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Donald Trump nominates RFK Jr. to be Secretary of Health and Human Services.
I am not naturally sympathetic to criticizing policy or personnel decisions on the grounds that they "embolden" the wrong people, but I am going to make an exception here. The sheer magnitude of human suffering prevented by vaccines and antibiotics is hard to comprehend. Due to complex structural and psychological reasons, the developers of these treatments capture a miniscule fraction of the total utility surplus created.
Enter the pharma skeptics: I do not know what RFK Jr.'s specific stance on vaccines is, besides "more skeptical than the liberal establishment will accept", but I do know how Twitter works. Twitter is real. It affects real events in actual reality, up to and including the US presidential election. Trans issues are getting dumped from the mainstream Democratic Party agenda because of how much it gets dunked on on Twitter.
In this Twitter thread, the entire concept of rewarding companies for treating disease is getting dunked on like it's a Lia Thomas podium. This is of course not the only example I could have pulled, but it shocked me both because of it's location (Alex Tabarrok's feed), and because of the sheer intensity of what can only be described as concentrated stupid.
But perhaps the most alarming implications are for democracy itself. RFK's endorsement likely won Trump the election, not least because it paved the way for the Rogan endorsement. Republicans won by increasing their share of the stupid vote. Indeed, no party can win a national election without winning large swaths of the stupid vote. There simply aren't enough smart people to win. Perhaps this explains the modern political environment. The decision between Democrat or Republican boils down to a decision on which party's concession to the stupid vote will do the least amount of damage.
Of all of Trump's cabinet picks, RFK Jr is the most unserious.
The credentials of the others at least seem fit for the positions.
my guess is that RFK Jr won't last very long. Remember Scaramucci? Trump likes to reward people for loyalty, and HHS is a decent prize, but RFK Jr has too big an ego to play subserviant to Trump for long.
The high number of people claiming that the trump picks won't last long seem to be hoping against hope. Trump does have a core number of people who do and are able to work with him over years and years.
RFK Jr is clearly a different personality than the establishment that wasn't able to last, so claiming that rfk will not last long seems premature.
Bannon was also idiosyncratic and he didn’t last long. So was Scaramucci.
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I'm not against Trump, I consider myself neutral. But it's just an objective fact that he churns through people around him quite quickly. I've never before heard of a president where his own vice president publicly came out against him, for example.
Steve Sailer once said that this kind of constant churn is common in a certain type of hard-charging, 80s, NYC business guy. I think that's a fair description for Trump.
I think some non-trivial portion of his starting picks won't remain in their positions until the end of his term. I'd say 25%. Either because Trump removes them or they remove themselves.
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