Earlier this week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told supporters on a Zoom call that Donald Trump pledged to give him control over the the federal government’s entire public-health apparatus. “The key that President Trump has promised me is control of the public health agencies, which are HHS and its sub-agencies, CDC, FDA, NIH, and a few others … and then also the USDA,” he said.

If Trump plans to entrust numerous federal agencies whose decisions hold millions of lives in the balance in the hands of a pure kook, it would be enormous news. Of course, the enormity of the news is tempered by the fact that the source of this alarming claim is that selfsame kook.

But Wednesday night, the prospect of this coming to pass became suddenly and terrifingly plausible.

CNN’s Kaitlin Collins interviewed Trump transition co-chair Howard Lutnick. Collins came in prepared to ask Lutnick about Kennedy’s wild-sounding claims about a high-level administration post. Instead, to Collins’s evident shock, Lutnick proceeded to reveal that he had spoken with Kennedy for more than two hours, and came away from the discussion converted to Kennedy’s deranged worldview and committed to a plan to operationalize........

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