Michael Shearer

It sort of echoed a lot of the liberal rhetoric that you now hear about President Trump.

And so one of the remarkable things about Kennedy is to get to where he is now, he had to square that.

He had to make the journey from thinking the Republican Party and its policy of appointing

former corporate executives to be energy secretary, for instance, which Trump did.

I mean, he serves now with an energy secretary who formerly worked for an oil company.

That was still part of this liberal crusade that Kennedy still believes he's fighting against entrenched power, corrupt bureaucracies, and sort of institutions that are... I mean, in the case of public health, quite literally, he believes killing kids or hurting kids.

And so...

That's a journey he took.

And we talked quite a bit about how he got from describing Trump as someone who preyed upon the darkest impulses of American history.

He was doing that in 2024 to standing on a stage in August of 2024 with Trump and endorsing his campaign and then spending the next several weeks fighting to get Trump elected.

Yeah, he admitted it was complicated.

And he said his relationship with Donald Trump is kind of like when you're dating a girl and you find out you keep liking her more and more.

I think that's right.

Yeah.

I mean, the simplest way to answer that question is that Kennedy decided—

that Trump was at heart not a conservative, but a populist.

So they were aligned in this sort of populist health crusade to break up the sort of established scientific view of how things like vaccines work, how chronic disease is approached, how chemicals are regulated.

I mean, there's a whole long list of things he's done at HHS since then.

And I think, you know, the simplest explanation for what he did was this was a transaction.

Trump was offering him power, real political power in his administration to make some of the changes that Kennedy had been arguing for for a long time.