The Idiocracy Gains Steam

By Abe Greenwald 

In an earlier newsletter, I said that the Trump administration was half–common sense revolution and half-idiocracy and that the combination had a certain appeal. I meant that the idiocracy shtick was funny so long as a wall was in place separating it from Donald Trump’s sensible conservative policies. The gold-leaf ornamentation in the Oval Office, the president’s hat blaring, “TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING!,” the surreal midnight Truth Social posts—these are all amusingly self-aware jabs at conventional presidential conduct. And given that Trump has been making good on every campaign promise from border security to stopping Iran to anti-woke crackdowns, there’s been little reason not to laugh along. 

But I fear the wall between common sense and idiocracy is wearing thin. Before getting into office this time, Trump said that he was going to let Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “go wild” in his administration. Sadly, this is another campaign promise he’s fulfilling.  

A few days ago in Texas, RFK Jr., now the director of Health and Human Services, had this to say: “I know what a healthy child is supposed to look like. I’m looking at kids as I walk through the airports today, as I walk down the street, and I see these kids that are just overburdened with mitochondrial challenges, with inflammation. You can tell from their faces, from their body movements, and from their lack of social connection. And I know that that’s not how our children are supposed to look.”

This is crackpot pseudoscience on par with phrenology. And the comparison is important, because RFK Jr. should be understood as the latest in a long and cyclical American tradition of fanatics, revivalists, and reformers who seek to purify the country by imposing one radical idea or another on the population. 

The 19th-century phrenology movement was linked to eugenicists who wanted to cleanse the American stock of “defectives.” The hellfire revivalist and commune movements sought to purify the American soul via everything from fasting, to the rejection of private property, to open marriage, to celibacy. The prohibitionists wanted to do it by ridding the country of alcoholic beverages. 

RFK Jr. plans to cleanse the American bloodstream of the alleged toxins that are supposedly in our food and vaccines. Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) is our new fanatical purification movement. 

Unlike most of the figures who headed up the old lunatic campaigns, Kennedy didn’t emerge from relative obscurity and hasn’t been left merely to tend his own flock. He’s a Cabinet member, the director of Health and Human Services. This gives him the opportunity to institutionalize his particular pseudoscientific mode of mass salvation, and he is apparently seizing it. 

By all indications, Kennedy is attempting to purge the public health establishment of anyone who doesn’t embrace his agenda. Those employees he’s not trying to fire are quitting in protest. If he manages to fill out the ranks with the MAHA faithful, we’re headed for a public health catastrophe. 

This is no longer performative idiocracy. It’s delusional mania that’s jumped the wall, landed in the sphere of policy, and threatens to overtake the administration’s common-sense objectives. I know what a healthy government is supposed to look like. And I know this isn’t how ours is supposed to look. 

Abe Greenwald is the executive editor of COMMENTARY.