Trump Is a Runaway Train—and Nobody’s Pulling the Brakes

Earlier this week, Defend Public Health, an organization made up of public health experts alienated by the Trump administration’s priorities, released a damning report summarizing Robert F Kennedy Jr.’s most outrageous lies as health and human services secretary over the past year.

The authors, who have been publishing a “whoppers of the week” newsletter about Kennedy since September 2025, found that he “consistently undermines science, the importance of government programs, the norms of what constitutes public health, and the dedicated workforce of HHS. His actions weaken federal public health infrastructure, and when experts are silenced at the risk of losing their jobs, the convoluted, fringe ideas of Kennedy and the MAHA coalition gain attention.” The group specifically pointed to RFK’s promotion of anti-vaccine conspiracies, hyping of poorly tested supplements in place of established medical interventions, quack notions about the dangers of fluoridation of water, and politically motivated attacks on public health officials.

Twelve thousand people around the country have subscribed to the DPH newsletter, according to one of its editors, biotech specialist Benedicte Callan. They run the gamut from CDC and NIH staff to doctors to school nurses—people desperate for accurate, usable, public health information in an age of federally promoted misinformation. The intent of the newsletter, Callan told me, “is to create a record of the types of actions the Trump administration is taking,” so that they don’t “disappear into the sands of history. We try to give a well-rounded view of what [RFK Jr.] is up to, and why he’s up to it. We’re trying to arm a large number of people to speak to their communities more confidently about what his lies are about. We’re trying to create an army of messengers.”

Callan has concluded that RFK Jr. is both a shill for the largely unregulated “wellness industry,” promoting quack cures over rigorously tested vaccines and medicines, and also a promoter of a form of neo-eugenics. Time and again, she says, Kennedy argues for policies that disproportionately hurt the poor and the vulnerable, and in favor of parental choices that leave genetically or otherwise medically sensitive children at peculiar risk of death. His worst whoppers, she argues, are those “that are targeted toward parents that are intended to scare them away from doing basic preventative care that would protect their children. We’ve already seen six deaths from measles. We will see a rise in liver disease and liver cancer in 10-to-20 years’ time because he’s convincing parents not to get the hepatitis vaccines for their children.”

RFK’s arrogant, destructive norms-busting behavior is of a piece with the rest of the Trump project. Despite having no medical training or scientific expertise, the health secretary presents himself as an avatar of truth pitted against the best medical brains on earth. Equally contemptuous of basic norms, Donald Trump Jr. accepts hundreds of thousands of dollars from a Putin-allied Russian oligarch to pay for his wedding celebration (remember the days when the GOP was up in arms about the conflict of interest presented by Hunter Biden’s consultancies with overseas companies?) and Trump then turns around and blithely, implausibly, denies all knowledge of the oligarch. Meanwhile, the MAGA man portrays himself as an AI-generated superhero and gets his most die-hard followers at his midterm “convention” to pledge personal allegiance to him and promise to “cheat like hell” to win the elections.

That sense of being untethered to basic societal codes of conduct has been on particularly shocking display this week in the debate over artificial intelligence. AI executives, who have not, by any conceivable interpretation of recent events, been ahead of the curve when it comes to protecting the common good, have finally acknowledged that they are creating potentially civilization-busting products and have urged the administration to put in place regulations and guardrails. Trump’s response? He calls the warnings—that were issued after a series of incidents in which malicious AI swarms collaborated to escape their containment systems and after Anthropic identified apparent attempts to use its AI models to manufacture bioweapons—a “HOAX,” accuses the naysayers of wanting to kill the American economy’s golden goose, and says that the only guardrail needed on AI is his, the president’s, high IQ and intuition.

The consequences of Trump’s malicious presidency are, as the midterms approach, on full display in every corner of public life. As Trump lashes out against everyone from the judge who prevented his name from appearing on the façade of the Kennedy Center to the Canadian prime minister, no one appears immune from his frenetic hostility.

In recent weeks, to take just one example, friends of besieged Federal Reserve board member Lisa Cook have resorted to a fundraising appeal to provide her with a personal security detail given the level of violent animus that Trump has continually ginned up against her.

Now that the Supreme Court has put the nail in the coffin of Trump’s efforts to use the Post Office to sabotage the 2026 elections, expect Trump to focus just as much ire on the court’s justices as he has done on Lisa Cook. Let’s see how the conservative justices, who went out of their way to empower Trump as a king in all but name, respond when the firehose of bile and vitriol and threats from America’s Caligula is aimed in their direction. Already, on Tuesday, Trump called out his three Supreme Court appointees for being “a shell of their original selves,” and for colluding in a “horrible, highly political” decision that would help the Democrats win the midterms. This, I am sure, is just the beginning. After all, hell hath no fury like a narcissistic president scorned by a hard-right SCOTUS majority.

Expect Trump’s venom to also be aimed at Federal Reserve chair Kevin Warsh after he and his colleagues voted to raise interest rates on Wednesday. Trump made it clear, when he nominated Warsh to the job that Warsh so obviously, publicly, distastefully craved, that he expected him to deliver rate cuts in return for the president’s largesse. Instead, economic reality—namely an increasingly skittish bond market faced with growing inflationary pressures triggered by the Iran War and out-of-control debt worsened by Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill”—is forcing the Fed’s hand. That’s surely going to infuriate a president who thinks he can simply will lower borrowing costs into existence through a campaign of social media bullying and who threatened, two weeks ago, to cut off all trade with countries with whom the US had a trade deficit if the Feds didn’t immediately lower rates.

As for the refusal to countenance any efforts to regulate AI, despite recent warnings by leading scientists—and influential MAGA strategists such as Steve Bannon—that there is a non-negligible chance that AI will destroy humanity within the decade, Trump is sowing the seeds of a potential cataclysm. This is so far beyond malignant that I struggle to find words to describe it. But it is, of course, of a piece with Trump’s endless efforts to undermine the common good in pursuit of the quick buck and the provocative headline.

Trump is, as Thomas Edsall wrote in The New York Times this week, living in a fantasy world—a bubble whose membrane allows in no dissent and no information that runs contrary to the childish superhero narrative that he has created around himself. Yes, it’s beyond pathetic, and, yes, it makes good fodder for late-night TV. But it’s also increasingly dangerous. Trump is a runaway train and, despite the urgency of the moment, none of his lackey cabinet members seem even remotely willing to prime the brakes.

Between the reemergence of right-wing red-baiting and Donald Trump’s use of the chilling National Security Presidential Memorandum–7 to criminalize left political organizing, we’re seeing McCarthyism reborn before our eyes.

This assault on democracy cannot be ignored or wished away. Resisting it requires bravery in the face of threats and repression, a steadfast commitment to the truth, and the unwavering belief that we can—and will—overcome this darkness.

We must have an independent media that sets the record straight, unearths corruption and abuses of power, and advances a politics of justice and dignity for all if we’re to win this fight.

That’s why I’m writing to you today. This September, The Nation needs to add 100 monthly donors to sustain our progressive journalism. Your contribution makes the next investigative report, the next truth-speaking column, and the next pathbreaking essay all possible. 

I hope you’ll support our work with a recurring donation today. If you donate $10 or more a month, we’ll send you a brand new “Hands Off the Free Press!” sticker to recognise your commitment to our cause. Please, donate today. 

Onward,

Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editor and Publisher, The Nation

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