After months of the Trump Administration running roughshod over federal agencies, there are signs of a backlash at the CDC. The national medical agency saw a mass walkout on Thursday in protest of RFKJR’s firing of Susan Monarez, the Trump-appointed director.
Before the election, I heard people pooh-poohing the possibility that RFKJR would become Secretary of Health and Human Services. On the chance that he would take office, they doubted that he would be much of a problem.
“What’s the worst he could do?” they asked.
CDC's Roybal campus in Atlanta, Georgia-Wikimedia/Public domain
As it turns out, he can do quite a bit of damage in only a few months. Together with DOGE, RFK laid off thousands of health workers, replaced members of a vaccine advisory committee with his anti-vax cronies, and canceled hundreds of millions of dollars of research into cures for diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s. (As a cancer survivor and friend and family member of other cancer sufferers, I’m particularly miffed about this.) RFK claimed that a measles outbreak could be treated with vitamins and was silent when an anti-vax gunman attacked the CDC campus in Atlanta. When he finally did speak. It was to criticize the agency for its handling of the pandemic.
Fast-forward to this week when RFK announced the firing of Monarez, ostensibly for not supporting Trump’s agenda, but more specifically for failing to rubber stamp a vaccine policy that that contradicted scientific evidence.
After her dismissal, three other CDC leaders resigned into protest. In a statement for the officials, lawyers said in a statement, “When CDC Director Susan Monarez refused to rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts, she chose protecting the public over serving a political agenda. For that reason, she has been targeted.”
Initially, there was some dispute as to whether she has been fired or not. RFK has named his deputy, Jim O’Neill, as interim head of the agency, but Monarez disputed that the HHS head has the authority to fire her since she was appointed by Trump and confirmed by the Senate. Ultimately, the White House did fire her.
The problems of electing Trump and appointing RFK should have been obvious, especially when paired with a Republican majority that is the rubber stamp that Susan Monarez refused to be. Nevertheless, we are stuck with the combination for the time being. Trump and RFK are playing to the anti-vax, anti-science MAGA base.
We get the government we deserve.
The fate of Susan Monarez is likely to be the fate of any honest and competent federal employee who refuses to compromise their principles. There’s not much we can do about it at the moment beyond lambasting Republican congressmen and supporting their challengers in the midterms.
For the next four years, we aren’t going to be able to trust federal health guidelines and recommendations, particularly if they’ve been recently changed. Get a good, experienced doctor to consult with them regularly. Follow tried and true preventive guidelines.
And if your doctor is an anti-vaxxer, get a new one. The evidence for vaccine safety and effectiveness is so strong that being anti-vax calls the rest of their qualifications into question. And yes, that includes COVID vaccines.
I think the CDC leaders who resigned did the right thing, and I hope that others follow their example. That is a tough thing to say because unemployment is not fun, but neither is selling your soul to bosses who are undermining national health efforts. If I was a federal employee, I’d be networking and building an escape plan.
America needs competent officials, but competent officials cannot do their jobs when they are undermined from the top. Federal employees should do their jobs the best they can, and when they can’t, they should resign like Monarez and the other CDC leaders.
America voted for Trumpism. We’re going to get the full effect of it. Hopefully, that will inoculate us from ever electing another authoritarian, MAGA or otherwise.
Ironically, having competent cabinet officials in Trump’s first Administration kept him from acting on his worst impulses. This time around, there are few, if any, such adult voices. We have an Administration full of RFKs.
The big news this week is the Cracker Barrel rebrand. By “big news,” I mean that’s what people are talking about, not necessarily that it’s important or impactful. I’m not going to write about that, except in passing.
Over the past decade or so, I’ve watched the Republican Party morph into something unrecognizable. The once-principled party now seems to have none except to be reflexively anti-Democrat and pro-Trump. That doesn’t really go far enough. The GOP has done more than abandon its core values. They have become what they professed to hate.
Take the Cracker Barrel kerfuffle as a prominent recent example (here’s the passing mention). For most critics, the rebrand is derided as “woke,” yet the biggest and most common complaints are the sign and logo changes that coincided with the onset of the dissent. While some have criticized the company’s DEI policies, which might be extended to include dropping a decade-long ban on gay employees in 2001, which seem pretty tame and average compared to other companies, most complaints that I have seen focus on the logo and interior redesign.
I mention Cracker Barrel as an example because it is representative of the MAGA cancel culture. From the MAGA perspective, “everything I don’t like is woke,” and everything woke is worse than anything the Republicans might do. For them, it’s a holy war to preserve what they see as American and Christian culture.
But American culture includes minorities, liberals, and gays. And Christian culture is not about forcing others to abide by our moral beliefs.
Or it shouldn’t be. If we look to Christ’s example, he sat down with sinners to reach them through his love. Rejecting sin is a consequence of coming to Christ, not a prerequisite. As the psalmist wrote, “As I learn your righteous regulations, I will thank you by living as I should” (Psalm 119:7 NLT - cue the outcry that the NLT is woke).
Right-wing cancel culture has a pretty long pedigree at this point. Aside from the crusade against Bud Light, there have been attacks on the NFL, Disney, Target, and others. Even Chick-fil-A has been accused of going “woke.”
To me, it seems to be exhausting to be as angry all the time as activists on both sides tend to be. I don’t have the time, energy, or interest to vet every company I do business with for ideological purity.
My personal feeling is that the Cracker Barrel angst is largely another installment in the Outrage du Jour genre. The right-wing Outrage and cancel culture industry is a sleight of hand. In large part, it is an attempt to keep the base angry and distracted from what the Trump Administration is doing.
And what is the Trump Administration up to? One of the Administration’s most prominent activities is mismanaging the economy and raising prices. The producer price index (PPI) jumped sharply in July, and a third of businesses say they plan to increase prices within the next few months. Tariffs, the large number of immigrant deportations, and a number of other factors are placing upward pressure on prices and could cause a return of inflation.
The Republican fervor for high taxes is another way that the party has become its enemy. As I’ve pointed out numerous times before, and as Republicans used to point out in the past, tariffs are taxes, and taxes are paid by the end user. In the case of Trump’s tariffs, that is going to be the American consumer.
And then there is Trump’s effective nationalization of an increasing number of companies. The trend began with a “golden share” of US Steel and was quickly followed by the DOD taking a stake in MP Materials, a rare earths company. These adventures in socialism have now been followed by the government taking a 10 percent stake in chip-maker Intel. Again, Republicans, who were extremely upset over Zohran Mamdani’s proposal for city-owned grocery stores, are fine with Trump’s federal socialism (or fascism to be technically correct, since the government is increasingly planning and controlling the economy, but private ownership is at least partially retained).
They have become what they hate.
Next on the list is another story from last week, the lawfare against former Trump advisor John Bolton. On Friday, the FBI searched the home of the former national security advisor-turned-Trump critic for alleged retention of classified documents. It seems likely that the raid was both retribution for his betrayal of Trump as well as a warning to other Trump critics. If there is actual wrongdoing on Bolton’s part, the FBI should make it clear as soon as possible, or else the reputation of the agency will be irreversibly tarnished.
It shouldn’t be lost on observers that unlawful retention of classified documents was exactly what led to the raid on Mar-a-Lago. In that case, the National Archives had sought the return of documents taken by Trump for months before the former president’s obfuscation and obstruction led them to refer the matter to the FBI.
They have become what they hate.
Beyond lawfare is the growing police state. In many American cities, masked officers, often without uniforms or badges, tackle people in the streets. Detainees, often legal immigrants, are disappeared into the system by an Administration that says due process is not a requirement. If this were the ATF or FBI, Republicans would be apoplectic, but since it’s ICE, they are okay with it.
They have become what they hate.
Several of the policies advanced by the Trump Administration were formerly in the province of right-wing conspiracy theories. The most obvious example is the Epstein files. For years, MAGA influencers connected everyone they didn’t like to the Epstein files, and Trump promised to release them if he was re-elected. Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed the files were on her desk, but they somehow disappeared after Trump was briefed that he appeared prominently in the documents.
Jeffrey Epstein and child-molesting, sex-trafficking Satan worshippers have figured prominently in right-wing conspiracy theories since the Pizzagate conspiracy of 2016. Now, MAGA has lost interest in the Epstein files, and some openly say they don’t care ifTrump is a child molester.
They have become what they hate.
Other conspiracies are coming true as well. I’m old enough to remember the anxiety over Jade Helm and the fear that Barack Obama was going to invade Texas in 2015. I lived in Texas at the time, and there were rumors that a closed Walmart near my town was one of several stores being converted into concentration camps. The concentration camp rumors reappeared during the pandemic as well, when a lot of right-wing influencers were adamant that pandemic restrictions would never be lifted.
Fast-forward to 2025, and we not only have concentration camps, but we also have the military occupation of our capital city. “Alligator Alcatraz” in Florida and another large ICE deportation camp at Fort Bliss, Texas, fit the definition of concentration camps. The Texas camp, officially called Camp East Montana but nicknamed the “Lone Star Lockup,” was used as an internment camp for Japanese-Americans in World War II. Both shame and irony die hard.
It should be noted that not all concentration camps are death camps, although we have come to equate the two after the Holocaust. In a simple definition, the term means “an isolated, circumscribed site with fixed structures designed to incarcerate civilians,” per Oxford Academic, i.e., to concentrate them in one place. In many cases, concentration camps house political prisoners or oppressed minorities, which is also somewhat fitting here since many detained immigrants have not been accused of crimes.
They have become what they hate.
And then there is the occupation of Washington, DC. The deployment of the National Guard was uniquely legal in the federal district, even if under false pretenses, but the federal crackdown on crime has yielded more immigration arrests than anything else. There is no tolerance for immigrant food delivery drivers by federal agents, but the National Guard troops are reportedly bored and far away from criminal hot spots. Their deployment may be more of a show of force for tourists than an attack on crime.
The bigger problem may be yet to come. Trump does have limited authority to take control of the District, but he has threatened both a “complete and total Federal takeover of the City” in response to complaints from the mayor, as well as a similar occupation of Chicago and other cities.
Remember that this is not a conspiracy theory. This is the president talking. And Republicans are fine with it.
They have become what they hate.
If Trump does move against Chicago, it will cross a major red line since US law generally prohibits the use of the military for domestic law enforcement. Trump’s plan may be to provoke violence that he can use to trigger the Insurrection Act. In any case, if Trump orders the occupation of Chicago, other cities will almost certainly follow.
I sincerely hope that this scenario does not come to fruition, but what we’ve seen so far is Trump pushing the boundaries of his emergency authority, and neither Congress nor the courts stopping him. He is likely to continue pushing until he meets resistance.
That brings us back to Cracker Barrel. The furor over the chain is partly to generate clicks and keep Republican voters engaged, but it’s also a distraction to keep all of us focused on a triviality while the sinister stuff plays out elsewhere.
I have to conclude that for most Republicans, it wasn’t a matter of believing in constitutional and limited government principles. For most, it seems to have been more of a matter of who got to be in charge of the authoritarian government. If the government is oppressing people they don’t like, they’re fine with it.
When the dust settles, MAGA may have triumphed over wokism at the cost of destroying the Republic. They’ll probably be okay with that… until the crocodile eats them.
