With Robert F. Kennedy Jr. poised to develop into the nation’s strongest public well being official, Contained in the Hive is again and going deep on the chief of the MAHA motion. Host and Self-importance Truthful editor in chief Radhika Jones, government editor Claire Howorth, and Hive editor Michael Calderone chart Kennedy’s path from Camelot to the halls of Congress, the place he made no bones about finishing up Donald Trump’s radical agenda. May this Democratic scion, in some unspecified time in the future, develop into the true MAGA inheritor?
Earlier than answering such a loaded query, Jones winds again the clock to assist us perceive simply how America received right here: In his earlier years, many years earlier than COVID, Kennedy was a number one fixture of the anti-vax motion. And, as a as soon as distinguished member of Democratic royalty, he’d lengthy sought to construct a repute for himself as an environmentalist and a public well being crusader. That, nonetheless, has all the time been difficult by his household’s vulnerability to scandal and tragedy, Jones notes. “It’s been extra thanalmost 25 years since John F. Kennedy Jr., his spouse, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, and her sister died in a small aircraft crash,” she says. “RFK Jr. was 9 when his uncle was assassinated and 14 when his dad was killed,” she says. “I imply, it’s a horrible factor to lose your uncle, lose your father, but additionally then to have the eye of the nation and the world on you…that was the state of affairs during which he grew up.”
On the identical time, Calderone argues, Kennedy has ridden his household’s mythos to the highest. He “brings that entire cultural cachet of being a Kennedy whereas additionally amassing his personal constituency round his views, which I wish to say are fringe or conspiratorial in loads of methods. I feel they nonetheless are, however he’s any person who has now risen to the place of probably operating a $1.8 trillion division of the US authorities, which might give him the ability over the FDA, the NIH, the CDC. It’s an unimaginable place, and it’s one which he would have the ability [to use] to doubtlessly put a few of these conspiratorial views into motion.”
As of now, little appears to face in the way in which of Kennedy doing simply that. The HHS nominee was rubber-stamped this week by the Senate Finance Committee, and is more likely to clear a full Senate vote, with Republicans within the majority. Evidently, the absence of GOP resistance has been stark.
What might have helped Kennedy sail by means of the method, Howorth argues, is that he’s a wolf in sheep’s clothes. “Now we have the listing of his coverage right here. And you must admit, it’s actually not objectionable-sounding,” she observes: “‘Degree the taking part in subject for People internationally on drug prices. Revisit pesticide and chemical-use requirements. Difficulty new presidential health requirements.’ That’s one thing Michelle Obama did…. These are actual, actual issues. , taking conflicts of curiosity out…. So I discover it laborious to parse his said coverage with what we will count on, which is loads of shit-stirring.”
Now, as we watch Kennedy run amok over the following 4 years on every part from abortion to infectious-disease coverage, one large query will stay: what he’ll do after Trump. And Jones, for one, has a concept: “I feel [Kennedy] is essentially the most logical inheritor to Trump proper now. I do. I feel he’s received identify recognition, he’s received fame, he’s received a constituency. He’s received a constituency not in contrast to Trump’s new one—that cuts throughout previously fairly robust ideological limitations and he has the capability to develop into extra seen and develop that constituency and he has his identify.”
