Top Trump Adviser Wants to Cause a Plague

Vaccine science doesn’t appear to have a bright future in a potential second Trump administration.

Speaking with CNN on Wednesday night, Trump transition co-chair Howard Lutnick repeatedly rejected the idea that vaccines are safe and suggested that there could be a future where the lifesaving medical tool is restricted from the market.

During one particularly heated moment with host Kaitlan Collins, Lutnick insisted that vaccines are “not proven” and shared that he had a more than two-hour conversation with notorious vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the issue. Lutnick claimed that Kennedy—who has admitted that his brain has been eaten by worms and who posed a slashed-up dead bear cub in Central Park as a weird practical joke—would like to strip even long-standing vaccines from the market.

That isn’t just an empty threat from a failed presidential candidate: On Monday, Kennedy claimed that Donald Trump had promised him “control” of several federal agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services. That level of control implies a Cabinet position, which would be difficult to obtain for Kennedy, considering that it would require Senate confirmation. But Lutnick outright rejected the notion that the renowned conspiracy theorist would be handed such a position if Trump returned to power.

“What he explained was, when he was born, we had three vaccines,” Lutnick recalled about his conversation with the 70-year-old wannabe politician, before going on to claim that autism rates at the time were “one in 10,000” and falsely insisting that newborns today are given 76 vaccines.

But Kennedy’s—and by extension, Lutnick’s—flagrant vaccine claims are plainly false. Dozens of vaccines had been invented by 1954, when Kennedy was born, preventing the societal spread of horrific illnesses such as bubonic plague, lockjaw, and tuberculosis. Autism itself has been routinely misdiagnosed and miscategorized since it was first described by Eugen Bleuler as part of a larger, outdated understanding of schizophrenia in 1911. It was later reclassified as a spectrum in 1994 in the DSM-IV, vastly widening the diagnosis.

And as for Lutnick’s assertion that babies receive countless vaccines at birth: Doctors recommend immunization for just a handful of diseases at that young age. Babies inherit some antibodies from their mothers during pregnancy from the vaccines that adults receive over the course of their own lives, but those antibodies begin to wear off about a year into the child’s life, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, which recommends that children begin their vaccinations for illnesses including polio, diphtheria, the flu, and ​​hepatitis B before they’re a year old.

Still, Lutnick wasn’t against just handing over American’s private health information to such an ungrounded figure.

“Let’s give him the data,” Lutnick told Collins. “I think it would be pretty cool to give him the data … he just wants data and to prove things are wrong.”

“He had to apologize for tying vaccine questions to what happened in Germany during the Holocaust,” Collins responded.

Vaccines have proven to be one of the greatest accomplishments of modern medicine. The jabs are so effective at preventing illness that they have practically eradicated some of the worst diseases—from rabies to polio and smallpox—from our collective culture, a fact that has possibly fooled some into believing that the viruses and their complications aren’t a significant threat for the average, health-conscious individual.

House Speaker Mike Johnson promised to take away your health care. Now he’s trying to pretend that he didn’t say just that.

“They took a clip out of context and said that I said we were promising to repeal Obamacare,” Johnson told Fox Business on Thursday morning. “That’s just not what I said, it’s actually the opposite of that.”

But on Monday, Johnson shared his message clearly to a crowd in Pennsylvania: “No Obamacare.”

Johnson was speaking about health care reform on the campaign trail on behalf of Donald Trump. The House speaker promised that if Trump is elected, the Republicans will undertake a “massive reform” of the Affordable Care Act in their first 100 days.

“No Obamacare?” asked a voter. Johnson confirmed the request, laughing, and followed up by declaring that “the ACA is so deeply ingrained, we need massive reform to make this work, and we’ve got a lot of ideas on how to do that.

“We want to take a blowtorch to the regulatory state,” Johnson said, threatening to strip health care for nearly 50 million Americans currently covered by the ACA and suggesting that “health care is just one of [the] sectors” that needs major cuts, echoing Trump’s and Elon Musk’s calls to slash $2 trillion from the government’s budget—no matter the impact on everyday Americans.

Now Johnson is accusing Democrats of putting words in his mouth. “They’re twisting our words,” he told Fox on Thursday.

Trump famously said he only had “concepts of a plan” when it came to replacing Obamacare. But even those concepts are frightening: His running mate, JD Vance, has said the current plan coming out of a potential second Republican administration would allow health insurance companies to charge more for preexisting conditions.

“Speaker Mike Johnson is making it clear—if Donald Trump wins, he and his Project 2025 allies in Congress will make sure there is ‘no Obamacare,’” a spokeswoman for Kamala Harris’s campaign told The New York Times. “That means higher health care costs for millions of families and ripping away protections from Americans with preexisting conditions like diabetes, asthma, or cancer.”

Former President Donald Trump took his promise to protect women to a creepy new level Wednesday evening, claiming he’d do so “whether the women like it or not.”

Wearing an orange garbage collector vest from a failed photo-op earlier in the day, Trump, speaking at a campaign rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, complained about his advisers telling him to stop saying he would “protect women.”

“They said, ‘We think it’s very inappropriate for you to say. I said, ‘Why? I’m president.’ I want to protect the women of our country.... Well, I’m gonna do it whether the women like it or not. I’m gonna protect them. I’m gonna protect them from migrants coming in, I’m gonna protect them from foreign countries that want to hit us with missiles and lots of other things.” The crowd erupted with cheers.

“Are there any women who want to be protected by the president?”

The backlash has been swift. “Donald Trump thinks he should get to make decisions about what you do with your body. Whether you like it or not,” Vice President Kamala Harris tweeted. “Alex, I’ll take things rapists say for $300,” said Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts. Others pointed out that Trump was accused of sexual assault by yet another woman just last week.

These words ring hollow from a man with more than 20 sexual assault allegations. They also contradict all of his positions on women and their agency. Trump boasts about overturning Roe, is OK with criminalizing doctors, and wants to leave abortion completely up to the states, making large swaths of the country much more dangerous for women who need access to abortion to stay alive. What kind of protection is that?

Republican Maryland Senate candidate Larry Hogan, who has publicly rejected an endorsement from Donald Trump, actually bragged about receiving one in a private fundraiser.

CNN obtained video from a private donor call in which Hogan, a former two-term governor of Maryland, responded to a question from one donor about how, publicly, it appears that the Senate candidate and Trump “hate each other.” Hogan interrupted the donor and seemed to happily tout the former president’s endorsement.

“Donald Trump actually endorsed me,” Hogan said. “Donald Trump actually endorsed me.”

The statement goes against Hogan’s public criticisms of Trump going back to his time as governor of Maryland. Last month, Hogan said that he wouldn’t vote for Trump for president, even after Trump endorsed the former governor’s Senate candidacy in July. This is likely due to Hogan’s popularity in the solidly Democratic state, which gives Republicans a chance to pick up a Senate seat that would have been out of reach with a less moderate Republican.

As governor of Maryland, Hogan repeatedly criticized Trump and didn’t vote for him in the last two presidential elections, instead writing in his late father, former Representative Lawrence Hogan, in 2016 and deceased former President Ronald Reagan in 2020. But this hasn’t helped Hogan enough, as the latest polls in Maryland’s Senate race show the former governor trailing Democrat Angela Alsobrooks by 10 points.

Maryland’s Senate race is a must-win for the Democrats and the chance at a steal for the Republicans, and has become the fourth-most-expensive Senate race in the country, with a total of $105 million spent. Hogan might like to pretend that he has a shot at the Senate because Maryland voters like him personally, but it’s actually because Trump and his supporters are backing the former governor.

Elon Musk’s canvassing operation for Donald Trump is going even worse than expected. 

Musk’s America PAC already made headlines this month for its failure of a door-knocking campaign. But new reporting by Wired shows the reality for workers on the ground is even darker than previously thought. 

In Michigan, paid canvassers hired by America PAC were mistreated and deceived as part of the Republicans’ get out the vote efforts. The workers were given unrealistically high expectations under poor working conditions, and when they didn’t meet goals, they were threatened financially.  

Musk’s PAC contracted with Blitz Canvassing to knock doors in swing states such as Michigan, and it has been a total disaster. Mostly Black employees were shuttled around in a U-Haul van with no seating or seatbelts. “We were all told our transportation would be handled and we’d be in rental cars. It turned out to be U-Haul vans, and I felt embarrassed and played,” said one worker, speaking anonymously. 

One paid canvasser even alleges that they had no idea they would be canvassing to elect Trump or for Musk’s campaign apparatus. “After I signed over an NDA, is when I found out we are for Republicans and with Trump,” said the anonymous employee, who said they only heard Musk’s name later in passing. 

On the doors, workers were “expected to maintain a 17-22% engagement rate during the campaign.” For anyone who has canvassed before, this rate is ridiculous and also not in the door knocker’s control—it’s dependent on how many people are home and choose to open their front door. Workers were told if they didn’t meet this standard and knock on more than 1,000 doors in a week, they’d be on the hook for paying for their motel rooms. 

“What’s gonna happen is, they’re gonna stop paying for these rooms,” a manager threatened, according to a recording obtained by Wired. “And then you’re gonna end up having to pay for it yourself. You can’t do that with no money.” 

Musk’s mistreatment of workers is not a bug, it’s a feature. One can see it play out in his threats against organizing workers and his companies’ violations of labor laws. But in case this terrifying report doesn’t dissuade you, America PAC is still hiring canvassers.