The businessman-in-chief has created and improved properties from Scotland to Palm Beach, Los Angeles, Dubai and the Bronx.
Here in Manhattan, his crown jewel, Trump Tower, shines darkly outside my hotel room on Fifth Avenue. It is the building in which he and now First Lady Melania rode the escalator down into history.
But if the courts allow, he will continue building and accumulating businesses worth billions from bitcoin to social media to golden bibles.
He is also hell-bent on breaking stuff. Mostly stuff within and adjacent to the federal government, like the CDC, our long-established, trusted government watchdog agency that has set the standards for medicine outside the realm of politics. Just take a quick look at what the President has done this week.
Technically, the creator and arbiter of some of these developments is not the president but his Health and Human Services secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr.
With the president’s approval and encouragement, advice and consent, Secretary Kennedy has started dismantling the medical establishment in a way that makes it seem as if crazy college kids have taken control.
Many of those mostly younger voters dig RFK Jr. He has the Kennedy look, speech, and pedigree. What he does not have is the Kennedy family blessing. He is a pariah, traitor and kook to his family.
Regardless, he is, by virtue of his lofty appointment, the most important man in American medicine these days. He is an environmental lawyer, not a doctor, but RFK Jr. leads an army of mostly young counter-culture skeptics, podcasters, and conspiracy theorists who have approved Kennedy’s embrace of an anti-establishment attitude that calls into question established norms.
He is perhaps the nation’s leading vaccine skeptic, and he has led the way to exacerbating parents’ fears about a purported link between vaccines and autism. By embracing even weirder conspiracy theories, many believe he has put public health in jeopardy.
For example, Kennedy has expressed support for the theory that fluoride in water leads to gender dysphoria. He also believes, apparently, that antidepressant use by adolescent young men is what has led to the epidemic of mass violence and school shootings. He does not believe that AIDS is caused by the HIV virus.
Because he is a Kennedy and almost automatically believable, his dumb idea about that AIDS/HIV denialism undermines established medical theory that AIDS is a sexually transmitted disease. Any advice that suggests otherwise will inevitably cause damage.
His moves to undo established medical precedent are opposed by 75 Nobel Laureates and condemned by both the American Medical Association and the American Public Health Association.
President Trump is not fazed. He has endorsed everything Bobby has wrought, including turning a blind eye to the recent firing and resignations of top scientists and administrators at the CDC, all of whom believe, contrary to Bobby, that vaccines do work.
Still, Trump has undercut the CDC by allowing Bobby to destroy the careers of these scientists and administrators, among the most respected in their field.
Another government role that has traditionally been left to experts is the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.
That is the body that sets interest rates and controls inflation. The last thing the Federal Reserve needs is a political operator in charge. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell has fended off the president so far, but Powell has lost one of his associates, Fed Governor Lisa Cook, who has been fired supposedly because of irregularities in a mortgage application she took out years ago.
Trump could just let her pay off the damn thing and make it go away, but she is a Democrat and Trump is purging as many of them as he can still in government.
He’s doing the same thing in the Bureau of Labor Statistics and other government agencies. He is interfering with the proper functioning of FEMA, tariffs, and windmills.
Since that windmill mention made me think of Don Quijote, let me end with that image of President Trump on a swayback horse with an old wooden lance broken at the top, about to joust with windmills, and break stuff in Washington.
