What’s a sociopathic narcissist to do? Poor Trump: In the before times, he rightfully bragged about getting the Covid vaccine up and running at “warp speed.” He hadn’t spent much time with beakers and Petrie dishes, and he benefited from the prior twenty years during which the groundwork for mRNA vaccine development reached its zenith right on time. Nevertheless, initial fatuity aside (disbanding President Obama’s pandemic preparedness team, it’ll be over in weeks, bleach, light, etc.), he deserves credit for that.
So, what to do when the craziest of his crazy patronage hires claims those vaccines were ineffective, deadly, and should be banned, replaces vaccine experts with quacks, and defunds further research? Does he defend RFK, Jr.? Does he fire the guy he touted before, saying he’d let him “go wild” at HHS? It’s a horned dilemma. He’d rather be grifting.
Junior Bobby Kennedy is nuts. Has been for a long time, well before Trump put him in position to kill Americans; well before every Republican senator except one, including four medical doctors, voted to confirm him. The exception? Mitch McConnell, the hypocrite’s hypocrite most responsible for keeping Trump in office.
Bobby Junior Kennedy claims he can tell which children are “overburdened with mitochondrial challenges” (not a thing) just by looking at them. He quotes medical research reports that don’t exist, and misquotes and misunderstands those that do. He couldn’t tell properly-run science research from the roadkill in the trunk of his car. There’s a worm in his brain that died after eating part of it, possibly killed by the heroin that once poisoned his bloodstream.
Bobby spreads misinformation like a farmer spreads manure, but, unlike farmers’, his manure ends, rather than stimulates life.
Bobby-J is nuts. Truly, deeply, dangerously nuts. Nevertheless, Trump, who hugs the flag, hugged him, too, putting him in charge of America’s health. Republican senators who knew better confirmed him. For a country purporting to be great again, it’s shameful.
Pathological liars know they’re lying. “I’m president,” Trump recently said. “I can do whatever I want.” It’s not supposed to be that way. The Framers believed they’d prevented it by creating “checks and balances.” But they couldn’t imagine sociopathic narcissists being unchecked by the unbalanced.
Contrarily, because he’s nuts and can’t tell the difference, Junior believes what he says, thinks he’s saving lives rather than endangering them. If Trump cared about anyone but himself, he’d have fired him by now. If there were even a dozen Republicans in Congress who weren’t self-serving cowards, they’d have joined Democrats to impeach Junior K the minute he started firing all the competent people at NIH and CDC, replacing them with conspiratorial know-nothings.
Unless every red state and every district within those states has managed to elect only stupid people, which seems unlikely even given the political insanity running amok in those states, there must be at least a handful who do recognize the danger RFK presents. Not to mention people like Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, and Pete Hegseth in the White House’s orbit. And Steven Miller, who calls RFKJ the administration’s “crown jewel.” Removing those other threats to bodies politic would require a level of integrity lacking even in the theoretical few.
Elected Republicans won’t act. There can be no clearer proof of the descent of a once-respectable political party than the spectacle of K-J doing incalculable damage to the health of Americans while that party’s Congresspeople, elected to further the interests of their constituents, sit silent and afraid.
The same applies to standing up to Trump as he systematically overruns the constitutionally-mandated guardrails meant to keep an incurious authoritarian from unbridled power. And if the existence of Bobby K in government is proof of the fall of the Republican Party, the reelection of Felonious Trump is confirmation beyond doubt.
The downward economic impacts of his immigration policies are just beginning to be felt. Pocketbooks aren’t yet as thin as they’ll be due to his tariffs. Worse still is the end of America’s ability to influence world affairs, to remain a respected leader in science and technology. And benevolence. Instead, Trump is sidelining our country, making it dependent on others, disrespected and dismissed. The implications are grave.
Witness the gathering in China of leaders of our economic and political adversaries: Russia’s Putin, China’s Xi, and India’s Modi, forming an anti-US trading alliance. NoKoKim showed up, too, bearing his own toilet. India’s and China’s technological and scientific advancements are surpassing ours. Trump’s policies couldn’t be more favorable to them. It’s almost as if handing them the world was his intention all along.
As he inflicts his bizarre, reality-rejecting vendetta on renewable energy, those countries are racing ahead with better harnessers of sun and wind, developing battery technology that will end concerns about dark nights and windless days, while making electric cars cheaper, faster charging, and with more range than a full tank of gas.
Maybe, if our next president ends Trump’s “see-me-flex,” economy-killing tariffs, they’ll even let us buy some.
