But no
How many clowns can Donald Trump fit into that car?
Quite a few, it seems. Including a man who in court documents claimed brain damage.
“The reason we know about RFK Jr’s brain worm is that he mentioned it during a divorce deposition, to argue that he was cognitively impaired and therefore had limited earning potential,” posted Catherine Rampell of The Washington Post.
Trump, himself in mental decline and famous for suggesting people inject bleach to cure COVID-19, chose Brain Worm Guy to head the Department of Health and Human Services. Like his prospective boss, RFK Jr. is a clear and present danger to public health (The Guardian):
Alastair McAlpine, a pediatric physician at British Columbia’s children’s hospital, wrote: “It is hard to overstate what a terrible decision this is. RFK Jr has no medical training. He is a hardcore anti-vaccine and misinformation peddler. The last time he meddled in a state’s medical affairs (Samoa), 83 children died of measles.”
According to FactCheck.org, in 2018, two infants in Samoa died when nurses accidentally prepared the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine with an expired muscle relaxant instead of water. Following the infants’ deaths, the Samoan government temporarily suspended the vaccination program.
The temporary suspension prompted Kennedy and his anti-vaccine nonprofit Children’s Health Defense to reportedly spread various falsehoods about vaccinations across the island, in turn resulting in a drastic decline in vaccination rates.
A year later, a measles outbreak on the island caused by a sick traveler ended up infecting more than 57,000 people and killing 83, including children.
We might have done better. We did do better, Heather Cox Richardson reminds her Substack readers:
The Biden-Harris administration today released numbers revealing that over the past four years, their policies have kick-started a boom in the creation of small businesses across the country. Since the administration took office, entrepreneurs have filed more than 20 million applications for new businesses, the most of any presidential term in history. This averages to more than 440,000 applications a month, a rate more than 90% faster than averages before the pandemic. Black business ownership has doubled, and Hispanic business ownership is up by 40% since before the pandemic.
The administration encouraged that growth with targeted loans, tax credits, federal contracts, and support services. Small businesses are major job creators and employ about 47% of all private sector employees.
President Joe Biden rejected the “neoliberalism” of the previous 40 years that had moved about $50 trillion dollars from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. Those embracing that theory maintain that the government should let markets operate without regulation, concentrating wealth among a few people who will invest it more efficiently than they can if the government intervenes with regulations or taxes that hamper the ability of investors to amass wealth.
Biden and Harris returned the U.S. to the model that both parties had embraced until 1981: the idea that the government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, and protect civil rights. That system had reduced extremes of wealth in the U.S. after the Great Depression and given most Americans a path to prosperity.
Biden’s policies worked, enabling the U.S. to recover from the pandemic more quickly than any other country with a modern economy, sending unemployment to historic lows, and raising wages faster than inflation for the bottom 80% of Americans.
It has also had social effects, most notably today with the announcement from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that the U.S. is seeing a historic drop in deaths from the street drug fentanyl. From June 2023 to June 2024, deaths dropped by roughly 14.5%, translating into more than 16,000 lives saved. Experts say the drop is due to better addiction healthcare, the widespread availability of the opioid reversal drug naloxone, and lower potency of street fentanyl.
Out of spite as much as ignorance, Trumps troop of clowns means to reverse everything the Biden administration accomplished.
Irony, we’ve repeatedly heard, is dead. So may be many who need not die in the near future. The nail in irony’s coffin is that Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, will have leading the drive for more efficient government two billionaires, “Tesla CEO Elon Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.”
RFK Jr. is now an extinction-level threat to federal public health programs and science-based health policy – Science-Based Medicine, Nov. 4, 2024