The poster boy for U.S. government disruption

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/02/2025 (241 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s difficult — and getting more so with each passing day — to get a handle on just exactly what Donald Trump is trying to achieve in his wildly chaotic second term as U.S. president.

But if there’s a single circumstance that aptly sums up the daily maelstrom that Trump-led U.S. politics has become, it might be the controversial effort to install Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the new administration’s secretary of health and human services.

In touting Kennedy — a polarizing figure with deep roots in the anti-vaccination movement and a long history of spreading misinformation and widely debunked conspiracy theories — as an appropriate choice to head America’s health infrastructure, Trump has effectively laid bare the three-pronged strategy that underpins much of what has transpired since his inauguration last month:

Disrupt. Distract. Dismantle.

Since beginning his second non-consecutive term as president (with the widening inclination of his loyalists being that their boss didn’t lose the 2020 election and therefore essentially never stopped being president), Trump has employed a chaos-by-design approach to governing, nominating for his cabinet a roster of individuals whose (lack of) qualifications and personal biases make them decidedly inappropriate for the roles he intends them to fill.

From original attorney-general pick Matt Gaetz, forced to withdraw after scrutiny of his checkered personal past became too intense, to anti-“woke” former Fox News commentator Pete Hegseth as defence secretary, to deep-state conspiracy theorist Kash Patel as head of the FBI, to former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, known for her sympathetic views toward foreign dictators, as director of national intelligence, Trump’s list of nominees seems mostly intended to embody his personal contempt for the government agencies he believes have mistreated him and to ensure the loyalty of those who lead federal departments is to Trump first and to processes and institutions second.

Assembling a rogues’ gallery of cabinet nominees has also served as a useful distraction of public scrutiny from many of the other outrageous actions Trump has taken, mostly through the issuance of masses of executive orders, since retaking control of the levers of power.

And it’s testament to the Republican Party’s recently-gained complete control of Congress, as well as the GOP’s outright acquiescence to Trump’s authoritarian whims, that he’s actually getting away with most of the egregious overreaches he has attempted.

Even the process to confirm Kennedy, a candidate so wildly unsuited to the role of health secretary that no right-thinking legislator could support his appointment, has advanced past the crucial Senate finance-committee stage. Members voted along party lines, 14-13, in favour of moving the issue to a full-Senate vote; among those in support was Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, a physician by trade and lifelong vaccine advocate who raised legitimate concerns about Kennedy’s qualifications but ultimately bent to Trump’s will.

Kennedy now sits one Senate-chamber vote away from gaining control of the United States’ massive health infrastructure. He deflected demands, during the hearing, that he must set aside his vaccine skepticism and prioritize the American public’s well-being; such a pledge would have been pointless anyway — if there’s one thing Trump has demonstrated during the entirety of his mercurial careers in business and politics, it’s that promises are meaningless when he’s in charge.

If installed — still not a guarantee, given the Republicans’ slim Senate majority and the possibility a few might briefly summon the spine to oppose this most outrageous of Trump’s cabinet picks — it’s almost certain Kennedy will wreak havoc in America’s health sector. He will disrupt; he will distract; he will dismantle.

In other words, exactly what his boss intends.