This week, Kennedy he told the supporters that if Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump wins, he promised Kennedy “control of public health agencies,” including the Department of Health and Human Services. Trump transition co-chairman Howard Lutnik later denied that Kennedy would get a job at HHS — though at the same time he said Kennedy convinced him to pull vaccines off the market. Trump himself, at his Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday, appeared to lend credence to the idea of ​​Kennedy leading on health care: “I’m going to let him run wild on health care. I’ll let him run wild with the food. I’m going to let him run wild with medication,” Trump said. Trump also said last week in a three-hour podcast episode with Joe Rogan that he told Kennedy, “Focus on health, focus — you can do whatever you want.” It is unclear whether such a promise was made in exchange for Kennedy’s political endorsement, which would be illegal. But if Kennedy they were to be put in charge of HHS, he would lead the executive department that oversees, among others, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health. Meanwhile, Kennedy is an honorary co-chair of Trump’s transition team and claims to be “deeply involved in helping to elect people who can run the FDA, the NIH and the CDC.”

In his own speech at Madison Square Garden, Kennedy took aim at Democrats, saying they were once “the party that wanted to protect public health and women’s sports” — an odd pairing that highlights his recent pivot to attacking trans athletes and gender affirmation . care. Kennedy, who ran as a Democrat and then an independent candidate for president before endorsing Trump, also spreads misinformation about chronic health problems such as obesity, diabetes, drug overdoses and autism; Tuesday, for example, he said diabetes could be “cured with good food”. In his speech on Sunday, Kennedy characterized Trump as a president who will “protect our children … and women’s sports” as well as “end corruption at federal agencies — at the FDA, at the NIH, at the CDC and at the CIA ”—a constellation of rarely united bodies that he suggested oversees and acts against the interests of the American people.

“This rampant attack on science and scientists is extremely destabilizing for the country,” Baylor College of Medicine Dean Peter Hotez, author of the book The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science, he told me earlier this year, months after Kennedy announced his escape. But it’s not just Kennedy — Trump and other congressional Republicans are also leading the charge to undermine expertise and further erode public trust in government, he said. “That’s what authoritarianism is all about,” Hotez said, lamenting the “collateral damage it will do to our democracy” and pointing to the ways in which Stalin portrayed scientists as public enemies during the Great Purge.