Member Newsletter
I’ve written a few times recently about Donald Trump’s ability to stake out and hold territory in the public mind, the public attention span, with threats that he likely (though not certainly) can’t make good on or won’t even have the attention span or care enough to focus on. So he’ll end birthright citizenship or he’ll jail his opponents. Or maybe not. It’s part of his ability to always be taking the initiative on that mutable and uncanny territory where media narratives and old fashioned reality become a common fabric. He acts and keeps acting and his opponents react and keep reacting.
I was reminded of a central example of this this morning, something that happened again and again in his first term. He muses publicly about his sole and unchallenged right to make some decision or choice that in practice he knows nothing about. Usually he has no right to make that choice. Often he has no ability to make that choice. The fact that he has no ability to make such a choice in any remotely informed way adds to the angst many feel hearing his comments. It’s the essence of the power, a multiple-layered onion of gaslighting and itself a factor in keeping everyone off balance. It is, and is intended to serve as, a kind of meditation and magnification of his arbitrary power, how we’re all living not just in his world but in his will.
This all came back to me this morning when I read about this new interview in which Trump discusses how he and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will soon sit down and hash out between them which vaccines Americans are allowed to take going forward. On the sidelines of this high-stakes chat there’s an interesting “angels on the head of a pin” conversation to be had about which of these two men is less qualified to discuss this issue, let alone make these decisions. (It’s kind of a complicated question when you think about it.)
Vaccine skepticism of course hit the big time with the COVID pandemic. (Here’s me reminding myself we shouldn’t be calling it “skepticism”.) It certainly existed before. And the associated opposition to vaccines had already led to decreasing rates of vaccination for the standard list of vaccines most of us got as children. But it’s time to remind ourselves that vaccine “skepticism” isn’t limited to the COVID vaccine. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his group Children’s Health Defense already helped measles kill dozens of children in Samoa — a notorious and truly willful horror story you should read more about if you’re not familiar with it.
But that’s not all, as they used to say on the old late-night Ginzu knife commercials. This morning the Times published this article on an anti-vax lawyer and close Kennedy associate who just two years ago petitioned the government to revoke approval for the polio vaccine. The lawyer, Aaron Siri, often works on behalf of something called the Informed Consent Action Network, which is also closely associated with Kennedy. It turns out Siri is now helping Kennedy chose appointees who will take over the U.S. public health agencies in January.
Democrats, especially when they’re feeling on the ropes as they surely are now, often get into these games of 20-dimensional chess with themselves about which issues are most important, which people care about, which can be used to gain political traction in a now uncertain and often bewildering political and electoral environment. What we too often forget is that certainty and consistency of belief are messages in themselves. Especially in a cacophonous and cluttered media environment. It’s worth considering the message it sends when a party loses a close and hard-fought election and then spends time debating what it should be for the next time. In any case, all these questions aside, I’m confident that protecting your children and grandchildren from polio and measles is a good majority issue. Opposition to routine vaccines that our parents, grandparents and some of our great-grandparents took as a matter of course is, dare I recall the word, weird. Most normal people see it as weird. Let’s just agree on this as a matter of substance and politics, not subject to repeated considerations, and move forward on that basis.