When announcing his 2024 candidacy, now-president Donald Trump called for the United States to execute drug dealers — but that was before he appointed one to run the country's highest health agency.
"We're going to be asking everyone who sells drugs, gets caught selling drugs, to receive the death penalty for their heinous acts," Trump said in November 2022 during a speech at his Mar-a-Lago mansion in Palm Beach, Florida. "Because it's the only way."
Before even beginning his second presidency — which also saw him pardoning the world's most influential drug dealer, Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, on his second day back in the Oval Office — Trump contradicted his own barbaric stance by promising to nominate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
As the onetime presidential hopeful now sits for his Senate confirmation hearings, it feels pertinent to bring back up that the anti-vax kook slated to lead HHS not only allegedly ground up animals for show back during his drug days, but also was reputedly a dealer himself.
Last August, author and Spy magazine cofounder Kurt Andersen recounted meeting "Bobby Kennedy," as he was called then, at Harvard in 1972 in an essay for The Atlantic. He'd heard about the political scion through a friend when he was looking to score some cocaine, and went to Kennedy's dorm room to do so — and in the process, met his brother Joe, the future congressman.
"I paid him, I believe, $40 in cash. It was a lot of money, the equivalent of $300 today," Andersen wrote. "But cocaine bought from a Kennedy accompanied by a Kennedy brother — the moment of glamour seemed worth it."
The author said it was the first and last time he ever bought coke from anyone. (After the sale, Kennedy called him to demand the return of the straw they'd used to snort the powdered substance, which according to Kennedy had "crystals inside it, man, growing.")
"In retrospect, it has seemed to me a tiny illustration of the child as the father of the man he became: fantastical pseudoscientific crusader, middle-aged preppy dick who takes selfies with barbecued dogs and plays pranks with roadkill bear cubs he didn’t have time to eat," Andersen mused.
Kennedy has never admitted to selling drugs, though he was arrested and convicted in South Dakota roughly a decade later for heroin possession.
The allegedly brain-wormed politico ultimately kicked the habit in 1984, right before one of his other brothers, David, died of an overdose. In the 40 years since, he's been frank about his fight with addiction and used it as a jumping-off point for some of his more outlandish claims, including that prescription ADHD meds and anti-depressants are "damaging" young people.
Much like his probably-boss, Kennedy also has a ruthless-sounding scheme for handling people addicted to prescription drugs: sending them to so-called "wellness farms" that sound very much like labor camps.
A few weeks ago, we would have said that the prospect of executing drug dealers and sending addicts to concentration camps sounded impossible — but given how things have gone since Trump was re-inaugurated, we're not so sure anymore.
More on the future HHS secretary: RFK Jr., Who Hates Adderall, Says Heroin Was Great for Treating His ADHD
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