Polio in Every Pot; Smallpox in Every Garage

Team Trump isn’t quietly enabling RFK Jr.’s vaccine lunacy. They’re enthusiastically embracing it.

Oct 31, 2024

“Whoever wins the White House next week will take office with no shortage of challenges,” the Wall Street Journal’s Greg Ip writes this morning, “but at least one huge asset: an economy that is putting its peers to shame”:

With another solid performance in the third quarter, the U.S. has grown 2.7% over the past year. It is outrunning every other major developed economy, not to mention its own historical growth rate. More impressive than the rate of growth is its quality. This growth didn’t come solely from using up finite supplies of labor and other resources, which could fuel inflation. Instead, it came from making people and businesses more productive.

A year from now, when Donald Trump is taking his millionth victory lap over having singlehandedly saved the economy from ruin, this will be a fun one to remember. Happy Thursday.

There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. These guys really are that color. (Photo by Rebecca Noble / Getty Images.)

Communications Breakdown

by Andrew Egger

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has done something remarkable this week: He’s made his brain worm contagious.

Last night, Howard Lutnick, the co-chair of Trump’s transition team, was interviewed on CNN. Host Kaitlan Collins asked him about RFK Jr.’s explosive claim, made on a video call with supporters this week, that Donald Trump had promised him “control” over America’s public-health agencies.

Now this is the sort of question any Mendoza-line political hack could dodge in their sleep. You know: These conversations are ongoing, we haven’t made any personnel decisions, and so on. This would have been particularly easy since RFK Jr. got out over his skis on this exact thing back in 2016, bragging that Trump was going to make him chair of a vaccine safety commission that never materialized.

Lutnick, though, wasn’t interested in dodging. “So I spent two and a half hours this week with Bobby Kennedy Jr., and it was the most extraordinary thing,” he gushed. Bobby, it turned out, had let him in on some stuff:

What he explained was, when he was born, we had three vaccines, and autism was one in 10,000. Now a baby is born with 76 vaccines because, in 1986, they waived product liability for vaccines. And here’s the best one. They started paying people at the NIH, right? They pay them a piece of the money for the vaccine companies . . . So what happened now? Autism is one in 34.

To be clear: The question of whether a link exists between childhood vaccines and autism has been exhaustively studied; none has been found to exist. The idea of putting a crackpot conspiracist in charge of America’s federal health agencies is almost too bleak to contemplate.

But what’s most fascinating about this particular interview is Lutnick’s tone of childlike wonder; the vibe of: Kaitlan, you’re not going to believe this. We’re all learning the most REMARKABLE new things from RFK.

Keep in mind that Lutnick is supposed to be one of the grownups in the room.

Yesterday, I wrote a piece for the site examining the curious breakdown of message discipline surrounding the Trump campaign this week. RFK Jr.’s bragging comments about his forthcoming cabinet appointment were a major part of it. But there was also Elon Musk, who’s been making inexplicably edgy predictions of serious economic turbulence in the opening months of a second Trump term. And House Speaker Mike Johnson, who this week crowbarred open a fresh debate about health care policy with comments to donors promising that Trump planned to “go big” with “massive reform” to the structure of Obamacare.

Why all these lapses down the stretch, after Team Trump spent all campaign season taking pains to remain vague on so many key policy issues? The Lutnick interview provides a clue. It’s a striking image of a campaign team that’s gotten hopelessly high on its own supply. Or, you know—it could just be that brain worm.

Pretty Woman, Don’t Walk on By

by William Kristol

Charlie Kirk is upset.

Of course, Kirk is often upset. He’s a minor MAGA celebrity, and a precondition for being a MAGA celebrity is that you’re upset with today’s America. And a key element of your job is to make other Americans upset—far more so than they have actual reason to be—about the country in which they live.

What’s Charlie particularly unhappy about now? That women may be lying to their husbands—for their own good. (Can you believe it? Who’s ever heard of such a thing!?)

What are they lying about? Their vote.

Charlie is deeply concerned—he said yesterday in an interview with Megyn Kelly—that women may “undermine their husbands” by letting them think they’re with them, side-by-side, seated comfortably on the Trump train. But then, in the dark and dangerous secrecy of the voting booth, some of these women might go ahead and vote for Kamala Harris, even though the husband “works his tail off to make sure that she can have a nice life.”

Betrayal! Subversion! Feminine wiles! The poor husbands of America, wool pulled over their eyes! It’s terrible.

Charlie seems to have been particularly provoked by an excellent ad from the organization Vote Common Good, featuring Julia Roberts. A buffoonish husband, having apparently just voted, instructs his wife: “Your turn, honey.” As the woman enters the voting booth, the voiceover reminds us that this is one place where she still has the right to choose, that women can vote for whomever they want, and that no one else need ever know.

The wife votes for Harris. Afterwards, the husband can’t resist asking in a slightly creepy and characteristically male way, “Did you make the right choice?” The wife answers, “Sure did, honey.”

It turns out some people other than Kirk are outraged by this ad. Some on the left are unhappy that the advertisement seems to accept the fact that, in today’s America, some women would feel they have to lie about their vote. But given the real existing family structures in today’s America, it’s reasonable for some women to choose to lie—or at least not to be entirely candid—about their votes, in order to preserve the peace of the home.

Maybe this ad won’t be necessary twenty years from now. By then, perhaps most American men will understand that whining is not a substitute for thinking, nor bellowing for persuading. But that’s a longer-term agenda.

For now, this is a good ad. I trust some number of women will follow its counsel. (And some men, too, who may not want to be or can’t afford to be fully candid with relatives or neighbors or coworkers.) The message is a sound one: Do the right thing, even if you choose not to announce it from the rooftops. The secret ballot exists for a reason.

Your husband may think it’s good, as Donald Trump said yesterday in Wisconsin, that Trump is going to “protect” the women of this country “whether the women like it or not.” But here in America in 2024, women do have the right to think for themselves and make up their own minds about their interests, and the country’s.

They will exercise this right on Tuesday. Whether Trump—or, in some cases, their Trumpy husbands—like it or not.

Quick Hits

SERENITY NOW: A New York Times headline to grind your teeth to: “Inflation is basically back to normal. Why do voters still feel blah?”

“The lingering pessimism is also something of a puzzle,” the Times reports. “The job market has been chugging along, although more slowly, overall growth has been healthy and even inflation is more or less back to normal. Fresh data set for release on Thursday are expected to show that prices increased by a mild 2.1 percent over the past year. Confidence has crept back up as inflation has cooled, but it remains much lower than it was the last time the economy looked as solid as it does today.”

This one isn’t rocket science. We’re just going to wildly speculate that the last time the economy looked as solid as it does today, half the country wasn’t being told “we’re in the middle of the worst economy in history” by their cultish leader. We’re not fortune tellers here. But if Trump wins, we expect economic confidence to shoot up within a few weeks among Republicans, for no reason other than that he will tell them it’s all fixed.

WHO’S SHOWING UP EARLY? Trump had better hope that his—ah—unorthodox appeal to female voters is paying off. Politico reports this morning that “women are voting early in huge numbers, far outpacing men”:

Across battlegrounds, there is a 10-point gender gap in early voting so far: Women account for roughly 55 percent of the early vote, while men are around 45 percent, according to a Politico analysis of early vote data in several key states. The implications for next week’s election results are unclear; among registered Republicans, women are voting early more than men, too. But the high female turnout is encouraging to Democratic strategists, who expected that a surge in Republican turnout would result in more gender parity among early voters.

Here’s one countervailing data point, though: Greg Bluestein of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution notes today that “the highest early voting turnout in Georgia isn’t in Democratic strongholds such as DeKalb County or the fiercely contested suburbs that surround metro Atlanta. It’s in sparsely populated rural counties where Republicans often reign supreme.”