RFK Jr.’s Lies Stain the Republic

We all know that it’s only a matter of time before a significant number of children in this country start dying of entirely preventable infectious diseases. That’s what happened in American Samoa in 2019, when 83 people, mostly children, died of measles after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. convinced authorities there to be skeptical of the vaccine.

Now Bobby’s bringing his rancid act from the island to the mainland, and it’s no coincidence that measles cases are up nearly fivefold so far this year over 2024. With Kennedy gutting the CDC and imposing his anti-vax views, we can expect to see more outbreaks. When Roald Dahl’s seven-year-old daughter died of measles in pre-vaccine Great Britain in 1962, it was a tragedy; today’s unnecessary deaths are more like sins.

Sins are moral failings that go beyond kookiness and unintentionally destructive idiocy. As I’ve written before, RFK Jr. is—like his boss—a person of poor moral character. He’s a serial liar, as senators conned by Kennedy at his confirmation hearings now seem to understand. But it’s a little more complicated than that. Kennedy’s mendacity—again, like Trump’s—is powered by projection.

In Thursday’s hearing, Sen. Maggie Hassan, who has a 36-year-old son with severe cerebral palsy, grilled Kennedy over his claim that everyone can get the COVID-19 vaccine. She noted that if the CDC doesn’t recommend a vaccine, most insurance companies won’t cover it. “Everybody can get the vaccine,” Kennedy insisted, though he admitted elsewhere in his testimony that it depends on which state you live in. Then, with Trumpian flair, he added: “You’re just making things up to scare people, and it’s a lie.”

Hassan didn’t miss a beat: “Sometimes an accusation is a confession.”

Touché. But amid all the acrimonious back-and-forth, ordinary Americans could be excused for not knowing who was lying. That’s intentional, and right from the Roy Cohn playbook that Trump learned decades ago. Cohn worked in the early 1950s for Senator Joseph McCarthy, as did a young and, at the time, conservative Robert F. Kennedy, whose namesake was born in 1954, the year of the Army-McCarthy hearings. That’s when the junior senator from Wisconsin was exposed by an attorney named Joseph Welch as a liar and creep, lacking any decency.

The RFK Jr. hearing had no such historic takedown. Our politics are too fraught for that. But there was one exchange when even an anti-vaxxer could see for sure that Kennedy was full of shit.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren was grilling him on why he fired CDC director Susan Monarez after saying a month ago that she was “unimpeachable” and highly qualified for her job.

Kennedy replied: “I told her that she had to resign because I asked her, ‘Are you a trustworthy person?’ and she said no.”

Warren was incredulous: “This is not what she has said publicly. So you’re saying she’s lying?”

Kennedy: “Yes.”

So let’s get this straight. Kennedy is saying that Monarez admitted to him in—what?—some kind of confession session that she was a really bad, untrustworthy person. He adds that Monarez then lied by writing in The Wall Street Journal that she was fired for refusing to go along with the recommendations of an advisory panel that Kennedy stacked with anti-vaxxers after firing the real scientists.

Whom to believe? Hmm…tough call.

Mark Twain once said that a lie makes it halfway around the world before the truth can get its pants on. Nowadays, it’s not just specific lies, but the shameless Trumpian pride in lying—the toxic projection of it onto innocent parties—that is metastasizing.

Senators in both parties grilled Kennedy not just because he’s harming public health. They resent him staining their institution with his disdain for them and for the truth.

Unfortunately, this may be the wave of the future. While Democrats, including members of Kennedy’s family, are calling for his resignation, polls of Republicans show that RFK Jr. is Trump’s most popular Cabinet secretary. He’s “tanned and jacked,” as an admiring Jesse Watters said on Fox last week, and almost certain to try again for the presidency.

In the 2028 GOP primaries, Bobby could do well against J.D. Vance, who is also a serial liar but lacks RFK Jr.’s bad-boy glamour and appeal to former Democrats. He’s also a tool—“Trump’s angry intern with a Wi-Fi connection,” as Brian Krassenstein, whom Vance cursed out on X, put it. You can bet that Trump—if he’s blocked from running himself, per the Constitution—will create mischief by toggling between them. That should be fun to watch, though it means that if the Democrats don’t get their act together, our long national nightmare may be only beginning.

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