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Trump Is a Runaway Train—and Nobody’s Pulling the Brakes

Everywhere you look, the president is causing chaos and destruction.

Donald Trump is seen aboard Air Force One checking a large printout about the Kennedy Center on September 16, 2026.

Earlier this week, Defend Public Health, an organization made up of public health experts alienated by the Trump administration’s priorities, released a damning report summarizing Robert F Kennedy Jr.’s most outrageous lies as health and human services secretary over the past year.

The authors, who have been publishing a “whoppers of the week” newsletter about Kennedy since September 2025, found that he “consistently undermines science, the importance of government programs, the norms of what constitutes public health, and the dedicated workforce of HHS. His actions weaken federal public health infrastructure, and when experts are silenced at the risk of losing their jobs, the convoluted, fringe ideas of Kennedy and the MAHA coalition gain attention.” The group specifically pointed to RFK’s promotion of anti-vaccine conspiracies, hyping of poorly tested supplements in place of established medical interventions, quack notions about the dangers of fluoridation of water, and politically motivated attacks on public health officials.

Twelve thousand people around the country have subscribed to the DPH newsletter, according to one of its editors, biotech specialist Benedicte Callan. They run the gamut from CDC and NIH staff to doctors to school nurses—people desperate for accurate, usable, public health information in an age of federally promoted misinformation. The intent of the newsletter, Callan told me, “is to create a record of the types of actions the Trump administration is taking,” so that they don’t “disappear into the sands of history. We try to give a well-rounded view of what [RFK Jr.] is up to, and why he’s up to it. We’re trying to arm a large number of people to speak to their communities more confidently about what his lies are about. We’re trying to create an army of messengers.”

Callan has concluded that RFK Jr. is both a shill for the largely unregulated “wellness industry,” promoting quack cures over rigorously tested vaccines and medicines, and also a promoter of a form of neo-eugenics. Time and again, she says, Kennedy argues for policies that disproportionately hurt the poor and the vulnerable, and in favor of parental choices that leave genetically or otherwise medically sensitive children at peculiar risk of death. His worst whoppers, she argues, are those “that are targeted toward parents that are intended to scare them away from doing basic preventative care that would........

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