Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is too out of touch with reality to serve in Trump’s cabinet | Opinion
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Republican President Donald Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Health and Human Services, has said that he thinks the 2004 presidential election was stolen by Republicans and that purveyors of raw ribeye are a greater threat to America than Osama bin Laden.
He’s repudiated his support for gun control, saying that he‘s now a “constitutional absolutist.” That certainly wasn’t true when he previously argued that people who disagree with him on climate policy (conservative Republicans and oil executives alike) belong in prison. So much for the First Amendment. And it doesn’t explain why he called the National Rifle Association “a terrorist organization.”
In short, the guy’s an extremist. Recently he’s switched from being a respectfully treated loony bin Democrat to being a respectfully treated basket-case Republican, but what hasn’t changed is his embrace of all kinds of dubious theories that have little consonance with the reality most Americans live in.
And that’s just on the stuff that doesn’t have much to do with his prospective new job. A Senate committee voted along party lines Tuesday to send his nomination to the full chamber.
RFK, Jr. has long fought abortion restrictions even in the ninth month of pregnancy, a position that puts him wildly out of touch with most Americans. And, I might add, more than a little out of touch with the Republicans who voted to make Donald Trump president.
A man with such a broken ethical compass should not be within a mile of critical decisions about our healthcare, which he will oversee through Medicaid, Medicare, the Centers for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration, which all fall under the HHS department Kennedy will head.
And when I say that his ethical compass is broken, it is not just on basic reality and policy issues where he is out of touch, but in how he intends to make himself rich. He’s an equity partner in a class-action lawsuit against Gardasil, the miraculous vaccine that protects people against HPV – the most common sexually transmitted disease among women – and the cancers it can cause.
While Merck & Co. save thousands of lives – maybe millions – through the pioneering drug work it invests in and profits from, Kennedy invests and intends to profit from suing them in hopes of a billion-dollar payday to compensate the relative handful of people who claim major side effects from the vaccine, despite little or no evidence for the problems in 160 safety studies.
Kennedy is an equity partner in the lawsuit – he gets a 10 percent share of the lawyers’ fees – in the same way you can be an investor in Merck or other life-saving drug companies. It is a sickening perversion of capitalism that class-action lawsuits have become a multi-billion dollar industry with shareholders and start-up moguls in the same way as Silicon Valley.
Once Kennedy gets into the government as the head of HHS and overseer of the FDA, he will be in a position to make decisions that effect the lawsuit and from which he could profit.
In an effort to assuage concerns about the arrangement, Kennedy has offered to sign over ownership of the investment in destroying a life-saving drug to his son, a California lawyer for a firm that is representing clients in the suit. So now Kennedy will be in a position to make decisions from which he himself will get nothing, but from which his family stands to make tens of millions of dollars or more. That’s not much better.
It is bad enough that the fringes of the GOP have taken over the conservative political party, but now Donald Trump and dozens of Republicans in the Senate want to put refugee extremists from the far left of the Democratic Party in charge of vital parts of our government.
There’s much to admire about Kennedy. For one thing, I don’t know whether I’d have the grit to overcome a decade-long heroin addiction. But Kennedy has been too wrong for too long on too many things to take a position in Trump’s cabinet.
I hope the handful of Republican Senators who could derail this fiasco have the guts to say no.
This story was originally published February 4, 2025 at 5:08 AM.
