His transition team, those who set the tone for his Cabinet and first 100 days, was over-represented with UFO believers. His inner circle included a guy who thoughts girls can't do math. I was only two years into science media by then so I believed that science academics were a cross-section of America - diverse - and that President George W. Bush hated science and everything else. Yet none of the choices President-elect Obama made seemed to concern those who insisted that science was paramount.(1)
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had raised a fantastic amount of money for Obama(2) so he was going to get a reward but an anti-vaccine anti-agriculture anti-medicine crackput controlling the EPA that approves food and medicine was too much.
Yet only a few of us objected. There was me, there was Dr. David Gorski, but then it caught traction and soon enough RFK Jr. was out of the picture.(3)
Fast forward to 2017 and my co-author of the bestselling "Science Left Behind", about the decline in scientific decision-making in the Obama years, got an email from the Wall Street Journal asking us for thoughts about President-elect Trump meeting with Kennedy about vaccines.
I'd written that article a dozen times about progressives and celebrity influencers and their war on vaccines. I was living in California, a state that had more children un-vaccinated than the entire rest of the US combined, which led to preventable disease outbreaks so devastating that after a decade of effort a campaign led by Dr. Richard Pan got Governor Jerry Brown to sign a law banning arbitrary exemptions.(4) It was in the hands of the Wall Street Journal about 90 minutes later and its edited form was up soon after.
To his credit, just a few hours after Kennedy got a meeting with President-elect Trump and announced there would be a "vaccine commission", the Trump team denied there was going to be any commission designed to undermine trust in vaccines.
I was impressed. I believed that he had been swayed by the progressive Precautionary Principle that dominates their anti-science thinking, but that Trump had changed his mind.
That was a good sign. Unlike Obama, Trump was not going to call himself Scientist-in-Chief while opposing the science consensus on everything Democrats opposed(5), he was going to listen to experts and then make the call. He was not buying into climate change but that was the only science issue where he was polarized and the private sector had already hit 2025 targets that Obama's never-enacted Clean Power Plan wanted so our emissions were fine. His denial there was harmless. Vaccines were not.
We know he learned a lesson after his loss in 2020 and he's also had seven years since he last changed his mind about Kennedy. We should not allow a repeat of 2008 and insist Democrats do no wrong and Republicans are anti-science.
It's not just wrong, it is lying to the American people. Again. And that leads to distrust of science academia, and the election just showed the public don't like being talked down to by elites.
Mr. Trump, enjoy your victory, you get to go out on a high note. But disavow Kennedy again. He didn't win the election for you, you won it. When Obama had to push him to the sidelines, he gave Kennedy's tiny $17 million company, BrightSource, a $1.4 billion concession prize.
Do that, give him a concession prize that won't put American children at risk. Make up that money with economic gains, and everyone wins.
(1) One contributor on our Scienceblogs site had written a whole best-selling book called "The Republican War On Science" yet didn't object to Obama's waffling on vaccine safety or his affection for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Even in the run-up to the election, a group called ScienceDebate2008 left out any questions about evolution, despite claiming Republicans denied it existed. They included a question about fish hatcheries but not evolution? There was a reason. Democrats overall only accept evolution more by single digits more than Republicans but the top denying demographic is black evangelicals.
Today, Democrats deny a lot more biology than Republicans but that can obviously be politically-motivated now just like it was in 2008.
(2) Senator Obama was crafty. McCain's name was on the campaign finance reform bill so was going to limit himself to public financing, Clinton had agreed to it as well and would have honored it. Obama got the nomination and then reneged on his pledge to limit himself to public financing and McCain was stuck. Obama outraised him 2:1.
Democrats never lost that command of the wealthy. This election VP Harris raised nearly 300% of what Republicans raised.
(3) President Obama ended up being worse for science than Bush had been but he hadn't crippled American children like Kennedy in control of medicine would have.
(4) A law the current California Governor, Gavin Newsom, opposed as Lieutenant Governor. Now California is up near Republican states like Mississippi and Tennessee in MMR vaccine uptake. Wealthy progressives then got Boutique Pediatricians to give their coastal kids medical exemptions. That all changed in 2021, when Democrats took credit for the COVID-19 vaccine they claimed was being rushed by Trump and risking lives. Then Republicans became anti-vaccine.
Democrats are 90% of career government employees in D.C. and they really run the country so I keep asking Republicans to oppose nuclear energy and genetic engineering next. As vaccine sentiment showed, if Republicans oppose affordable food and energy, Democrats will embrace both and we'll have climate change and starvation solved by 2030.
(5) His party in Congress even tried to get warning labels mandated for GMO foods.
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