Is RFK Jr. Trump’s Achilles’ heel?

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s quest to prove himself President Donald Trump’s most destructive Cabinet member continues apace. 

On Wednesday, the Department of Health and Human Services abruptly announced that “Susan Monarez is no longer director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.” She had been nominated to the key post in March, and actually served in it for less than a month. Shortly after that, Monarez’s lawyers issued a fiery statement asserting that she had neither been fired, nor resigned, and was being targeted by Kennedy for refusing to “rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives,” and help him weaponize “public health for political gain.”

Shortly after that, the White House announced that Monarez had officially been relieved of her duties. Several other top CDC officials – including its chief medical officer – subsequently resigned in protest.

The proximate cause of the Kennedy-Monarez showdown was reportedly the latter’s refusal to support the former’s push to rescind approvals for coronavirus vaccines. According to The Washington Post, Kennedy and his team grilled the short-lived director on Monday over her alignment – or lack thereof – with his effort “to change vaccine policy.”

That is, of course, quite the euphemism. Kennedy has spent decades advancing a novel’s worth of anti-vaccine conspiracy theories. The founder and former leader of “Children’s Health Defense,” the organization behind the instant classic Vaxxed III: Authorized to Kill, Kennedy once boasted that, “I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, ‘Better not get them vaccinated.’”

Samoan authorities blame him for a 2019 measles outbreak that claimed the lives of more than 80 people. As the families of the victims picked up the pieces, Kennedy suggested that a “defective vaccine” may have been to blame.

To win a fraught confirmation fight earlier this year, Kennedy adopted a simple, time-honored strategy: he lied.

“All of my kids are vaccinated, I’ve written many books on vaccines, my first book in 2014, the first line of it is ‘I am not anti-vaccine’ and the last line is ‘I am not anti-vaccine,’” he insisted at the outset of his hearing before the Senate Finance Committee. The missing context is that he had said he would “do anything” and “pay anything” to go back in time and change his own kids’ vaccination status. Asked about his incendiary past claims about the CDC, he denied having ever compared the agency’s actions to “Nazi death camps” and the Catholic Church’s “pedophile scandal.” It’s public record that he did exactly that.

The Kennedy now running the federal government’s largest Cabinet department has – surprise, surprise – better resembled the kook who walked into his confirmation hearing rather than the moderate victim of a smear campaign he portrayed himself as during it. Despite the empty promise to Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA), a medical doctor and stalwart vaccine advocate, during the confirmation process, Kennedy has worked tirelessly to undermine public trust in vaccines during his short tenure at the top of HHS. In June, he fired every member of the federal Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, decrying the federal panel as a “rubber stamp” for vaccines, and announced that the administration would deny Gavi, an international vaccine agency, funding. Then, earlier this month, Kennedy announced that the second Trump administration would either cancel or alter all of its existing mRNA vaccine projects. The first Trump administration, of course, championed Operation Warp Speed, the expedited research and approval process that led to the development of several safe and effective coronavirus vaccines in a matter of only a few months. Trump himself hailed that effort as “one of the greatest achievements ever” only a few days ago.

By now, Kennedy’s playbook is no mystery. Surely, if not so slowly, Kennedy is purging HHS of those who would forthrightly push back on his anti-vaccine agenda. He complains of rubber stamps for vaccines, but demands a rubber stamp for his every effort to undermine them.

The president and his allies ought to be alarmed. While Trump has cornered the Democrats on any number of issues – crime, gender ideology, immigration, etc. – by presenting himself as the moderate alternative to a party with ideas so extreme that they’re unrecognizable to most Americans, Kennedy’s actions put his boss in danger of being on the opposite end of this equation.

Trump lost the 2020 presidential election in large part because of the perception that he was not taking the Covid-19 pandemic seriously enough. Imagine the fallout if any significant number of American children die in an outbreak that could be reasonably attributed to Kennedy’s vaccine skepticism. Or the pandemonium that would ensue if Kennedy greeted another pandemic with inaction and a refusal to pursue a vaccine. Besides costing some untold number of lives, it would utterly destroy Trump’s presidency – and his legacy.

Kennedy’s appointment was a reward for his endorsement of the president last year. Trump rewards loyalty above all else, and views Kennedy as a dependable ally. But if he must suffer the embarrassment that is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on his team, he must not allow him free rein to continue to wreak havoc. To do so is to court a disaster so great as to dwarf every other controversy, mistake, and scandal Trump has survived to date.