Trump Officially Gives RFK Jr. Chance to Destroy Country’s Health

Donald Trump tapped Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services on Thursday, effectively handing the reins of the nation’s health policies to a renowned conspiracy theorist and vaccine skeptic who has admitted to having brain-eating worms in his head.

“I am thrilled to announce Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as The United States Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS),” Trump announced on X. “For too long, Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation.”

Kennedy’s nomination was always on the horizon, despite the insistence of Trump’s transition co-chair that it would not be the case.

In his first speech after being declared the winner of the 2024 election, Trump promised that Kennedy would take on a role in his second administration that would “help make America healthy again.”

“He’s a great guy, he really means it, he wants to do some things and we’re going to let him go to it,” Trump said.

During an interview with NBC News’s Dasha Burns earlier this month, Trump refused to promise that he wouldn’t ban vaccines, instead outlining his intentions to talk to Kennedy and “talk to other people” and make a decision. “He’s a very talented guy and has strong views,” Trump said of Kennedy.

During the same interview, Trump signaled that he would be open to RFK Jr.’s recommendation to remove fluoride from all public water systems—a 1945 public health decision that has reduced cavities and tooth decay in adults and children by as much as 25 percent, according to the American Dental Association.

The choice will likely draw the ire of medical professionals across the nation, as Kennedy reportedly has plans to strip even long-standing vaccines from the market.

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 our collective culture, from rabies to polio and smallpox, 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.

This story has been updated.

Senate leadership seems all mixed up about giving Donald Trump the power to straight-up bypass Congress and appoint Matt Gaetz as his attorney general.

Ahead of Trump’s recent Cabinet picks (a crew of loyalists so unqualified it feels more like trolling than anything else), the president-elect laid out his shady plan to get them appointed without Senate approval.

“Any Republican Senator seeking the coveted LEADERSHIP position in the United States Senate must agree to Recess Appointments (in the Senate!), without which we will not be able to get people confirmed in a timely manner,” Trump wrote Sunday on X.

Unlike typical official appointments, recess appointments don’t require a Senate vote, and allow the president to unilaterally decide who will fill a role. The appointment wouldn’t be permanent; it might only last until the end of that session, which is no more than two years. At the end of that time, the president could just renominate their pick and appoint them again.

This would be particularly useful in the case of Gaetz, an antagonistic MAGA acolyte currently under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for alleged sexual misconduct, among a slate of other charges.

CNN congressional correspondent Manu Raju asked several top Republicans whether they actually supported Trump’s request for recess appointments.

Florida Senator Rick Scott, a staunch Trump ally, said that he supported Trump’s request. “Well I believe in recess appointments, so I was very clear,” said Scott. “And I think John Cornyn and John Thune are committed to recess appointments.”

That would have been all well and good if Scott had won his bid to become the Senate majority leader earlier this week. But he didn’t, Thune did. And it’s not clear that Thune or Cornyn agree with Scott at all.

“Well that’s another whole issue; obviously I don’t think we should be circumventing the Senate’s responsibilities, but I think it’s premature to be talking about recess appointments right now,” Cornyn replied, when asked about possibly allowing recess appointments.

Scott claimed that he, Thune, and Cornyn had agreed on recess appointments ahead of the Senate GOP election Tuesday. Cornyn said that no such discussion had taken place.

Cornyn added that “there should not be any limitation” on the Senate’s investigation into Gaetz. Separately, he told ABC’s Rachel Scott that he “absolutely” wanted to see the Ethics report on Gaetz.

As for Thune, he claimed that whether he would allow Trump to make recess appointments hadn’t even crossed his mind.

“I haven’t given that any thought yet,” Thune added. “I just know that the nomination isn’t formalized yet, but when it is, we’ll process it in the way we typically do and provide our advise and consent.”

On Wednesday, Thune signaled that he hoped to put nominees through standard confirmation hearings. “I’m willing to grind through it and do it the old-fashioned way,” Thune told South Dakota reporters.

Another member of Republican Senate leadership, Oklahoma Senator James Lankford, who became vice chair of the Senate GOP Policy Committee Tuesday, also pushed back on Trump’s request for recess appointments.

“I think the Supreme Court would even step in on those roles,” Lankford said, adding that he wouldn’t favor recess appointments.

Elon Musk is holding open auditions for employment at his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Applicants simply must be willing to work grueling hours for zero compensation. 

DOGE made the announcement Thursday from its official account on X, writing:

We are very grateful to the thousands of Americans who have expressed interest in helping us at DOGE. We don’t need more part-time idea generators. We need super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting. If that’s you, DM this account with your CV. Elon & Vivek will review the top 1% of applicants.

Musk then quote-tweeted a message regarding the “monumental amount of tedious super-high quality work” that would be required to run the department.   

“Indeed, this will be tedious work, make lots of enemies & compensation is zero,” Musk wrote. “What a great deal!” The billionaire attached a laughing emoji at the end of the tweet. 

Musk is familiar with these kinds of absurd labor demands. He warned Twitter employees to either be “extremely hardcore” or leave when he bought the platform in 2022. He also told them they’d have to work “long hours at high intensity.” Eighty percent of the staff left soon after.

Musk was one of Donald Trump’s most prominent advocates (and donors) on the campaign trail, and he hasn’t left the president-elect’s side since his victory. In return Trump gifted Musk the Department of Governmental Efficiency—or DOGE, a stale reference to an ancient internet meme—along with Vivek Ramaswamy. How the department will operate, and what the jobs there will even look like, remains to be seen. 

Steve Bannon has a vision for the future, and it involves locking up MSNBC’s anchors and their producers for criticizing President-elect Donald Trump.

“You better be worried. You better lawyer up. Some of you young producers, you better call Mom and Dad tonight. ‘Hey Mom and Dad, you know a good lawyer?’ Lawyer up. Lawyer up,” Bannon said on his show, War Room, Wednesday.

The shocking threat came on the heels of news that Donald Trump had tapped Florida Representative Matt Gaetz to be his attorney general (a conveniently timed appointment that has the dual benefit of killing a House Ethics investigation into Gaetz’s alleged misconduct with women and minors). That decision will effectively hand Gaetz the keys to the Justice Department during Trump’s second term—so long as the unsavvy but deferential political operative can ride the wave.

“You try to destroy Trump. You try to imprison Trump. You try to break Trump,” Bannon continued. “He’s not breakable. You couldn’t destroy him. And now he is turned on you. And he’s put a firebrand in charge of main justice—Department of Justice. And you’re going to have to live with it.”

The ex–Breitbart editor then went on to name names, calling out host Ari Melber and MSNBC legal analyst Andrew Weissmann, who was part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.

“I’ve never complained about this,” Bannon said. “Never bitched and moaned about it. Just came with the territory. I understood they feared us. And why do they fear us? Because we were coming to take down the globalists and the deep state!”

Bannon was himself, at one point, at the epicenter of Trump’s universe, serving as the forty-fifth president’s chief White House strategist before the former Apprentice host fired him in 2017 following a series of controversies in which Bannon openly contradicted Trump and began to encroach on the MAGA limelight.

But despite his incredible fall from grace, Bannon has continued to posit his influence in the far-right sphere. In 2023, the political provocateur issued a similar threat, promising to slam MSNBC with “prosecutions and accountability.”

“We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” Bannon said at the time.

Republican Senators Rand Paul and Thom Tillis got into a heated exchange Thursday over aid for hurricane victims in Virginia and North Carolina.

Tillis asked for an aid bill to be passed by unanimous consent during a floor speech, but Paul had other ideas, pushing for an amendment that the relief be paid for with green energy funds and complaining about unrelated funds to Ukraine. In effect, Paul’s amendment would block the aid bill, which drew Tillis’s ire. The North Carolina senator then asked the Kentucky senator to yield his time for questions, setting off an argument.

“Look, our state motto is Esse quam videri,” Tillis, who represents North Carolina, said. “It says to ‘be’ rather than to ‘seem.’ This is a disingenuous offer to amend my bill.”

Tillis suggested that Paul was grandstanding and perhaps planning to use his rant, which attacked the Green New Deal, in a fundraising email. “This bill, if it got amended, has no prayer,” Tillis said. “I came to the Senate to make a difference, not to make a point.

“I assume that Senator Paul knows how to count votes,” Tillis added. “He has to know that he doesn’t have the votes to get this bill done if it’s amended. To be rather than to seem. I’m focused on trying to get North Carolina back on track and not playing a game on the Senate floor.”

Paul stuck to his guns, insisting that the funds weren’t available thanks to the “accumulation of $35 trillion worth of debt,” prompting a response from Tillis that Paul was “playing a game of being disingenuous.” The North Carolina senator noted that the House, which is controlled by Republicans, would find a way to pay for the aid relief and that Paul was “putting a poison pill” that would prevent the bill from passing in the Senate.

Paul used debate over the bill to expound upon a favorite Republican punching bag, the Green New Deal, missing the irony that the environmental plan seeks to reduce the greenhouse emissions that are a major factor in increasingly severe hurricanes. Tillis has a point—people who have suffered because of Hurricane Helene care more about immediate relief than funding technicalities.

It’s only been a week since Republicans had a successful election in which they won the presidency as well as Congress, and they are already having trouble passing a simple aid relief bill for hurricane victims that even had Democratic support. If this is how Congress is going to function when the GOP takes full control next year, we can expect more gridlock and hardly any bills being passed.