MAHA Is No Longer Useful to Trump

21:22David Wallace-Wells:Yeah. I mean, it's interesting this sort of the way that this idea about public health as this important collective endeavor kind of feels like it's gone away. I don't know, maybe not. But this very individual health focus, it seems to have evolved beyond a response to COVID to now this sort of obsession with you. Tressie, you've written about personal health, the kind of aesthetics of health. Where do you think that's coming from now? Is it still related to COVID or is it kind of evolving into something else?

21:57Tressie McMillan Cottom:I think the easiest way to answer, I think there are a couple of things happening, but I think the most macro trend in all of the data that you see about people's shifting political position vis-a-vis health decisions, really the biggest answer there is that gender matters a lot. You know, there's this wonderful sociological data that followed women, particularly mothers, across COVID and like a couple of years after. And one of the things I found fascinating in this was that a lot of what we would think of as like vaccine hesitancy among moms, you know, if you just ask them on a survey whether or not they had questions about vaccines, you would say, oh, they're vaccine hesitant.

22:34Tressie McMillan Cottom:But then, you know, they're liberal or they're well-educated. And, you know, and then you'd have these questions and it would make it seem like, right, that there was this sort of like growing anxiety about vaccines. But when you did the qualitative analysis and you followed up with them, what you found was that they felt increasingly responsible for their children's health in every way imaginable and wholly unprepared to manage it. If my child has autism, nobody's blaming the father. Why didn't I do X? And that a lot of what you were seeing was an undue amount of expectation, specifically on motherhood, to manage the fracturing of our health care system.

23:16Tressie McMillan Cottom:And women who were educated enough to know what they didn't know, trying to ask questions in a system that is not set up to treat women seriously. And so in that conundrum, it looked like you were vaccine hesitant when, in fact, it was just that you were never supposed to be managing the vaccine schedule or the biological future of your children. Right. That this was never supposed to be an individual endeavor. I think that that has probably impacted women's understanding of helping something that they are personally, morally responsible for. And then you add on to that all of the status benefits of looking healthful, of looking like you are making the right moral health choices for yourself and for your family.

24:03Tressie McMillan Cottom:And then we do what it is we always do, which then an economy appears to help you solve that problem, right? It's not enough to be healthy. You have to look healthy. And then it's not enough to look healthy. You have to look like you're trying to be healthier. And then you need to have really healthy children who also care about health. and that they also look healthy, right? And again, these are not things that by and large we are asking of men, right? We are asking this mostly of mothers. And I think that then becomes a thread through how all of our medical decisions then become to be understood, not just as individual consumer choices, but individual responsibility, right?

24:42Alexandra Sifferlin:I mean, not only all that, you also have to sell something to your audience.

24:46Tressie McMillan Cottom:That's right.

24:46Alexandra Sifferlin:So that they can live as beautifully and happily as you do. That's exactly it, yeah. Don't forget that part. But there is, as you mentioned earlier also, there is the male side of it, right? So you were just talking, I think, quite beautifully and profoundly about the way that pressures on women through this period have produced some of this pathology, this social pathology. On the male side, I think it's really quite clear. It's like these people are playing a game of social Darwinism. They do not care for the weak. They're happy to see the weak die. And then when you look at the genuine avatars of Maha on the male avatars, it is not about looking healthy.

25:27Alexandra Sifferlin:It's looking like...

25:29Tressie McMillan Cottom:What is that look?

25:31Alexandra Sifferlin:I mean, it's professional wrestling. And I mean, truly, it is like I sort of made a crack about it earlier. But the fact that like RFK Jr. puts himself forward as an icon of health. Have you seen a photo of him at 40? He does not look like that. He did not look like that 30 years ago. He has completely remade his body in ways that strike me as like quite off-putting. But the, I mean, if you see him in like jeans and a hot tub, even more so.

26:02Tressie McMillan Cottom:I actually have forgotten that image and I don't appreciate being reminded. Yeah.

26:07Alexandra Sifferlin:But he's also, I mean, you know, I don't want to, like, rag too much. It's like he can't even lift that much weight. He just looks, like, really huge.

26:16Tressie McMillan Cottom:I actually think we should say that more. I think it's a favor.

26:21Alexandra Sifferlin:But, you know, the story that's being told by his body and by the body of many men like him is not about fitness even. Yeah. It's about monstrousness. monstrousness. Like these people are meant to be threatening. They are meant to be intimidating. And that is a aesthetic value that has grown much more powerful over the last decade, as I think in the Trump era, the right wing has gotten much more explicitly acquisitive, competitive, unapologetic about its claims on the rest of the world, any resources, etc. etc. It's a very, very dog-eat-dog worldview. And the way that that descends on the individual is to coach them to be warriors in a time of, you know, they would say, like, whatever, soy boys.

27:20Tressie McMillan Cottom:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I just read about, you know, RFK Jr. wanting to create a men's health division as if, you know, the majority of medical science had not been developed for the health and well-being of men, but by which he meant it was to make testosterone more freely available, right? To David's point that this very limited, narrow view of male health is just performative aesthetics of, I love this, of monstrosity. Whereas I think it is very different what is happening on the other side with women. And we conflate the two, I think, in a way that hides what I think might be the most strident fissure of the Maha movement, which is that one may be going about you know, managing their health risk in a way that is not pro-social.

28:06Tressie McMillan Cottom:But the other is quite actively trying to destroy the idea of social and its performance of health. And along the way, are making it virtually impossible for the women of their own camp to do what it is their charge to do, to perform motherhood effectively. And to my mind, it's a coalition that cannot hold, but it's also a coalition that they are not very devoted to either. I don't think that the men of Maha are very devoted to the female faction.

28:34Alexandra Sifferlin:Well, one way of combining them would just be to say that's patriarchy.

28:38Tressie McMillan Cottom:Yes.

28:39Alexandra Sifferlin:I mean, the men are supposed to be warriors, and the women are supposed to be beautiful, eternally youthful wives.

28:46David Wallace-Wells:You know, you talked about the things like testosterone and the things that Kennedy is personally into. I was hoping you could help me make sense of this sort of pushback against more established medications and treatments like vaccines and this embrace of unregulated substances like peptides that people are buying online from places like China. They don't really know what's in them, but they're willing to inject themselves with these substances.

29:20Alexandra Sifferlin:Yeah, we can't buy EVs from China, but we'll buy market peptides.

29:25David Wallace-Wells:What is going on?

29:28Tressie McMillan Cottom:I mean, I think of it as the merger of like what I call everyday eugenics, which is this idea that you can kind of retroactively self-select your genetic superiority. And then just the nihilism of where I think individual choice will lead a person, right? That there is something inherently superior about me choosing to do it that overrides all of the unknowns, that overrides all of the risk, that the real problem a lot of people have, I think in particular men, have with a vaccine schedule is that it was decided by someone else. It is a locus of external control. And that, no, but if I choose the peptide, right, then it is obviously superior despite the fact.

30:10Tressie McMillan Cottom:So, again, it is flattering to one's sense of self as being able to make complex scientific decisions. You know, there are these wonderful studies about people, you know, where they talk about, you know, I do my own research. Of which, listen, people I love are among those groups of people. I won't name them, but hello, mother. You know, who are very proud of having done their own research, right? But then you get down to them of what was their research process, right? And of course, they don't mean what we mean by the scientific method and debate and falsifiability and et cetera. I mean, they read lots of things, but it is very flattering to one's sense of self.

30:46Tressie McMillan Cottom:I think especially if you feel like you don't have a lot of control to think that if you just read enough, right, if you read a summary of those complicated studies, that you can draw meaningful inferences that are not much different from a scientist or a medical doctor. And so you add that to, I think, the egotism of looking smarter, having the superior genes and the superior physical strength or power or looks maxing or whatever it is at any given point in time. And then you go, well, yeah, I did my research and I chose the peptide.

31:18Alexandra Sifferlin:I agree with all that a couple small things I would add one is that um I think one thing that people find offensive about vaccines but also anything that you'd compare them to is that everybody gets the same one that's right it's the DMV principle you are equal before the vaccine that's right and if this the principle of equality offends you yep you will rebel. And I think that is one big part of what has happened here is everybody wants a personal advantage because they can't tolerate being told they are just like everybody else, vulnerable like everybody else, and only entitled to the same protection as everybody else, not more.

32:01Alexandra Sifferlin:It's also the case that we're not just seeing individuals striking out on their own. We're seeing them withdraw trust from one set of people and then extend them to another set of people. If you think about what the wellness influencer universe is, that's not a map of distrust. It's just a map of distrust to people who work at the New York Times. It's like people trust Andrew Huberman quite a lot. And so much that they're willing to take drugs that are not approved by any regulatory body, but they're willing to forego all of that, overlook all of that, because they trust the person who sent them there.

32:44Alexandra Sifferlin:And so I think we sometimes get into a little bit of a tangle when we talk about this question in terms of the decline of trust, when in fact what we're really seeing is something more like trust transference. And that may be in certain ways scarier because it's not just about drawing individuals back into the fold. They are already allied with a whole new knowledge system, which operates according to a completely different set of principles, which is to say often like entrepreneurial principles.

33:13Tressie McMillan Cottom:Yeah, I was, yeah. And when you start talking about them, we've talked about this before, when you start talking about withdrawing trust and transferring it to another entity, what you're talking about, it's a market. And what is fundamentally beneath wellness influencers, I think in particular, is that you don't solve people's problems. You create a new market for them, right? Well, that market is not just competing with the other wellness influencers. It is also competing with the CDC, right? I think it's important to keep in mind that what is being done here is for most people, it's being done for profit.

33:45Tressie McMillan Cottom:That means there is no profit in solving the problem and saying, well, the CDC has figured it out. We got this great vaccine schedule or this is how we address high blood pressure. Or, hey, everybody doesn't need a testosterone shot. That forecloses on a market. So, yes, not just the moving the trust from one to the other. It is doing it to maximize whether it's attention or it is profit seeking. And these days they are roughly the same. Yes.

34:12David Wallace-Wells:I wanted to talk just a little bit about Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the man.

34:16Tressie McMillan Cottom:Oh.

34:17David Wallace-Wells:The myth. The lynch. I'm curious if you guys think of him as sort of a true believer in his causes or as more of a sort of politically or otherwise motivated figure.

34:35Alexandra Sifferlin:What do you think? You know, I guess I think that if he really believed that vaccines in particular were as damaging as he was saying three and six and eight years ago before he was really in public life, if you really believe that they were as damaging as he was saying then, and he was put in a position of this centrality and power and only did as much as he has done to diminish our faith in vaccines. and attack the vaccine schedule, that would be a huge failure for him. And so I think the fact that he has accommodated himself to this political moment, navigated the landscape, and solved the contradiction, the contradiction being he believes vaccines are bad, the country believes vaccines are good, the fact that he has solved that contradiction by vaguely raising doubts, suppressing vaccine uptake by a couple of percentage points, that to me suggests someone who is more a grifter than a true believer.

35:44Alexandra Sifferlin:I do think he believes in his core that institutions are corrupt, elites are paid off, and big pharma and big ag don't have the interests of Americans in their heart. I think he believes that, but I believe that. I mean, it's not a weird set of things to believe. The thing that I don't believe is that, you know, vaccines cause autism and, you know, we shouldn't be giving hep B vaccines to children. Those are the things that he purports to believe. But if he really believed them and had only achieved as much as he had achieved, He'd have to be, you know, shrinking from D.C. as a miserable failure rather than someone who's trying to hold together a shape-shifting coalition with every ounce of political, you know, capacity that he has.

36:37Tressie McMillan Cottom:Yeah, I think all of it and all of them are scam artists. And, I mean, I was looking for an exception and I don't have many. And I also, like, I tend to, you know, I've got this, like, ontological position on whether or not, you know, I don't know. I don't know if I care so much about what he believes in. Because should he have stayed just, you know, RFK Jr., if he'd have done whatever it is the Kennedy thing is you're responsible for doing, meaning a quasi-private person with a public family institution behind him, and believed whatever he wanted? I might think it's somewhat interesting to try to figure out whether or not he really believes it.

37:13Tressie McMillan Cottom:At the moment, he becomes, however, a political actor. and his decisions impact other people's ability to make good decisions for themselves, then I think the only thing that matters is what has he been willing to do. And what he's been willing to do is to further ideas, questions, doubts that fundamentally make us weaker and more vulnerable and some of us sicker and more likely to die. I don't even really care too much about what he actually believes because the stakes of that, try more seriously, are so high that even if he were a true believer, it would make him more monstrous, not less. And so, yeah, but I tend to just think he's mostly a scam artist.

37:59Alexandra Sifferlin:One more thing, just quickly, about him and his character and his public character is I think a lot about how different the world we'd be living in right now and how different this conversation would be on stage tonight if Trump had made RFK Jr. the head of the EPA.

38:15Tressie McMillan Cottom:Uh-huh, yeah.

38:16Alexandra Sifferlin:Or even the head of the FDA.

38:18Tressie McMillan Cottom:Mm-hmm.

38:19Alexandra Sifferlin:Or the head of the Department of Agriculture.

38:21Tressie McMillan Cottom:Yeah.

38:21Alexandra Sifferlin:Those would have been causes in which he had conspiratorial views. He has, you know, I think, non-scientific perspectives. Some power. But his instincts are more in line with science and much more in line with public opinion. Mm-hmm. And so it wouldn't have been nearly as politically difficult for him to, at least on the public side of things, achieve real concrete gains that he might have been celebrated for. Instead, Trump made the opposite choice and put him in a kind of impossible situation, trusting that Bobby could navigate his way out of it. And I think the ultimate, as always, like Trump miscalculated, made a short-term decision that he thought would benefit him and it's coming at a long-term cost to his own political popularity.

39:10David Wallace-Wells:So there's been a lot of attention paid to the Hantavirus outbreak. And while there's a lot of uncertainty, and I'm not saying it's going to be a huge thing, it is raising this question, I think, of what might happen should Kennedy be in a position where he does actually have to lead the country through something like a serious pandemic or some kind of novel virus. And I'm curious if this is keeping you up at night.

39:41Alexandra Sifferlin:I mean, I think I should say as a first note that I don't think that the Hantavirus is likely to take off in the ways that have animated our nightmares since COVID. There are too many reasons to think that it will be spreading too slowly for anything like a global takeover to happen. So what we're dealing with is a public health threat of a distinctly smaller scale, which is nevertheless quite scary because the strain that we're dealing with kills somewhere between 30 % and 40 % of those people who are infected. And because at no point along the timeline of the last month has any public health official, whether in America or internationally, I think really done a very good job of communicating about the risk or building a sort of set of protocols or infrastructure that would allow us to really contain it.

40:38Alexandra Sifferlin:I think we're in a really bad spot there. I don't think that we have control over this disease. I think it's likely to continue spreading and ultimately killing more people and that those infections and those deaths were avoidable. The degree to which that's an international problem or an American problem, I think there's a lot of blame to go around. I don't think the WHO has handled itself very well here. But I will say that we are, as a country, staring this down so ill-equipped. I mean, literally, the cabinet, literally like the health cabinet is bare. Marty Makary just quit today. There's no head of the CDC.

41:17Alexandra Sifferlin:There's no head of the FDA.

41:19Tressie McMillan Cottom:What's been done to the CDC, I mean, alone?

41:21Alexandra Sifferlin:Thousands of people fired. I mean, it's completely, you know, and the person who's nominally in charge of the American public health response is actually not RFK, really. He's not really been paying much attention. It's Jay Bhattacharya, who's the head of the NIH and technically the acting director of the CDC. And this is a man who last fall wrote an essay in the City Journal in which he said that the United States should scrap its pandemic playbook because the best pandemic preparedness was to make America healthy again. Now, I would like to see Americans cut their BMI. I would like to see us have less chronic disease.

41:58Alexandra Sifferlin:But that is not the job of the NIH or the CDC or HHS in the face of the new virus. And I don't think any of these people take their role seriously because, again, they think of the world in social Darwinist eugenicist terms. Yeah, they think they will survive. That's right.

42:15Tressie McMillan Cottom:Yeah, yeah.

42:15Alexandra Sifferlin:Now, I don't think that means that any of these people want to see 10 million Americans die. But I also don't think that they care that much if a few more people die that didn't need to die, if the logic of that was that they were allowing more able-bodied people to move around more freely and unencumbered. These are people who take that deal after generations of public health officials would have insisted on the opposite deal. And that's not comforting in the least.

42:45Tressie McMillan Cottom:Yeah. When you think about what's happened at the CDC, which I do think about quite a lot, it's not just, you know, the pushing out the head of the CDC. It is what has happened to like the two tiers of scientists and institutional knowledge below the sort of executive level and how that has been gutted. In the same way you see other, you know, government institutions gutted in the same way. But in science, because science is so path dependent, right, and it is so cumulative that when you lose that, you're not just losing, you know, sort of like basic, you know, human power, labor power. You really are losing sort of the consensus upon which science has a system to refine.

43:25Tressie McMillan Cottom:And what those scientists will tell you, many of whom have become for the first time in their professional lives advocates or think of themselves now as having to be far more radical than they'd ever thought they would have to be. What they would tell you is that it is not a matter of if we will have another pandemic event. It is a matter of when. Right. And so the question becomes, what is our risk tolerance politically for having people who not only don't believe in the science, but don't believe in the institutional production of any sort of public knowledge, but also have an overinflated sense of themselves and belief in themselves?

44:02Tressie McMillan Cottom:What does it mean then to face down that risk? And my risk tolerance for that is quite low. I think there are some other people who, again, who think that they can sort of navigate through individual choices. I'm healthy. I won't have these problems. And I think, though, that if you ask most Americans more soberly, like when you're when we are facing, which may or may not be the next pandemic event, but something that could be. And when they're actually thinking about what's really possible and probable, I think their sense of risk changes. And I think that becomes potentially a political problem for this administration.

44:38Tressie McMillan Cottom:The difference between imagined risk and real risk has a way of clarifying some people's own susceptibility to risk. But that is not the way you want to do a political means test. To David's point, it's not just that people will be sick and people will die. It is the sheer possibility, the scale of which that might happen. But I worry that that is the sort of political means test it might take.

45:02David Wallace-Wells:So we have some great reader questions, but I just had one more future-looking question that I know was of interest to both of you, too. So what should be the response from the other side, from Democrats, to all of this? What does a Democratic public health vision look like, let's say, in 2028, potentially?

45:28Alexandra Sifferlin:That's a great question. You want to go first?

45:31Tressie McMillan Cottom:I think it is part and parcel of sort of the larger project. And listen, I really resist this thing where, you know, tell the Democratic Party what it needs to do. It's not my job. And also, I'm not particularly sure they're interested in what I think they should do. However, Evan said that I think that, you know, our concerns about our health system are part of our larger set of concerns, which is I think Davis said as well, you either believe in a social compact or you do not. And as a party, you need to lay out a clear vision of, listen, the other side thinks that, which it took the Democrats quite a while to even, I think, come to consensus about how to talk about what was happening in the Republican Party.

46:12Tressie McMillan Cottom:And they've roughly settled on sort of a consensus, right? they've decided to throw the F-bomb once in a while or something. I don't know. But what you don't see is a more affirmative, coherent argument about what they do believe in. And I think the issue of health is just an example of that more broadly. Like, is this still the party that believes in public administration or not? And how much do they think we should have? Is this an administration that believes that, you know, economic security is kind of part of government's responsibilities as citizens. And if so, how are they going to enact that, right?

46:47Tressie McMillan Cottom:I think that they're still kind of trapped in the cycle of trying to accurately describe what Trumpism is. And as it comes down to health, you know, they've got a narrative about the Democratic, you know, the sort of big, most recent big legislative win, of course, is, you know, Obamacare, which they're not all equally comfortable running on, but it is a set of benefits that most Americans have become comfortable with having and it means something to them. And it's a particular, you know, has the possibility to be a political wedge issue. But like, I'm stunned that they have not drawn a sort of bigger story of that about health, right?

47:24Tressie McMillan Cottom:Like, it's not just that you have access to the Affordable Care Act, but like, we want to make it possible for you to make a range of good, healthy choices. You know, there's some, you know, on the fringes, you know, Sanders talks about it. Cory Booker recently was talking about organic food and vegetable, that kind of thing. But no, the Democratic Party right now does not have a clear vision on that, does not seem to be competing for voters for whom that is a concern. And I think there are a couple of reasons for that. You know, some of them are still smarting about what happened to Michelle Obama when she tried to, you know, lead on school lunches and that kind of thing.

47:55Tressie McMillan Cottom:But I also think there's this sense that the other side is bungling it so bad and why get in the way of your enemy shooting themselves in the foot? and that maybe that is good politics, but it is not a good narrative for how, why we should trust you to lead us out of this era of political dysfunction.

48:15Alexandra Sifferlin:Yeah, like Tressie, I see this as part of the bigger dilemma for Democratic politicians. I also see this as, you know, the war on public health is a war on the social safety net. Many of these measures that have been drawn back are things that were extended to protect the most vulnerable in society, and they've been withdrawn. But looking beyond health, I see a party that seems comfortable to wait for the Trump administration to self-immolate. And I see the challenges ahead looming quite large. So yeah, I'm worried that a Democratic public health administration will be divided, as I was saying earlier, between those who basically want to restore for faith in public health and the principle, extend the principle of health solidarity, and those who want to retreat from those principles in order to demonstrate that they learned some lessons and they heard some criticism during COVID.

49:13Alexandra Sifferlin:I see that on foreign policy. You know, Democrats are very happy right now criticizing Trump's foreign policy. But like, what is the post-Trump democratic vision for America's role in the world? I think it's extremely open-ended. And you see people who are very hawkish, even in the Biden administration, now singing an extremely dovish tune. I don't know if there's a possibility out there that a future Democratic president could even try to regain the world stage the way that Biden tried to regain the Obama position when he came in in 2021. And I see that, you know, in domestic policy and fiscal policy.

49:50Alexandra Sifferlin:Do I really think the Democratic Party is capable of raising money via taxes sufficient to actually deliver services to their voters and the country as a whole? It seems quite hard. They seem like they really want to just raise taxes on the very rich. And there's a kind of justice argument to that. But I'm not sure that the party is actually serious about doing what it needs to do to deliver meaningful victories there. And on that point, I think I'm, you know, sort of inspired by the model of our mayor here, Zora Namdani, who has really taken. Yeah, please applaud. Yeah. You know, I'm not here to make a personal endorsement, but I think really inspiring in the sense that he is an ideological actor who nevertheless takes extremely seriously the need to do the job well and demonstrate that the system itself works for people.

50:47Alexandra Sifferlin:and seems actually much more than was apparent even during the campaign to believe that that's the first job of governance is to demonstrate attentiveness to the needs of the people and that once you've established that trust, you can go further and make ideological gains. At the moment, it seems to me like there are few leaders at the national level in the Democratic Party who are thinking in those terms. And to the extent that they are, their impulses run against one another. And so I don't know where we're going to end up, although I do think we're going to end up with a Democratic president in 2029.

51:20David Wallace-Wells:Okay. All right. I think we have time for some reader questions. How do we productively respond to mistrust of corporations, like in agriculture, food producers, within Maha? How can we question what we're being sold while rebuilding social trust? Mm-hmm.

51:43Tressie McMillan Cottom:If I understand the question correctly, I may not, but I think what you're asking for there is meaningful regulation. How do we regulate the corporations that are charged with the manufacturing and distribution of most of our sort of meaningful resources, things like food? One of the problems we have is that we're in an era where people are questioning whether or not regulation is sufficiently muscular enough to do that job. And we're also doing that after like, you know, 40 years of just sort of like actively chipping away. At some regulations, some people would say, and then actively making it more complex.

52:20Tressie McMillan Cottom:Others would say, depending on what industry you're talking about. But I think what people are really responding to there isn't necessarily the degree of regulation, but the transparency of the regulation. I think one of the issues that we have is that when so much is provided by the private sector, There is not a meaningful feedback loop for people to respond to what's being done and to feel like they understand what is being done. And so I think one of the things that people are really asking for when they talk when we talk about regulation, whether they think it's too much or too little, I think we confuse that with public accountability.

52:54Tressie McMillan Cottom:accountability, right? I was just recently speaking with someone about like how we bring the sense of accountability in the public feedback loop to things like labor policy, for example. And she, you know, had come up, that's how she cut her professional teeth. And she was talking about ways that she tried to do that at the federal and the state level and how hard it was. She said, yeah, it was hard. She was like, but when we got it right, people's trust in the system was off the charts. And so your point about Mamdani, when you develop trust in one area, you are able to translate it into another area.

53:27Tressie McMillan Cottom:It is hard work. I think it's going to be even harder with the way that so many of our institutions have atrophied. But I think it is fundamentally what people are asking for, which is public accountability. It can be done. People are going to have to demand it. And a lot of political forces are going to have to align. But yeah, I think that's the way forward.

53:46David Wallace-Wells:Last question. I think this could go to either of you. Is there anything RFK could do to alienate the Maha base or is any escalation, no matter how ridiculous, excused as anti-establishment heroism?

54:01Tressie McMillan Cottom:Yeah, there is a lot of anti-establishment impulse there that will drive people to follow the personality as opposed to any sort of political axis. However, we are already seeing some fracturing of those coalitions. You know, one of the problems that RFK has is the same problem that like Donald Trump has. And I think sort of like Trumpism writ large is that it is pretty effective at mobilizing people whose beliefs are transactional. It really struggles with people who truly believe. And so some of what you see, for example, are, you know, what moms across America who really led this fight against like Roundup weed killer and feeling deeply betrayed by this administration's, you know, supposed interest in health.

54:51Tressie McMillan Cottom:When Trump signs, you know, the executive order sort of defending the corporate interests against many in his base who are actively saying, you know, he has lost my support because of this. not yet seeing many of them willing to organize on the other issue. But, you know, being disaffected is a political choice, much like voting is a political choice. And I think the real possibility of that particular fissure anyway is that those were a lot of people who were mobilizing for Donald Trump, at least certainly online, some of them even offline. And I think you can lose some of that energy when they decide that they are no longer supporting RFK Jr.

55:28Tressie McMillan Cottom:And so you're already seeing some of that emerge. Everybody, however, is not a true believer, right? It becomes a problem and then the question becomes how many of them are. But for those who actually really believe, R.F.K. Genius almost, you know, wholesale inability to deliver them anything other than like symbolic victories is smarting with a lot of people.

55:48David Wallace-Wells:Yeah.

55:48Alexandra Sifferlin:Just to pick up briefly on the anti-establishment point. I mean, I do think it's worth remembering that, you know, come 2028, 2029, we will have been living in Donald Trump's America effectively for at least 12 years. And there was an interim period where we had basically an invisible president. But in the kind of collective American imagination, Donald Trump has been running this country for a very long time. And there are things about Democrats picking up the mantle of anti-establishmentarianism that make me worried and make me uncomfortable. I'm the kind of person who works at the New York times.

56:23Alexandra Sifferlin:I obviously have establishmentarian values, but I also think that there are some political opportunities there. And if you think on the food front, you compare the objection to Michelle Obama is making us eat healthy food, compare that to Donald Trump was in bed with all the big ag companies and he's feeding us poison. One of these actually is a much more potent message. I don't know exactly to what degree the Democratic Party as a whole will feel comfortable playing that card, but it is available, at least to some members of the coalition. And I suspect that one of the things that's going to happen over the next few years is that at least some figures, if it's Graham Plattner or whoever, are striking that note to national effect, even if the party itself is not singing the same tune.

57:11David Wallace-Wells:That's great. David and Tressie, thank you so much.

57:15Alexandra Sifferlin:Thank you. Thank you guys. Thanks to the library too. Thank you.

57:55David Wallace-Wells:It's edited by

58:04David Wallace-Wells:Original music by

58:13David Wallace-Wells:The Fact Check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. The head of operations is Shannon Busta. Audience support by Christina Samulewski. The director of opinion shows is Annie Rose Strasser.