When voters returned Donald Trump to the White House, they did so believing he would strengthen the economy. Supposedly, workers who form the backbone of this country were to be front and center.
Ironic, then, that arguably this administration’s most visible Cabinet official is Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a man whose career has been defined not by building up working-class Americans but by using them as props on his way to enriching himself and the trial lawyer lobby he represents.
At the “Make America Healthy Again” summit, the administration doubled down on the alliance. Vice President JD Vance praised Kennedy’s “outside-the-box” thinking and even invoked his Appalachian roots to suggest that Kennedy was finally putting “his people first.”
A nice sentiment, except that Kennedy’s record directly contradicts it.
For decades, Kennedy has employed a disturbing playbook: arrive in a struggling community promising justice, extract maximum publicity and legal fees, and then disappear once the cameras stop rolling.
In 2007, Kennedy traveled to Boone County, West Virginia, declaring he would fight until mountaintop removal mining ended. He participated in a documentary, rallied national environmental groups, and then, after settling a class-action lawsuit for pennies on the dollar, never returned. The mountain he vowed to save was blown apart.
That naked exploitation prompted lifelong Boone County resident Maria Gunnoe to comment: “(Kennedy) took advantage of some of the poorest people in our country. He left a very bad taste in the mouths of many Appalachians.”
The same story played out in New Jersey. Kennedy’s law firm joined a lawsuit on behalf of the Ramapough Lenape Nation against Ford Motor Co. Tribal leaders hoped the Kennedy name would finally deliver justice and real compensation. Instead, they received photo-ops and a modest settlement with no admission of wrongdoing.
During his 2024 presidential campaign run, Kennedy referred to the settlement as a “landmark case.” Ramapough Lenape member Wayne Mann reacted to that characterization, pointing out that Kennedy’s depiction was “hurtful and disgusting— and untrue.”
Conservatives have long warned that the lawyer lobby is a parasitic force on the American economy, siphoning massive sums of money to themselves while true victims suffer and too often receive minimal settlements in comparison. Now, one of the most well-known trial lawyers is proving that he should not be trusted with decisions that affect the health and safety of all Americans.
Even worse, Kennedy remains a walking conflict of interest that should alarm any advocate of respectable governance.
During his confirmation, Kennedy disclosed that he earned $2.5 million in referral fees over two years from Wisner Baum, a law firm currently suing manufacturers of a popular, life-saving vaccine against human papillomavirus, some strains of which cause cancers such as cervical, vulvar and vaginal cancers. In other words, the individual responsible for national vaccine policy has deep, recent financial ties to attorneys litigating against vaccines.
Kennedy’s actions as secretary reveal the extremes to which he is willing to go. Kennedy has railed against vaccines, purged FDA leadership without cause, and forcibly stacked the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices with anti-vaccine operatives who reject decades of scientific evidence and are upending the childhood vaccine schedule while entertaining dangerously fringe proposals to end it entirely.
That is not “disrupting the bureaucracy,” it is pushing policies that directly benefit his cronies and putting their interests before the American people he took an oath to serve.
Self-dealing is not reform.
The political costs of keeping Kennedy in place are mounting by the day. Recent polls show Kennedy’s approval as low as 33 percent. Even more alarming, a University of Pennsylvania survey from September found that 60 percent of Americans lack confidence in him to provide trustworthy health information. With Republicans continuing to struggle to earn public trust on healthcare, tying the party’s message to a figure who further drags down that trust, even among Republican senators, seems puzzling.
Control of Congress will be decided in suburban districts full of voters who value competence, stability and normalcy. Many supported Trump in 2024. Yet Kennedy has spent his tenure generating chaos that no mainstream voter asked for and that few besides some lawyers and fringe activists applaud.
The face of Trump’s health agenda is now a lifelong Democrat with a documented record of abandoning the downtrodden to enrich himself. If the administration wants to avoid an electoral backlash in 2026, one step might be to recognize what Kennedy has been his entire career — a charlatan who is not working in the interests of the American people.