He’s Not a Doctor. But He Did Stay at the White House Last Night.
In retrospect, maybe the era of bleach-injection speculation wasn’t so bad.
Brace yourselves, everybody: The end of Humphrey’s Executor may be coming. That 1935 Supreme Court decision paved the way for Congress to set up executive agencies over which the president exercised only limited control, and Donald Trump’s attempts to fire these agencies’ current heads without cause have sparked some of the most important court battles of his second term.
But the Supreme Court yesterday, splitting along partisan lines, agreed to revisit the precedent—and told Trump that in the meantime he could go ahead and fire a top official at the Federal Trade Commission. Not great, Bob. Happy Tuesday.
Cranks Amok
by Andrew Egger
Five years ago, at the height of a raging pandemic, Donald Trump took to a White House podium to do a little medical brainstorming on how to rid a patient of SARS-CoV-2.
“Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous—whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light,” Trump mused, to the shock of those in attendance. “And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute—one minute—and is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning? . . . It would be interesting to check that.”
We didn’t know how good we had it.
Yesterday, Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. headed to the microphones again for a major medical announcement. They had uncovered, they claimed, a major piece of the puzzle of rising autism diagnoses in America—“an answer to autism,” as Trump had suggested the day before. Remarkably, the announcement aligned perfectly with the timetable Kennedy had announced back in April: “By September, we will know what has caused the autism epidemic and we’ll be able to eliminate those exposures.” This sort of predictive accuracy is how you know the science must be good.
What did Trump and Kennedy claim to have unearthed in the past five months that has largely eluded scientists for decades? A link between prenatal use of acetaminophen—the painkiller better known by the brand name Tylenol—and later diagnoses of autism. They also trumpeted the promise of another drug, leucovorin, as a promising way to treat the condition.
Neither of these claims were wholly invented. One large study last year found a marginal increase in autism among children whose mothers had used Tylenol. But that study’s own authors pointed out that the link vanished when their data was subjected to a stricter sibling-control analysis, suggesting that the increase was likelier due to some extraneous factor the scientists had not been able to control for. (“The preponderance of evidence,” Sen. Bill Cassidy tweeted yesterday, “shows that this is not the case.”) Similarly, leucovorin has shown early promise as a possible treatment for some children with autism, but it’s difficult to overstate how preliminary the state of the science is at the moment: “The evidence we have supporting it,” autism expert Dr. David Mandell told Reuters, “is really, really weak.”
But you know what that all sounds like? Nerd talk! The president and the great patriots at HHS aren’t going to let little things like scientific uncertainty stand in their way. The best weapon to defeat the autism epidemic will not be rigorous scientific research (Who has the time? And we DOGEd a fair bit of that money already!) but half-remembered anecdata: “There’s a rumor, and I don’t know if it’s so or not, that Cuba, they don’t have Tylenol because they don’t have the money for Tylenol,” Trump said yesterday. “And they have virtually no autism, okay? Tell me about that one.” (For the record, Cuba has both acetaminophen—though there the drug is known as paracetamol—and autism. Oh man, did we just prove Trump’s point?)
A few months ago, it was reasonable to wonder whether Trump might see Kennedy’s crank-science crusade as a political liability and cut him loose, à la Elon Musk. Yesterday felt like the death knell for that theory. Trump’s all in on this stuff; his gaga gut instincts perfectly paired to Kennedy’s deep conspiracism. As the event went on, in fact, he seemed to drift in Kennedy’s direction, dismissing the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists as “the establishment” and warning against scientific consensus that the hepatitis B vaccine shouldn’t be given to babies either. MAHA clearly is here for the long haul.
In such deeply stupid times, it almost feels like an anachronism to score our government’s public-health decisions based on whether they comport with good science. (Of course they won’t!) Instead, the main question at hand tends to be this: Will whatever piece of bad science they’re rolling out be benign or malign—and if malign, how so?
In this specific case, you could argue the downsides may be bad but relatively limited. Some expectant mothers will suffer unneeded pain, having been scared away from a safe drug. Others will needlessly worry they might have harmed their children by having taken Tylenol already. Some might even make a more disastrous mistake: switching unthinkingly to another painkiller like ibuprofen instead, despite the fact that ibuprofen is known to increase the risk of certain fetal harms.
Still, all this is simply taking place at the level of public-health messaging, not public-health policy: Tylenol is an over-the-counter drug and will remain so. And whatever the nonsense Trump is spewing, it’s at least some comfort that official FDA messaging remains more restrained: The FDA’s accompanying statement on the acetaminophen announcement noted that a “causal relationship” with autism had actually “not been established” and went to great lengths to stress that Tylenol actually could (and maybe even should) be taken in cases where pregnant mothers spike fevers.
If that were the extent of the bad science Trump and Kennedy intended to wreak, we could, I suppose, count ourselves fortunate.
But we’re likely to get no such luck. Yesterday’s announcements were merely a down payment, our great public-health leaders said, on millions of dollars in new federal spending on the “root causes” of autism. And Kennedy and Trump have made it painfully clear over the years that they’re already plenty sure what those root causes might be. Trump spent a lot of time at the podium yesterday railing against the current pediatric vaccine schedule, claiming (ridiculously) that babies currently receive as many as 80 shots and suggesting further changes were coming.
“It’s too much liquid,” Trump said of pediatric vaccines. “Too many different things are going into that baby at too big a number.”
The actual scientists who would have pushed back on this are long gone. Over his shoulder, Kennedy just nodded along.
Another Widow’s Fight
by Cathy Young
Erika Kirk garnered justified praise for her remarkable display of grace at her husband’s memorial service this weekend. At the same time, but with much less attention, another widow who has stepped up into a public role as a successor to her slain husband is back in the news.
Last week, Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Russian anti-corruption crusader and opposition leader Alexei Navalny, released a video asserting that new evidence from tissue-sample tests confirms that her late husband was poisoned.
In a way, it’s the least surprising revelation ever. Navalny’s sudden death in a “strict regime” Arctic penal colony in February 2024 followed another poisoning attempt by Vladimir Putin’s Federal Security Service (FSB) in 2020. It also followed a nineteen-year sentence given to Navalny for “extremist activities,” tacked onto an early nine-year sentence on trumped-up fraud charges. It was clear to many observers at the time that Putin, who so feared Navalny that he never uttered the opposition leader’s name, had no intention of letting him leave prison alive. Despite his optimistic disposition, Navalny matter-of-factly anticipated such an outcome in his memoir, Patriot, published last January.
In the new video, Navalnaya says that the tissue samples, which her husband’s team managed to obtain and “securely transfer” abroad, have been tested by laboratories in two different countries, with both concluding that the cause of death was poisoning. However, neither laboratory has publicly released the results or even identified the poisoning agent; Navalnaya suggested that this was due to fear of political fallout.
Navalnaya’s video includes other heartbreaking documentation: a photo of the cell in which her husband died, with vomit visible on the floor; a photo of the small snow-covered yard where he was allowed to go out for exercise; and accounts by penal-colony employees of his collapse and agonizing death. While these materials are not fully confirmed, they are consistent with other information about the colony.
Even had Navalny died of “natural” causes in the penal colony—where he was regularly subjected to harsh punishments for the smallest infractions and where medical aid can be charitably described as inadequate—his death would have amounted to a slow murder. But it seems increasingly likely that Putin wasn’t content with killing his captive archenemy slowly. Among other things, there was pressure to trade him to the West in exchange for the spies, assassins, and crooks Putin wanted bailed out, but Putin had no intention of letting him out alive. ( If Navalny was, in fact, poisoned, there is not a shred of doubt that this could have been carried out on Putin’s orders.)
Once, evidence that the president of Russia was personally involved in organizing a hit on his political opponent would have shocked the world. Now, after other high-profile murders and nearly four years of a devastating war in Ukraine—and after the president of the United States has literally given the murderer a red-carpet welcome at the Alaska summit—the news hardly registers. Even so, the full facts of Navalny’s death must be known.
AROUND THE BULWARK
No, Trump Hasn’t ‘Settled Seven Wars’... GEN. MARK HERTLING with a fact check. The president should be called out every time he makes that claim.
Everything Is Awful. And It’s Changing Us... It’s great that Disney is bringing Jimmy Kimmel back, MONA CHAREN writes, but is it too late?
“Alpha Male” Videos Are Secretly Hilarious! “Rapture TikTok” Has Lost It!... On FYPod, TIM MILLER and CAM KASKY take on the weird world of Rapture TikTok, Charlie Kirk conspiracies, and the hilarious nonsense of “alpha” and “sigma” male culture.
Charlie Kirk Conspiracy Theories Are Running Wild... It doesn’t help when the head of the FBI is fanning the flames, observes WILL SOMMER in False Flag.
Just How Much Damage Can RFK Jr. Do? On The Mona Charen Show, JONATHAN COHN joins MONA to discuss the harm the HHS secretary has already done and what we can expect next.
Quick Hits
ON SECOND THOUGHT: When it was reported this past weekend that White House border czar Tom Homan had accepted $50,000 in a CAVA bag last year in exchange for promises of future administration contracts—and that it had been caught as part of an FBI sting—the White House’s initial response was: So what?
“The Department’s resources must remain focused on real threats to the American people, not baseless investigations,” FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement Saturday. “As a result, the investigation has been closed.”
With the benefit of a few more days, however, the White House hit on a new line: Actually, the bribe never happened at all.
“Mr. Homan never took the $50,000 that you’re referring to,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Monday. “This was another example of the weaponization of the Biden Department of Justice against one of President Trump’s strongest and most vocal supporters in the midst of a presidential campaign.”
Because this is the Trump administration, where no story stays straight, Homan appeared on Fox News last night, during which he quite notably did not deny that he accepted the $50,000. “I did nothing criminal,” he said. “I did nothing illegal.”
If only there were a way to get to the bottom of this. Perhaps—I dunno, we’re spitballing here—they could release that FBI tape?
MORE MAGA MEDIA: As Donald Trump continues to postpone enforcement of the U.S. law banning TikTok from app stores—a law he has no authority to continue to declare forceless, if anybody happens to care—details are emerging about the consortium of U.S. partners in line to take over the platform’s operation in America. The AP reports:
Tech giant Oracle will spearhead U.S. oversight of the algorithm and security underlying TikTok’s video popular platform under the terms of a deal laid out Monday by President Donald Trump’s administration.
All the final details still need to be nailed down among several joint venture partners that will include Oracle, investment firm Silver Lake Partners and possibly two billionaires—media mogul Rupert Murdoch and personal computer pioneer Michael Dell. The U.S. administration would not have a stake in the joint venture nor be part of its board, according to a senior White House official.
We’ll admit: We pricked up our ears at the mention of Rupert Murdoch. Last we’d heard, he was on Trump’s shitlist over the Wall Street Journal’s reporting on the existence of the birthday letter he wrote decades ago to Jeffrey Epstein. Trump’s lawsuit against both the Journal and Murdoch himself remains ongoing. It will be interesting to hear how he got involved in this deal, when the details inevitably leak. Perhaps it was when they got together last week at the U.K. state dinner.
TOP GOON: Every few months, Ben Terris emerges from the cryogenic chamber where New York magazine keeps him to uncork some eye-popping new piece of reporting, and his latest on Kristi Noem’s Department of Homeland Security is nuts. The piece goes deep on a department that Noem ostensibly controls, but which in reality she is more like a mascot for. The real powerbrokers: Trump policy aide Stephen Miller, who is supplying the brains for the operation, and longtime aide Corey Lewandowski, who is providing most of the enforcement muscle despite having only an outside advisory role. Terris notes throughout that the heavily persuasive evidence of a Noem-Lewandowski romance is making things a wee bit awkward for all involved. He writes:
When Trump picked Noem for DHS, Lewandowski hoped he would be named chief of staff. It wasn’t in the cards. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year that the tabloid reports of his romantic relationship with Noem were a sticking point. But apparently there were other issues as well. In September, the Daily Mail reported the existence of a memo written by Richard McComb, the chief security officer at DHS at the time, containing a litany of concerns regarding Lewandowski and questioning whether he should have a top-secret security clearance. Lewandowski had, according to the memo, been accused of receiving $50,000 directly from the Chinese Communist Party as well as money from Israel’s Likud Party without disclosing the payments on his DHS background form. (A DHS official denied these claims.)
The memo also detailed known instances of Lewandowski’s entanglements with the law, including an alleged incident of unwanted sexual contact. In 2021, a woman accused Lewandowski of touching her inappropriately and relentlessly making sexually explicit comments at a charity dinner in Las Vegas. Lewandowski was charged and cut a plea deal in 2022 that resulted in eight hours of impulse-control counseling and 50 hours of community service. . .
Noem’s belligerent approach is reflected within the department, where she is an isolated and isolating figure. She has, according to a person close to the administration, gone to the White House multiple times to try to replace Troy Edgar, one of her deputies. A very tight circle of aides runs day-to-day operations. Lewandowski, in particular, was described to me as a micromanager who will approve and deny travel requests made by ICE employees. He has been responsible for firing and reassigning dozens of people within the agency, and they are afraid to push back because he might call and “rip their heads off,” according to the person close to the administration.
Cheap Shots
What happened yesterday was the most dangerous press conference since the inject bleach one.
As a nurse, I’m sickened by what I watched. I’m so angry on behalf of scientists and healthcare professionals that we will once again have to counteract LIES being spewed by the President of the United States.
We are in a very dark place right now.
I just "did my own research." A typical infant immunization is 0.5 ml. Even if they received a dozen shots at once, that's 6 ml. That's the equivalent of a heaping teaspoon. I don't think the volume of shots is a problem.
Can I get appointed to the CDC now? 😀