Alex Brandon/AP Photo
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks at Donald Trump’s campaign rally at Madison Square Garden, October 27, 2024, in New York.
Looking for some dim silver linings, some progressives have made the accurate observation that some right-wing populists have criticisms of capitalism that mirror the left’s. They may be, if not useful idiots, occasional allies.
For instance, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has criticized Big Food and Big Pharma. If he can just drop some of his more lunatic views, as secretary of HHS he might shine a useful spotlight and revise some bad industry practices.
Dr. Deborah Birx, COVID response coordinator during Trump’s first term, said Sunday she expects that Kennedy’s nomination will lead to illuminating discussions about public health. Speaking on CBS’s Face the Nation, she said, “I’m actually excited that in a Senate hearing he would bring forward his data and the questions that come from the senators would bring forth their data.”
CBS showed a clip of Kennedy saying, “I’m just going to tell the cereal companies to take all the dyes out of their food. I’ll get processed food out of school lunch immediately. Ten percent of food stamps go to sugar drinks to, you know, sodas. We’re creating diabetes problem, and our kids are giving them food that’s poison, and I’m going to stop that.”
Birx is actually a serious person. She served as Obama’s global AIDS coordinator. Could she be onto something?
The populist right also has mixed feelings about tech billionaire monopolies (Elon Musk and Peter Thiel excepted) because of their fundraising for Democrats and their socially liberal views. Our friend Matt Stoller published a startling item on the admiration of Matt Gaetz for FTC Chair Lina Khan, charmingly describing Gaetz as a “Khanservative.”
As Stoller wrote, “Gaetz proudly calls himself a Lina Khan fan, and filed a brief with the conservative Fifth Circuit asserting that the Federal Trade Commission has the authority to ban non-compete agreements, and personally hosted her as a guest on a show on Newsmax to discuss how to get rid of ‘creepy’ commercial surveillance. He has praised the Biden Antitrust Division’s Jonathan Kanter’s work on Google.”
Stoller also quoted Gaetz: “It is my belief that the number one threat to our liberty is big government. It is also my belief that the number two big threat to our liberty is big business, when big business is able to use the apparatus of government to wrap around its objectives.”
This sounds hopeful, but Gaetz may well not get confirmed as attorney general. And if he does, he still has to answer to Trump, who could easily find antitrust officials with his own highly selective views of which monopoly abuses to go after and which to give a pass.
And while Kennedy does have some views that are critical of Big Food and Big Pharma, consider what happened on the food front over the weekend.
In the past, RFK Jr. has been highly critical of Trump’s diet. “The stuff that he eats is really, like, bad,” he said. “Campaign food is always bad, but the food that goes onto that airplane is, like, just poison. You have a choice between—you don’t have the choice, you’re either given KFC or Big Macs. That’s, like, when you’re lucky, and then the rest of the stuff I consider kind of inedible.”
Well, on Sunday, all the talk shows showed images of Trump forcing Kennedy to choke down a burger, fries, and a Coke.
The deeper problem with far-right populism is that the boss is the boss of bosses. Because far fringe appointees like Gaetz and Kennedy, if confirmed, will be entirely creatures of Trump’s whims, they will do what he says.
E.E. Cummings wrote in a poem, celebrating a brave conscientious objector named Olaf who was brutalized by his captors, declaring, “There is some shit I will not eat.” That evidently does not describe RFK Jr.
