Trump’s Pick to Lead Public Health Doesn’t Trust Public Health Experts

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. apparently refused to believe the evidence of his eyes and ears during the Covid-19 pandemic, ignoring the freezer trucks full of bodies in favor of baseless conspiracies.

Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of health and human services toyed with the “plan-demic” conspiracy, according to an unearthed clip from a speech Kennedy gave in August 2020 obtained by The Bulwark. In the clip, Kennedy says that he felt the Covid pandemic—which killed 1.2 million Americans—was “very planned.”

“Many people argue that this pandemic was a ‘plandemic,’ that it was planned from the outset, it’s part of a sinister scheme,” Kennedy said. “I can’t tell you the answer to that. I don’t have enough evidence. A lot of it feels very planned to me. I don’t know. I will tell you this: If you create these mechanisms for control, they become weapons of obedience for authoritarian regimes no matter how beneficial or innocent the people who created them.”

In the same speech, Kennedy likened 2020 vaccination efforts to Nazi testing on “Gypsies and Jews,” referring to the jab as “a pharmaceutical-driven, biosecurity agenda that will enslave the entire human race and plunge us into a dystopian nightmare.”

Kennedy has promised, under Trump’s helm, to remove fluoride from all public water systems—a 1945 public health decision that has reduced cavities and tooth decay in adults and children by as much as 25 percent, according to the American Dental Association. The vaccine conspiracy theorist also reportedly has plans to strip not just the Covid vaccine but older, irrefutably effective vaccines from the market, as well.

Vaccines have proven to be one of the greatest accomplishments of modern medicine. The medical shots are so effective at preventing illness that they have practically eradicated some of the worst diseases from our collective culture, from rabies to polio and smallpox—a fact that has possibly fooled some into believing that the viruses and their complications aren’t a significant threat for the average, health-conscious individual.

In two months, Joe Biden will leave office and, soon after, nearly everything he and his administration have accomplished will be undone. One legacy, however, will remain: the administration’s continued backing of Israel in its brutal war in Gaza, which will continue—and likely increase—with Donald Trump in office. Nevertheless, the administration has shown little appetite for changing direction: On Wednesday, the United States vetoed a United Nations cease-fire resolution. A bill sponsored by Bernie Sanders to block arms sales to Israel that is scheduled to go to a vote Wednesday is highly unlikely to pass.

There are, however, people within the administration who are working to change its policy. On Monday, nearly two dozen White House officials released an open letter excoriating the Biden administration for its continued support of Israel’s brutal war in Gaza and the Middle East and demanding that, in his final days in office, the president take “concrete measures” to end the war and save civilian lives. The letter calls on the Biden administration to end U.S. military aid to Israel, demand a cease-fire, provide humanitarian aid to people in Gaza, and offer full transparency explaining its continued support for a military campaign that has resulted in thousands of civilian deaths and violated “U.S. and international laws.”

The signees, all senior members of the Executive Office of the President, chose to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. The New Republic spoke to three of them—two current officials and one who recently left the administration—about why they chose to sign the letter, what they think the administration can accomplish in its final weeks, and how continued American support for Israel has affected their day-to-day work.

“Ongoing U.S. support for Israeli military actions in Gaza and the West Bank, in violation of international and human rights law, goes against our moral and professional duties as civil servants,” the letter reads. “It wastes funds on a brutal assault on civilians without benefiting public welfare, either at home or abroad. We implore you to take simple and immediate action to drastically mitigate the humanitarian crisis.”

The group had been working on the letter for several months, the signees told me, but Trump’s election victory made the matter far more urgent. The Biden administration now only has until late January to act.

For the signees, this was a deeply personal decision. “At this point, watching the genocide unfold, you realize that this is a moment where you will look back on where you were when it started to happen and ask if you did something about it,” one signee, a current administration official, said. “Looking back at other analogous moments in time, it’s important to take action now, even if it can be undone. We need to arc towards peace.”

The former administration official concurred. “When you look at history, whether it was the treatment of the Native Americans, civil rights for Black Americans, apartheid in South Africa—these weren’t solved in a year or two or a hundred or sometimes 400,” they said. “But if at any point, even after 200 years, someone [decided progress wasn’t being made and] gave up, we wouldn’t be here.”

For the signees, Trump’s victory also crystallized another important factor in their decision to release the letter. When he takes office on January 20, he will quickly undo most of the current administration’s policies. The president’s domestic legacy—one of full employment and strong economic growth with an emphasis on building manufacturing and strengthening the working and middle classes—will be ripped up more or less immediately. Gaza is what will remain.

“As the war has expanded, this is increasingly becoming the Biden administration’s legacy,” the current administration official told The New Republic. “We have to think about how the Biden administration began. Its legacy could have been entirely focused on coming out of Covid and fixing the wreckage of the economy. Instead, most likely, this crisis, this war, will be that legacy.”

“There is a small but significant opportunity to change that,” they continued. “Will it be a legacy of horror or something else?”

The signees said that America’s ongoing support for Israel has made coming to work difficult and jarring. “It is a continual fatigue, this cognitive dissonance,” a second current administration official told The New Republic. “I watch the news and then walk into work where that news happens. It is taxing and demoralizing. It is a constant struggle.”

For the first administration official, that support has also made them question the work that they do in the government. “A lot of the reason people end up in the federal government is because it’s mission-driven: It’s meant to help serve the public,” they said. “The less that happens, even outside of our own borders, the less that holds water.”

As we ended our call, I asked all three if they would keep working in government if their calls went unheeded. All three said they weren’t sure anymore.

The cloud of sexual misconduct allegations hanging over Matt Gaetz’s head grows larger every day. ABC News is reporting that the House Ethics Committee has records of Gaetz paying two women over $10,000 between July 2017 and January 2019. The same women later served as witnesses in the House and Justice Department probes against Gaetz. The payments totaled to $10,224.02 over 27 Venmo transactions. The witnesses testified that some of these payments were indeed for sex.

In the “notes” section of Venmo, Gaetz labeled the payments as things like “Cartrages,” “Refreshments,” “Gift,” or “Car deductible,” as well as “travel” and one “extra 4 u.” The payment dates also align with allegations that Gaetz flew the two women to New York City to keep him company while he appeared on Outnumbered, on Fox News. There is also a signed check with Gaetz’s name and address for $750 titled “tuition reimbursement.”

Gaetz, a scandal-ridden Trump loyalist whose attorney general selection shocked Democrats and Republicans alike, actually resigned from the House as soon as his nomination was announced, and just days before the Ethics Committee was set to release its probe—a seemingly obvious ploy to avoid the report. Instead, Trump picking him for attorney general has only made the investigation more prominent. These details of Venmo payments are the latest to emerge about the contents of the as-yet unreleased report. Earlier this week, a lawyer representing a woman who testified before the committee told news outlets that his client personally witnessed Gaetz having sex with an underage girl in 2017.

Gaetz has continuously denied allegations of sexual misconduct, and the president-elect seems to be standing by him. “The Justice Department received access to roughly every financial transaction Matt Gaetz ever undertook and came to the conclusion that he committed no crime,” said Trump spokesperson Alex Pfeiffer in defense of Gaetz. “These leaks are meant to undermine the mandate from the people to reform the Justice Department.”

Gaetz is just one of many Trump Cabinet nominees with deeply troubling sexual misconduct or assault allegations. The House Ethics Committee is expected to convene Wednesday to decide whether to release the report.

Donald Trump nominated former Attorney General Matt Whitaker to be the United States ambassador to NATO Wednesday.

“Matt is a strong warrior and loyal Patriot who will ensure the United States’ interests are advanced and defended,” Trump wrote in a statement.

A staunch Trump loyalist, Whitaker served as the Department of Justice’s chief of staff before replacing Jeff Sessions as attorney general in 2018. There, he found himself in charge of Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Trump first took an interest in Whitaker after he distinguished himself as a major critic of the Mueller probe, insisting that there had been no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, according to The New York Times. Trump specifically brought Whitaker in to serve as an attack dog against Mueller, and one presidential adviser told the Times that Whitaker had been sent there to minimize the investigation’s fallout. Whitaker ultimately resigned from the Justice Department in 2019.

Whitaker had already proven himself to be one hell of an aggressor as a federal prosecutor in Iowa. He sparked backlash after he brought a flimsy case against Matt McCoy, the first openly gay member of the Iowa legislature, in 2007. The evidence Whitaker’s team drummed up for “attempted extortion” was so weak the jury reportedly deliberated for just half an hour.

“Whitaker’s office clearly wanted to give the evangelical right within the Republican Party a trophy, and that trophy was me—one of the state’s most prominent young Democrats at the time,” McCoy wrote in Politico in 2018.

Clearly holding political ambitions, Whitaker went on to launch unsuccessful bids for Iowa Supreme Court in 2011 and the U.S. Senate in 2014. He also held an advisory board position at World Patent Marketing, a shady company that sold toilets for “well-endowed men” among other random things. The Federal Trade Commission ordered World Patent Marketing in 2018 to shut down its operations and pay a settlement of more than $25 million, after the company was determined to be a scam.

Whitaker also previously served as executive director of the Foundation for Accountability and Civil Trust, or FACT, a conservative watchdog that targeted Democratic leaders. Whitaker currently serves as a co-chair for the Center of Law & Justice at the America First Policy Institute, a right-wing think tank chaired by Linda McMahon, Trump’s unorthodox nominee for secretary of education.

Trump has remained skeptical about NATO and previously threatened to leave the alliance if European defense spending did not increase. In February, Trump encouraged Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to any NATO country that was “delinquent” in its payments. That kind of attitude, plus the president-elect’s affinity for Russian President Vladimir Putin, means that Whitaker will likely act as an enforcer on behalf of a hostile Trump.

Proximity to sexual abuse and scandal increasingly looks like a prerequisite for joining Trump’s upcoming Cabinet. President-elect Donald Trump made yet another surprising pick on Tuesday, naming former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO Linda McMahon as his intended nominee for education secretary.

McMahon, along with her husband, Vince McMahon, helped turn the WWE into the pervasive entertainment product that has become intertwined with modern North American culture. Trump was a good friend to the McMahons during this time, even getting in the ring for the “Battle of the Billionaires” in 2007.

Linda McMahon stepped down from WWE in 2009 and launched herself in conservative politics, serving on the Connecticut State Board of Education and running two unsuccessful campaigns for Senate in 2010 and 2012. She then became a Republican megadonor, and was rewarded with an administrator position at the Small Business Administration in Trump’s first-term Cabinet. On Tuesday, she was rewarded once again.

“Linda will use her decades of Leadership experience, and deep understanding of both Education and Business, to empower the next Generation of American Students and Workers, and make America Number One in Education in the World,” Trump wrote in a statement. “We will send Education BACK TO THE STATES, and Linda will spearhead that effort.”

But much like Trump Cabinet picks Pete Hegseth and Matt Gaetz, McMahon has troubling skeletons in her closet. The WWE has long been known for its highly questionable, borderline abusive work environment.

Linda McMahon and Vince McMahon—from whom she is now reportedly separated—are being sued by five anonymous plaintiffs who served as “ring boys,” essentially teenage stagehands. The ring boys allege that they were being sexually abused by WWE wrestlers Pat Patterson and Terry Garvin. The suit states that both Linda and Vince knew exactly what was happening to the ring boys but did little, if anything, to stop it. Vince faces even more damaging allegations of sexual assault, trafficking, and more. And although these are separate from Linda, almost all of these accusations date from when Linda was leading the WWE. Trump has yet to comment on the allegations.

Linda McMahon also falsely claimed in 2009 on a candidate questionnaire for the Connecticut Board of Education that she had a bachelor’s degree in education, when she only has a certificate. Per The Washington Post’s recap of the incident, she resigned from the board as soon as she heard that local journalists intended to make her error public, but claimed the timing of her resignation was merely coincidental.

If confirmed as education secretary, McMahon will be charged with carrying out Trump’s plan for the Department of Education: specifically, to kill it completely.

The state of Texas is offering the Trump administration a 1,400-acre ranch to use as a camp for mass deportations. The Texas General Land Office’s commissioner, Dawn Buckingham, sent a letter to the president-elect Tuesday making the offer, saying that the office “is fully prepared to enter into an agreement with the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or the United States Border Patrol to allow a facility to be built for the processing, detention, and coordination of the largest deportation of violent criminals in the nation’s history.” 

The state bought the land, located along the southern U.S. border with Mexico in the Rio Grande Valley, in October with plans to build a border wall on it. The previous owner did not let state authorities build a wall there, and prevented law enforcement “from accessing the property,” according to the letter. 

For a state official to offer land to an administration not yet in office for the purpose of conducting questionably legal mass deportations is, to put it mildly, a big, preemptive step. Trump does seem ready to fulfill his campaign promise for mass deportations, however,  given his appointment of Tom Homan as “border czar.” Homan was the architect of the first Trump administration’s ruthless family separation policy, which resulted in nearly 2,000 children being torn from their families after being detained at the southern border. Homan appeared on CBS’s 60 Minutes last month laying out precisely what a mass deportation program might look like.

Trump plans to declare a national emergency and enlist the U.S. military for these deportations, targeting all undocumented immigrants, criminal or not. Trump’s choice for deputy chief of staff for policy, white nationalist Stephen Miller, has said that the president-elect would revoke legal protections such as birthright citizenship, DACA, and temporary protected status, resulting in legal immigrants facing deportation as well. 

Texas’s action suggests that Trump will have plenty of help at the state level to carry out his unprecedented plan. “We figured, hey, the Trump administration probably needs some deportation facilities because we’ve got a lot of these violent criminals that we need to round up and get the heck out of our country,” Buckingham told Fox News on Tuesday. “We’re happy to make this offer and hope they take us up on it.”

Even small-time investors are looking to peel out from their Truth Social shares as the stock continues to tumble in the aftermath of the election.

Stock in Trump Media & Technology Group has failed to pick up steam since its last peak at $51.51 a share near the end of October, causing some users—who had banked on a bigger postelection spike—to panic about the future of an investment irrefutably tied to Donald Trump’s personal fortune.

In the days since the last spike, TMTG has lost nearly half of its value, causing some users on a Truth Social investor board to lament, “The fact is we are in trouble.”

The company, which was conceptualized after Trump was banned from traditional social media outlets over his followers rioting through Congress on January 6, has plainly struggled to generate revenue. A financial statement from Trump Media released on Election Day shared bleak ratios: The company had lost $363 million during the first three-quarters of the year and generated just $2.6 million in revenue. That was down 23 percent from last year, reported The Washington Post.

Earlier this month, Trump Media & Technology Group director Eric Swider sold all the stock he owned directly in the company, offloading 136,183 shares at $28.23 per share, a total value of more than $3.8 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Swider still holds a little more than 18,000 shares in TMTG via an LLC, Zach Everson reported last week in his 1100 Pennsylvania newsletter.

Swider had been the CEO of Digital World Acquisition Corporation, which merged with TMTG in March when the media company was on the verge of running out of cash. The deal was seen as a major win for Trump, infusing $300 million into the company and keeping Truth Social up and running. The merger also helped the media entity make a particularly strong debut on the stock market with a valuation of nearly $8 billion, sending the worth of Trump’s personal stake in the company skyrocketing to upward of $3 billion at a time when he was facing nearly $500 million in legal expenses.

And Swider wasn’t the only one to offload his Trumpian assets. Also on November 8, TMTG’s chief financial officer, Phillip Juhan, dumped 320,000 shares at a price of $30.65 apiece and, after the weekend, sold another 64,000 shares at a price of $32.97 each, leaving him with just over 265,000 shares in the social media endeavor. General Counsel and Secretary Scott Glabe also dropped shares, though significantly fewer—15,917 shares at $32.19 each.

Trump—who owns roughly 57 percent of the company with 115 million shares—has insisted for months that he has no intention of selling off his stock.

Donald Trump’s transition team has begun quietly assembling a list of alternatives to Pete Hegseth, Vanity Fair reported Wednesday.

The Fox & Friends host has been the subject of immense scrutiny since he was nominated last week to head the Department of Defense, after allegations surfaced that Hegseth had sexually assaulted a woman at a Republican event in Monterey, California, in 2017.

Hegseth’s lawyer said the claims had already been investigated and nothing had come of it, but soon after, it was reported that Hegseth had agreed to a settlement with the accuser in return for her signing a nondisclosure agreement.

Two Republicans close to Trump told Vanity Fair that they were preparing a contingency plan in case Hegseth’s nomination fell apart.

“It’s becoming a real possibility,” one of the sources told the magazine.

“People are upset about the distraction,” the second source said. “The general feeling is Pete hasn’t been honest.”

A MAGA insider insisted that although Hegseth had been vetted, the allegation hadn’t come up. Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, was briefed on the allegations the day after Hegseth’s nomination was announced. The claims were so serious that Wiles and a lawyer for Trump’s team approached Hegseth about them the following day.

Hegseth’s nomination has also garnered backlash over his misogynist and anti-Muslim statements, as well as his reported ties to extremist Christian nationalist figures and tattoos featuring slogans used by white nationalist groups.

Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Nancy Mace are bringing out the rhetorical big guns to knock down Representative-elect Sarah McBride.

Over the course of the week, Greene has accused McBride—the first openly transgender person to be elected to Congress—of being mentally ill and partaking in a “war on women.” Now Greene is claiming that a trans woman’s mere presence in a bathroom is tantamount to assault.

“I’m not kidding you,” Greene said Tuesday on Steve Bannon’s War Room. “It is like a physical assault for a man to come in, charging into our private places, bathrooms, locker rooms, our gyms, places that are designated specifically for women only.”

A 2018 study from the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law found that bathroom-related nondiscrimination laws pose practically no risk to women and that claims to the contrary are little more than myths that are “not empirically grounded.”

Mace also elevated the assault claims, arguing Tuesday night on Fox News that “the idea of a man walking into a locker room where I’m changing, is actually—it feels like assault.”

Greene and Mace’s purported support for women’s safety abruptly ends with their fizzling fears over transgender rights, however. The pair of MAGA acolytes are vehement supporters of Donald Trump, who famously said that he could grab women “by the pussy” and is a judge-determined rapist, convicted adulterer, Jeffrey Epstein confidant, and proud abortion rights destroyer.

On Tuesday, Mace introduced a resolution that would ban trans women from using the restroom that corresponds with their gender identity in the U.S. Capitol. The attention-seeking South Carolina representative openly acknowledged that the stunt was a direct attack on McBride—again, who will be the lone transgender woman in Congress—telling reporters on Monday that it was “that and more.”

“Sarah McBride doesn’t get a say. I mean, this is a biological man,” Mace said, adding that the newly elected Delaware congresswoman “does not belong in women’s spaces, women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, changing rooms, period, full stop.”

McBride had her own response to the resolution, describing it in a statement as a “blatant attempt from far right-wing extremists to distract from the fact that they have no real solutions to what Americans are facing.”

“We should be focused on bringing down the cost of housing, health care, and child care, not manufacturing culture wars,” McBride said. “Delawareans sent me here to make the American dream more affordable and accessible and that’s what I’m focused on.”

Senator Lindsey Graham doesn’t care what the ethics report on Matt Gaetz says; he doesn’t think alleged sexual misconduct should knock Donald Trump’s nominee out of the running for attorney general.

CNN’s Manu Raju asked Graham Tuesday for his response to the “serious allegations of sexual misconduct” against Gaetz. Before Raju had even finished speaking, Graham was already shaking his head.

“Nobody should be disqualified from a media report,” Graham replied.

The House Ethics Committee is set to vote Wednesday on whether to release the report on its yearslong ethics investigation into Gaetz over allegations of sexual misconduct, including sexual conduct with a minor. It was previously reported that two women testified that Gaetz had paid them for sex, and one testified that he’d also had sex with her underage friend, per the lawyer representing the women. Even if the report confirms this, it apparently wouldn’t be reason enough for Graham to abandon ship.

Gaetz called Graham as part of his effort to consolidate Republican support for Trump’s nominee, CNN reported. Gaetz and Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Defense, Pete Hegseth, have been on the offensive to shore up support for their respective unsavory nominations. Hegseth reportedly paid a woman who accused him of sexually assaulting her as part of a nondisclosure agreement. Both Hegseth and Gaetz have denied any wrongdoing.

Last week, Graham admitted that it might not be easy for Trump’s nominees to get approved by the Senate. “Every nominee will have to acquit themselves well during the confirmation process by answering difficult questions and having their actions scrutinized,” Graham said.