Washington Update From a DC Insider - January, 2025

[Mike McKenna is a long-time analyst/advisor/polling professional in Washington, DC. Also a former Trump staffer, he currently writes op/eds for the Washington Times. He sends out comprehensive state-of-play reports to a select email distribution, and allows me to share them with paid subscribers here. This is his report for January, 2025.]

From: Mike

Date: January 22, 2025

Re: Monthly Note

Let’s start with a few thoughts about the new administration.

Robert Kennedy

Imagine for a moment that the president nominates someone to lead the Department of Health and Human Services and introduces him as a person who will fight against food processing companies and pharmaceutical companies and who believes that: “For too long, Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex (whatever that means) and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation when it comes to public health.”

Let’s also imagine this person’s professional resume includes all of the following:

- Advocating against modern agricultural practices, which, as a practical matter, means advocating for doubling the price of food and ensuring that American farmers will no longer be able to export American-grown food to a hungry planet.

- Working to enrich trial lawyers (probably because he is one);

- Describing the man who nominated him as “. . . a terrible human being. Probably the worst president ever and barely human. He is probably a sociopath.”

- Stating that as part of the administration, he will be able to clear a pathway for more mass tort lawsuits against businesses and stating that “once we have the good science out there, the litigators will come in and solve the problem.”

- Launching a war on crop protection products, farm market supports, and the agricultural policies that help ensure Americans have the most productive agricultural sector on this planet;

- Saying in 2001 that “Osama Bin Laden and his terrorist network are less of a threat to the American people than the U.S. hog industry;” and

- Wanting a law to "punish" people who are skeptical of or deny global warming (not sure what it means to “deny” or be “skeptical” of global warming, but . . .).

Finally, let’s imagine that this nominee is so far off the fairway that the president who nominated him has to reassure everyone that the nominee is “rational” and will keep strictly to matters within the jurisdiction of health and human services. It is probably easier to imagine that a committed advocate will almost immediately connect agriculture and environmental issues to health issues.