On the eve of the 2024 election, there’s little I can use this platform to say that will relieve the collective bubbling, ulcer-forming acid in all of our stomachs, so here’s a more digestible tale — though RFK Jr. would not refer to it as such.
This presidential campaign cycle has been weird for many ominous, dark and deeply concerning reasons, not least of which is the fact that democracy as we know it is on the line. But also because of the prominence of gimmicky stuff, like the performative consumption of Diet Mountain Dew, the soft drink most often associated with Appalachia and, also, the fuel of late-night gamers. I wrote about Diet Mountain Dew Culture™️ when it first emerged on the campaign scene, as both Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) spent several news cycles playing up their reverence for the drink as a sort of testament to their working-class roots — all part of an ongoing effort to appeal to the every-day man (despite what one of their Ivy League law school diplomas might tell you).
While the competition to out-blue collar each other was demonstrative of both campaigns’ efforts to court working-class voters and young men when Harris first added Walz to her ticket this summer, the denouement of the Diet Mountain Dew story is representative of the sinister tone the Trump campaign has taken on in the last few weeks of the campaign cycle.
Enter RFK Jr.
Ever since the Kennedy, whose political aspirations have been roundly denounced by the rest of his family, announced he was dropping his bid for president and endorsing Donald Trump, he has been publicly and privately hoping to trade his political support for a Trump administration position. The anti-vaxxer’s patience was, apparently, rewarded two-fold last week when he announced that Trump had promised him “control of the public health agencies” should Trump take the White House after tomorrow’s election.
That news sparked concerns about the influence of RFK Jr.’s extreme and conspiratorial beliefs about public health should he head up, say, the Department of Health and Human Services or the Department of Agriculture. RFK Jr. has said for years that he wants to work to ban vaccines — particularly those administered to school-age children — and to ban the fluoridation of water, as well as seed oils and the use of pesticides — all pillars of his conspiracy theory-based belief system.
Trump acknowledged at his Madison Square Garden rally that he would, in fact, allow RFK Jr. to “go wild on health,” “food,” and “medicines,” and then said on Sunday that he would be open to listening to Kennedy’s views on certain public health measures like banning some vaccines.
What does all of this have to do with Mountain Dew? Since news broke of a potential future with RFK Jr. as HHS secretary, internet sleuths have been digging up all kinds of evidence of things that Kennedy has previously said he hopes to ban. In this YouTube video posted by his campaign last month, RFK Jr. went on attack mode against the consumption of food treated with Tartrazine, a synthetic dye that is often used to add a yellow or orange coloring to processed and gelatin-based foods — think Cheetos, gummy vitamins and popular children’s cereals like Captain Crunch. It’s also an ingredient in Mountain Dew, Donald Trump’s would-be vice president’s favorite likability drink.
It would seem, then, that the Trump campaign is poised to surrender in the Diet Mountain Dew wars.
Obviously, our interest here is not truly in which candidate can out-Mountain Dew the other. This isn’t really about synthetic dyes or whether its advisable to consume large quantities of FDA-approved but somewhat questionably colored ingredients. (The Biden-Harris administration, it should be noted, has rolled out policies to combat food deserts in which residents are often left with few ways to obtain healthy ingredients.)
What this is really about is the lengths to which Trump has been and will continue to go to elevate, embrace and implement dangerously extreme policies should he win tomorrow — policies not grounded in science, but in the ideas of whatever crank spoke to him last, and policies motivated, above all, by his self interest, whether that’s the perceived political expediency of banning life-saving vaccines or deploying the military domestically to go after his political rivals.
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