With Robert F. Kennedy Jr. poised to become the nation’s most powerful public health official, Inside the Hive is back and going deep on the leader of the MAHA movement. Host and Vanity Fair editor in chief Radhika Jones, executive editor Claire Howorth, and Hive editor Michael Calderone chart Kennedy’s path from Camelot to the halls of Congress, where he made no bones about carrying out Donald Trump’s radical agenda. Could this Democratic scion, at some point, become the true MAGA heir?
Before answering such a loaded question, Jones winds back the clock to help us understand just how America got here: In his earlier years, decades before COVID, Kennedy was a leading fixture of the anti-vax movement. And, as a once distinguished member of Democratic royalty, he’d long sought to build a reputation for himself as an environmentalist and a public health crusader. That, however, has always been complicated by his family’s vulnerability to scandal and tragedy, Jones notes. “It’s been more thanalmost 25 years since John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, and her sister died in a small plane crash,” she says. “RFK Jr. was nine when his uncle was assassinated and 14 when his dad was killed,” she says. “I mean, it’s a terrible thing to lose your uncle, lose your father, but also then to have the attention of the nation and the world on you…that was the situation in which he grew up.”
At the same time, Calderone argues, Kennedy has ridden his family’s mythos to the top. He “brings that whole cultural cachet of being a Kennedy while also amassing his own constituency around his views, which I want to say are fringe or conspiratorial in a lot of ways. I think they still are, but he’s somebody who has now risen to the position of potentially running a $1.8 trillion department of the US government, which would give him the power over the FDA, the NIH, the CDC. It’s an incredible position, and it’s one that he would be able [to use] to potentially put some of these conspiratorial views into action.”
As of now, little seems to stand in the way of Kennedy doing just that. The HHS nominee was rubber-stamped this week by the Senate Finance Committee, and is likely to clear a full Senate vote, with Republicans in the majority. Needless to say, the absence of GOP resistance has been stark.
What may have helped Kennedy sail through the process, Howorth argues, is that he’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. “We have the list of his policy here. And you have to admit, it’s really not objectionable-sounding,” she observes: “‘Level the playing field for Americans internationally on drug costs. Revisit pesticide and chemical-use standards. Issue new presidential fitness standards.’ That’s something Michelle Obama did…. These are real, real things. You know, taking conflicts of interest out…. So I find it hard to parse his stated policy with what we can expect, which is a lot of shit-stirring.”
Now, as we watch Kennedy run amok over the next four years on everything from abortion to infectious-disease policy, one big question will remain: what he’ll do after Trump. And Jones, for one, has a theory: “I think [Kennedy] is the most logical heir to Trump right now. I do. I think he’s got name recognition, he’s got fame, he’s got a constituency. He’s got a constituency not unlike Trump’s new one—that cuts across formerly pretty strong ideological barriers and he has the capacity to become more visible and grow that constituency and he has his name.”
