RFK Jr.’s Extremely Improbable Rise to HHS Secretary

Not so long ago, but in a distant political galaxy … Photo: Josh Reynolds/AP

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is now on track to be secretary of Health and Human Services, the largest federal agency in terms of overall spending (a cool $1.8 trillion for the current fiscal year). It’s not official just yet, but the Senate Finance Committee’s party-line vote recommending RFK Jr. on Tuesday almost certainly ensured that he will be confirmed by the full Senate. Even if you put aside the various ways that Kennedy has made himself perpetual tabloid bait, his extreme susceptibility to conspiracy theories, and his very limited knowledge about HHS, this is remarkable. From a political standpoint, Kennedy emerging as a major figure in the Trump administration is extremely improbable.

Just over 15 months ago, RFK Jr. was running for the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party, mostly appealing to lefty dissidents unhappy with Joe Biden. He was basically Marianne Williamson (a rival in that contest) with a vastly more famous last name and pedigree. Before his more recent fame as an anti-vaxx activist, he had spent decades as a crusading environmentalist and had fairly conventional liberal stances on hot-button issues like abortion and gun control. Even after he abandoned the Democratic Party to run for president as an independent, Kennedy appealed to voters on the anti-Establishment left as much as the anti-vaxx right. Here’s what one prominent Republican said about RFK Jr. in March 2024:

RFK Jr. is the most Radical Left Candidate in the race, by far. He’s a big fan of the Green New Scam, and other economy killing disasters. I guess this would mean he is going to be taking votes from Crooked Joe Biden, which would be a great service to America. His running mate, Nicole Shanahan, is even more “Liberal” than him, if that’s possible.

This was, of course, Donald J. Trump, who a couple of months later called Kennedy “one of the most Liberal Lunatics ever to run for office” and a “Phony Radical Left fool.” That was just over nine months ago. Yet just three months after Trump dismissed RFK Jr. as the worst kind of bad news, Kennedy (after trying to cut a deal with both major candidates) endorsed the 45th president’s campaign and announced a slogan as improbable as the alliance itself: “Make America Healthy Again.” This wasn’t exactly a sentiment naturally associated with the junk-food-noshing, fossil-fuel-loving, anti-corporate-regulating candidate from Mar-a-Lago. But to the surprise of many observers, the partnership lasted.

Did Trump owe much politically to Kennedy beyond a couple of days of puzzled coverage? There’s not much evidence of it. Kennedy’s support as an independent candidate had steadily dwindled over the course of the campaign and stood at under 5 percent (according to FiveThirtyEight) when he dropped out, and that definitely overstated his likely vote since he had struggled to achieve ballot access in a lot of states. Like most non-major-party candidates, he was sure to lose even more altitude as Election Day approached. And while there was some basis for thinking Kennedy marginally drew more votes away from Trump than from Kamala Harris, he also tended to attract low-propensity voters, so it’s hard to say how many of them would have shown up at the polls if Kennedy had stayed in the race or hadn’t made an endorsement. Perhaps more to the point, Trump’s contention before and after the election was that he had been awarded a massive mandate that was actually larger than the numbers showed thanks to alleged Democratic voter fraud. So it seems unlikely that this most narcissistic of politicians feels much of a debt to Kennedy.

The bigger question is whether a Trump MAHA pledge is real, given his many connections with some of the unhealthier corporate interests in the country and the certainty that they will use their leverage to neutralize any threat posed by the new HHS secretary to Big Ag, Big Pharma, and other supposed merchants of death. As a New York Magazine feature noted, appointing Kennedy to his position is “akin to putting Bernie Madoff in charge of the Treasury Department.”

The one thing Kennedy and his new boss do have in common, however — and perhaps this is their enduring bond — is a cult of personality based on securing the trust of people who don’t trust the country’s major institutions. Toward the end of his campaign and in his endorsement of Trump, RFK Jr. expressed as much personal bitterness toward the Democratic Party and its legal and electoral practices as any MAGA crank. This is why at the time I referred to their partnership as a “coalition of vengeful whiners.” They’re not whining anymore, but the vengeance against their common enemies may have just begun.

It’s also possible that Trump has lifted Kennedy to his current position just to mess with the heads of his enemies by capturing a scion of the most famous family in Democratic politics — or worse yet, just to show he can get whoever he wants for any position confirmed (so far, Republican senators are proving his point by swallowing their concerns about the least-qualified Cabinet in American history and falling into line). In any event, a man who so recently looked politically like the roadkill he loves to eat is now riding high in Washington.