display throughout 2026 to date. Most notably, Donald Trump clearly did not care in the slightest about how awkward the position would be that he was putting RFK Jr. in when Trump signed an executive order boosting and guaranteeing the production of the herbicide glyphosate, claiming that it was necessary for “national security.” That would be the same glyphosate found in the weedkiller Roundup, against which RFK Jr. litigated and won billions in damages for his clients, whose cancer he indeed blamed on glyphosate. Cue shameless corporate shill Trump, who via this executive order got into bed with the Big Poison manufacturers at Bayer-Monsanto, likely shielding them in the process from any future litigation. Kennedy, meanwhile, had spent the past decade-plus railing against glyphosate-based herbicides, and while running for President himself in 2024 had vowed to ban them from commercial farming. So naturally he publicly disagreed with Donald Trump about that executive order, right? No, of course he didn’t–Kennedy instead put out a statement, “drafted with help from the White House,” (cringe) saying that he supported Trump’s order because “we must safeguard America’s national security first.” They literally got him to flip and support the exact same substance he had spent a decade fighting against as a lawyer.
To anyone who’s been paying attention–especially Kennedy’s formerly enthusiastic MAHA supporters–it’s just been a procession of similar headlines ever since. The Trump administration embraces some kind of environmentally devastating or poisonous thing; something critically central to Kennedy’s own past MAHA evangelism, and he proceeds to ignore it entirely if he can get away with doing so, or actively praise it if he can’t. You won’t hear a peep from RFK Jr., for instance, when Lee Zeldin’s EPA announces that it’s weakening regulations on the emission of toxic ethylene oxide gas, a known carcinogen that in 2016 was found to be 60 times more toxic to children than previously believed.
In fact, Kennedy didn’t even speak up in any way when the same Trump EPA relaxed pollution limits on how much toxic mercury coal power plants were allowed to belch into the atmosphere, despite mercury contamination being one of Kennedy’s longest and dearest pet causes, and something he claims to have literally suffered from himself during a period when he was engaging in one of his classic (in this case all-fish) fad diets. Back in 2017, during the first Trump administration–before Trump was literally his employer–RFK Jr. railed against the administration’s desire to repeal wastewater limits, arguing then that it would lead to more mercury-contaminated fish entering the human food chain. He referred again to those efforts during his own confirmation hearings, touting his experience at fighting the release of toxic chemicals and saying of mercury: “The same chemicals that kill fish make people sick.” Now, however, Kennedy has a boss to answer to. And suddenly he doesn’t give a shit about mercury.
“If he really does care about the issues he used to care about when he was working at the Waterkeeper, you would think he would say something,” said Abel Russ of the Environmental Integrity Project. “EPA is doing a lot of things that are an anathema to his stated life’s mission.”
The sheer cowardice of RFK Jr. to confront Trump on any issue seemingly extends all the way to things so seemingly inconsequential as the persistent bickering over the debate on ending twice-yearly clock changes in the United States by embracing either permanent standard time or permanent daylight saving time. Would it shock you to find out that the entire MAHA movement supports a move to permanent standard time, because it’s generally associated with better health outcomes and has the support of more doctors and medical professionals? Donald Trump, however, has publicly said that he supports permanent daylight saving time instead, a choice that is entirely possible simply because he’s an avid golfer. Regardless, even on an issue as tiny as this one, the fact that his platform’s unofficial viewpoint is the opposite of Trump’s viewpoint has meant that despite hoards of MAHA devotees begging and pleading with him to broach the issue, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has gone out of his way to stay as far away from it as he possibly can, refusing to publicly take a side. That’s how much of a milquetoast, defeated former idealist we’re dealing with here: A man who doesn’t even have the guts to take a public position on daylight saving time. That’s how defanged he is. And even MAHA can see it.
If some RFK Jr. intern at HHS happens to be reading this, then I invite you to relay the above insults to your boss, and I hereby challenge him to prove me wrong by taking a stand and publicly disagreeing with Donald Trump about literally any of the stuff above. Perhaps he could recall the two decades he spent fighting against industrial pollution spilling into the Hudson River, and elect to say something about the Trump EPA’s far worse abuses? Maybe he could recall the billions of dollars he extracted out of Monsanto-Bayer, before proclaiming their weedkiller more important than American health? Maybe he could just tell people to get the fucking measles vaccine, rather than waiting until their children are seriously ill and attempting to treat that illness with supplements and “alternative” medicine?
Maybe he could remember what it felt like to have a spine, before Donald Trump removed it and had it bronzed?
