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On the campaign trail, president-elect Donald Trump promised both a dictatorial presidency and one predicated on vengeance against his detractors. His controversial nominations to key Cabinet positions have underscored just how much intention lies behind those promises. A climate science denialist, Trump has nominated another denialist, GOP former congressman Lee Zeldin, to head the EPA and a fracking company CEO, Chris Wright, to head the Department of Energy.
Trump has also chosen people with no experience in the fields they’ve been tapped for, like WWE CEO Linda McMahon for Secretary of Education and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noemand — a noted puppy killer — to head the Department of Homeland Security.
After months of claiming that he knew nothing about Project 2025 and in fact, his campaign said they would ban people involved in Project 2025 from his administration, Trump has nominated a half dozen authors and architects of Project 2025 to his administration, including lead writer Russell Vought to head the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the agency that develops the president’s proposed budget and executes the president’s agenda.
Controversial Trump choices
Among the most controversial Trump nominations are former congresswoman and former Democrat Tulsi Gabbard, a notorious anti-LGBTQ zealot with ties to dictators and Russian media, to be Director of National Intelligence and anti-science anti-vaxxer Robert F .Kennedy, Jr. to head HHS (Department of Health and Human Services).
Gabbard ran for president as a Democrat in 2020 and Kennedy ran for president in 2024, first as a Democrat, then as an Independent, before offering his voters and his iconic name to the Trump team. The quid pro quo with Kennedy was Trump, who was responsible for a lax and delayed response to the COVID pandemic that led to the U.S. having the highest death rate of any nation, telling Kennedy he could “go wild” on the nation’s health-care system.
What RFK Jr. says
Kennedy, a former environmental attorney with no medical background or expertise, is best known for being the nation’s foremost anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist. He also claims Wi-Fi gives you cancer, SSRIs cause people to commit mass shootings and the CDC, FDA and other health-care agencies are in cahoots with Big Pharma.
While some of Kennedy’s ideas are mainstream — his MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) movement promotes exercise, a healthy diet and getting additives out of processed foods — all ideas pushed by the CDC, FDA and your own doctor. He is also wedded to extreme conspiracy theories about health and preventative medications, which are dangerous. It is those conspiracy theories that Kennedy wants to take mainstream and remake the public health system with those as his foundation and guideline.
Chief among these is Kennedy’s anti-vaxxer zealotry. Kennedy heads a nonprofit agency, the Children’s Health Defense dedicated to vaccine disinformation. His family has been outspoken in their disavowal of these theories. Last week, his cousin Caroline Kennedy called his stances “dangerous.”
Kennedy has self-published a series of anti-vaccine books. He has also promoted the long-debunked theory that vaccines cause autism. He has called for the prosecution of Dr. Anthony Fauci, claiming that Fauci helped craft the COVID virus to attack Caucasian and Black people and protect Jewish and Chinese people.
In an August 2020 speech, Kennedy said he thought the U.S. government might have planned and orchestrated the COVID-19 pandemic.
“A lot of it feels very planned to me,” Kennedy said in a video published by The Bulwark.
Last week, it was revealed that he funded the viral COVID conspiracy film “Plandemic.”
RFK Jr. says water can make you gay or trans
As PGN previously reported, Kennedy’s conspiracy theories include LGBTQ+ people. He has made claims that sexual orientation and gender identity have been impacted and influenced by water and chemicals and that this could be turning kids gay and trans.
Throughout 2023 as he ran for president, Kennedy asserted that chemicals in the environment could be making children gay or transgender and causing the feminization of boys and masculinization of girls.
But as CNN reported at the time, experts dispute the claims from Kennedy and said his theories that “sexual identification” and “gender confusion” among children could be from their exposure to “endocrine disruptors” found in the environment are completely unfounded.
“I want to just pursue just one question on these, you know, the other endocrine disruptors because our children now, you know, we’re seeing these impacts that people suspect are very different than in ages past about sexual identification among children and sexual confusion, gender confusion,” Kennedy said on his podcast in June 2023. “These kinds of issues that are very, very controversial today.”
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, endocrine disruptors are chemicals that interfere with the body’s hormones and endocrine system. Such chemicals are commonly found in pesticides and plastic, and can affect reproductive functions and increase the risk of obesity.
CNN reported that Kennedy on multiple occasions misconstrued endocrine disruptors’ studied ability to cause some male frogs to become female and produce viable eggs, suggesting that these chemicals could have similar effects on children and change their sexuality.
CNN spoke to multiple experts who said there is no link between endocrine disruptors and children’s gender and sexuality. While sex in frogs is determined by environmental factors such as temperature and chemicals, Dr. Andrea Gore, professor of pharmacology and toxicology at the University of Texas at Austin, said the sex of humans is determined at the moment of conception, and cannot later be altered by endocrine-disrupting chemicals.
RFK, Jr. on gender-affirming care
In December, Kennedy told the conservative political commentator Patrick Bet-David that transgender minors should not be able to access medications like puberty blockers and hormones “without permission,” saying gender-affirming care for minors should be “deferred till adulthood.”
In May, Kennedy wrote on Twitter/X that while individuals diagnosed with gender dysphoria “deserve compassion and respect,” he’d become “troubled” by the idea of giving puberty blockers to minors. Kennedy called the medications “repurposed castration drugs.” He also referred to transition-related surgery as “mutilation” and said all GAC treatments should be postponed until adulthood.
As PGN has reported in detail, most medical organizations say gender-affirming health care for transgender adults and minors is medically necessary and can be lifesaving — several studies link puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy to lower rates of suicidality in transgender adolescents.
The American Academy of Pediatrics states that gender-affirming care is medically necessary and appropriate for transgender children and adolescents and the American Medical Association supports health care for transgender people and youth as do the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association.
CNN notes, “The baseless claim that chemicals — particularly in tap water — could turn people gay has gained popularity with conspiracy theorists over the years, most memorably with conservative radio host Alex Jones — who alleged for years that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a sham — said chemicals in the water were ‘turning the friggin’ frogs gay.’”
RFK Jr. on HIV/AIDS
For decades, it has been established that untreated HIV can lead to AIDS. Kennedy disagrees. In a June 2023 interview, he told New York Magazine that nobody knows whether HIV is solely responsible for AIDS, and that “there are much better candidates than HIV for what causes AIDS.”
In his 2021 self-published book, “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health,” Kennedy revives a long-debunked theory from the early 1980s that “heavy recreational drug use in gay men and drug addicts was the real cause of immune deficiency” and that “the initial signs of AIDS” were “strongly linked to amyl nitrate — ‘poppers’ — a popular drug among promiscuous gays.” Kennedy cited the work of Peter Duesberg, a notorious AIDS denialist.
As Rolling Stone reported, “More recently, Kennedy can be seen promoting this position in a video that the right-wing watchdog group PatriotTakes posted in June 2023, falsely claiming that ‘100 percent of the people who died — the first thousand who had AIDS — were people who were addicted to poppers’ who he describes as ‘people who were part of a gay lifestyle.’”
In addition to being utterly without scientific merit, such statements stigmatize LGBTQ+ individuals, suggesting they are to blame for the AIDS epidemic.
What the experts say
As a trauma therapist and clinical social worker, Dr. Jennifer Goldenberg has been treating clients with a range of mental health issues and of all backgrounds, including queer and trans people, for years. She told PGN, “As a clinical social worker who works mostly with people struggling with complex PTSD, depression and anxiety disorders, I’ve been reeling — as have many in my profession — as each new appalling Trump appointment is rolled out. Regarding Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s appointment to head HHS, I’m mostly concerned with his anti-science, anti-vaccination stances and his spread of misinformation. People need easy and free or low-cost access to the miracles of vaccines. He sows doubt and discord surrounding the proven safety and efficacy of the vaccines we now have. This misinformation, I’m afraid, leads to measles and pertussis outbreaks, especially among the most vulnerable — children. This is a travesty and could so easily be avoided.”
Goldenberg noted the impact this vaccine misinformation could have on the LGBTQ+ community, where Hep B and HPV vaccines are critical to the health of sexually active teens and young adults.
Goldenberg said Kennedy’s vacillating stances on women’s health was another issue that has barely been mentioned.
“I’m also concerned that Kennedy may roll back already fragile or non-existent access to mifepristone [the abortion pill], which will put so many women and girls at risk,” she said. “His influence may also cause funding to be cut toward scientific advances in all types of vitally needed medicines, including treatments for depression and PTSD.”
Goldenberg added, “Kennedy’s appointment as head of HHS could, I fear, cause already vulnerable populations to sicken and even die — as he did in Samoa. He is not, in my opinion, competent or qualified to lead such a broad and critically important agency.”
Kellan Baker, executive director of Whitman-Walker Health, a Washington-based nonprofit focused on LGBTQ+ health care told The Hill, “[Kennedy’s] comments on transgender health care, in a lot of ways, reflect a confusion that is very widespread right now among a lot of people in U.S. society who don’t know what it means to be transgender, and how deep and long-standing both the evidence and clinical practice on this topic are.”
Alex Sheldon, executive director of GLMA, an association of LGBTQ+ health-care professionals, told The Hill, “RFK Jr.’s history of denying basic scientific truth, from the cause of AIDS to the legitimacy of transgender health care, they represent a grave threat to the health and well-being of the LGBTQ+ community, and he is poised now for one of the most powerful and consequential positions in shaping the nation’s health care and public health policies. In this context, disinformation isn’t just harmful, it is deadly.”
Greg Herren, who has worked in HIV and STI prevention for gay men for more than 20 years, said “We’re all concerned about what this is going to mean for our funding.”
“My salary, and funding for our programs, comes from the CDC. So what does that potentially mean? Services could be either canceled, or dramatically curtailed by major funding cuts. It’s never happened, regardless of the administration, but we’ve never had a sociopathic billionaire and an anti-vaxxer who thinks poppers cause HIV, running public health and looking over the budget. What could go wrong? After all, these are the people who laughed about it killing all the right people in the 1980s.”
Update: An original version of this story incorrectly stated that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. founded the Children’s Defense Fund. Kennedy founded the Children’s Health Defense.