Donald Trump isn't the first US president to serve 2 non consecutive terms (Grover Cleveland did too). He is, however, the first president to be reelected after being found guilty of 34 felonies, not to mention his being impeached twice in his first term. That first term was a dumpster fire of chaos and corruption, topped by his utter mismanagement of the pandemic, which, according to some studies, lead to thousands of unnecessary deaths in this country. But tens of millions of Americans seem to have forgotten all of that and just remember that prices were lower when he was president, so here we are.
And any hopes that a second Trump term would be less insane than the first were quickly dashed when he started naming his intended cabinet members. First, former Senator Marco Rubio was named for Secretary of State, which, under the circumstances, wasn't such a bad choice. But then came the crazy trifecta: Pete Hegseth for Defense Secretary, Matt Gaetz for Attorney General and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Right off the bat it should be noted that each of these men has a history of alleged sexual misconduct: Hegseth made a payment on a sexual assault charge that he claims was actually consensual, Kennedy has faced multiple allegations of sexual assault, and Gaetz famously was investigated for taking illegal drugs with and having sex with a minor, although he was never formally charged. Once upon a time, these kind of allegations would cast a serious shadow over a nomination, but since the country just reelected a man with 28 allegations of sexual assault (including an adjudicated rape charge), things have clearly changed on that score. Just ask Justice Kavanaugh.
But after even dismissing those allegations (even though we shouldn't!), none of these men are qualified to run the agencies that Trump wants them to: Hegseth is a combat veteran and TV personality who's never run anything on the scale of the largest military in the world. Gaetz does have a law degree, but little experience. And Kennedy is a lawyer with no scientific training.
Of the three, the one that scares me the most is Kennedy because of his anti-vaccine views, and the power he would have if he were confirmed. (He would run a department with over 80,000 employees and a three trillion dollar budget). Although he publicly goes back and forth on the subject of vaccines, depending on who he's talking to, (he recently told a podcaster that “there’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective.” and then later tried to walk that back), it's clear that he is skeptical of their safety. He has even chaired an anti vaccine organization, deceptively titled The Children's Health Defense. All this despite the fact that there has never been any proof of a link between vaccines and autism as he and other anti-vaccine people have claimed. (A 2014 meta study by the University of Sydney that looked at 10 different studies covering over one million children concluded that there was no such link).
Vaccines should be celebrated as one of the great scientific advancements of the 20th century, with terrible conditions like polio and diphtheria being eliminated. But, mainly because in 1998 the medical journal The Lancet published an article by surgeon Andrew Wakefield that claimed that there was a link between vaccines and autism, the lie has spread on the internet. Even though The Lancet retracted the story and Wakefield's questionable research methods and personal financial interest in lawsuits against vaccine companies were exposed, the damage was done. Since then Wakefield has continued to lie about his findings while celebrities like Jenny McCarthy and social media have kept the lie going. And the pandemic, and the fact that many conservatives refused the Covid vaccine, even when it came from the Trump administration, only furthered the anti vac movement in this country.
Kennedy's personal history on this issue is downright despicable: in 2019 in Samoa, he took a picture with local anti vaccine activist Taylor Winterstein. The Children's Health Defense and Winterstein both blamed the 2018 death of two Samoan infants on vaccines, even though it was later discovered that were wrongfully given muscle relaxant injections along with the vaccines. These false allegations lead to a measles outbreak in Samoa that killed over 70 people. So, putting it simply, Kennedy has blood on his hands.
And it gets worse, during the pandemic he came out against Covid vaccines and absurdly claimed in 2023 that the virus was "targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. the people who are the most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese ... we don't know whether it's deliberately targeted or not." There is, of course, no scientific evidence that the virus was "targeted". Clearly he was buying into the right wing media racist mindset of blaming China for the virus, which lead to an increase of hate crimes against Asian people in this country. And he threw in some anti semitism for good measure. In any normal time, this single offensive, stupid quote would kill any nominee for Health Secretary, but we haven't lived in normal times in this country since Trump first announced his candidacy back in 2016.
As for Trump's own views on vaccines, he's always seemed anti vac adjacent, but, because he's a fool who just repeats whatever he's just heard, and he's been listening to Kennedy a lot lately, he appears to have gone full on anti-vax himself. Add that to his bigotry, sexism, dishonesty and corruption and you can see why I'm not excited about the next four years.
No comments:
Post a Comment