Donald Trump’s team may already be having doubts about one of the most recent additions to its ranks: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Ahead of Trump’s victory in the presidential race Tuesday, Kennedy was already talking about his plans as head of the Department of Health and Human Services, including removing fluoride from the U.S. supply of drinking water. Trump has signaled that he would be open to the idea, even though experts say that fluoridation prevents people from getting life-threatening infections.
After Trump won, Kennedy did an ominous interview on MSNBC, where he was pressed about his personal skepticism about vaccines and how that might factor into his future role overseeing the Food and Drug Administration. Trump transition co-chair Howard Lutnick had previously claimed that Kennedy had plans to strip even long-standing vaccines from the market.
When backed into a corner, Kennedy claimed that he was “not going to take away anybody’s vaccines,” but, apparently, some in the Trump camp weren’t thrilled by the optics of the conversation.
“That is not what we want people focused on today,” a source close to Trump told CNN.
Inside Trump’s camp, it seems concerns reach much further than bad press. There have been discussions that Kennedy would not pass a background check to obtain security clearance for his Cabinet-level position.
“If you dump a bear in Central Park and think you’re above the law, you don’t want to have to go through that gauntlet of political correctness,” one former Trump official who’d been briefed on those discussions told CNN.
In August, it was revealed that Kennedy had found a baby bear carcass in upstate New York and then dumped the carcass in Central Park because he ran out of time to dispose of it before going to the airport and thought staging it was funny. Kennedy has also gotten into trouble for chain-sawing the head off a beached whale.
He’s three months from taking the Oval Office, but Americans are already feeling the hurt from Donald Trump’s economic policies.
Home loan interest rates saw a sharp spike Thursday to nearly a 6.8 percent average for 30-year fixed mortgages, marking a startling shift for a country on the precipice of an aggressive new administration.
“That’s going in the wrong direction,” reported CNN’s Matt Egan. “That is happening because the bond market is getting more optimistic about the economy, but also starting to price in the trillions of dollars in debt that could get added from Trump’s plans to cut taxes.”
The Federal Reserve cut its key interest rate by a quarter point on Thursday as it shifts its focus from fighting inflation to preserving the current job market. The cut follows a half-point reduction that arrived in September. During a press conference, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said that Trump’s election would “have no effects” on the central bank’s policymaking decisions “in the near term.”
Trump has promised to tackle inflation by imposing extreme tax cuts and tariffs. The MAGA leader has floated several tariff ideas—including one impossibly high hike on imported goods of between 200 and 2,000 percent. Businesses across the country have balked at his numbers, arguing that it will be Americans, not foreign countries, who pay the price. Readying themselves for a second Trump administration, companies whose business models rely on foreign suppliers—from the auto industry to some of the nation’s most popular clothing lines—are already planning to introduce price hikes on their products.
“We’re set to raise prices,” Timothy Boyle, chief executive of Columbia Sportswear, told The Washington Post. “We’re buying stuff today for delivery next fall. So we’re just going to deal with it and we’ll just raise the prices.… It’s going to be very, very difficult to keep products affordable for Americans.”
But that’s not what Trump has advertised to Americans. During an Economic Club of Chicago interview with Bloomberg News editor in chief John Micklethwait last month, Trump promised that American wallets would be relieved by the policy.
“The countries will pay,” he insisted, promising that it would encourage more companies to produce products inside the United States.
Trump has also proposed a more modest 20–60 plan, in which his second term would impose a 20 percent worldwide tariff alongside a 60 percent tariff on Chinese goods. But even that plan would prove devastating for the economy, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, which found that it would lower household incomes by an average of $3,000 in 2025.
In a joint letter released last month, nearly two dozen Nobel Prize–winning economists formally warned against Trump’s economic plan, arguing that the MAGA leader’s stiff tariff increases and tax cuts would spell disaster for the average American.
“His policies, including high tariffs even on goods from our friends and allies and regressive tax cuts for corporations and individuals, will lead to higher prices, larger deficits, and greater inequality,” the 23 economists wrote. “Among the most important determinants of economic success are the rule of law and economic and political........