At the heart of the Trump administration’s health agenda is a dramatic reorientation of public health priorities. Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. declared during a Senate hearing last week:
“We at HHS are enacting a once-in-a-generation shift from a sick-care system, to a true health care system that tackles the root causes of chronic disease.”
“Make America Healthy Again” has been met with both praise and fierce resistance. Republican Senator Mike Crapo supported the initiative, saying:
“President Trump and Secretary Kennedy have made a steadfast commitment to make America healthy again”.
Kennedy’s long-standing skepticism of vaccines has become central to his tenure.
Chronic illness, environmental toxicity, and mental health neglect have long plagued our systems. But when that vision is paired with vaccine suspicion, the firing of CDC Director Susan Monarez, and a panel stacked with anti-vaccine voices, the promise begins to fracture.
Monarez, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, accused Kennedy of pressuring her to:
“Compromise science itself” and approve recommendations from a panel “filled with people who have publicly expressed antivaccine rhetoric”.
Kennedy’s response? “The people at the CDC who oversaw [COVID-19 mitigation]... are the people who will be leaving.” That’s not reform. That’s purging.
Senator Tina Smith challenged Kennedy directly:
“When were you lying, sir – when you told this committee that you were not anti-vax? Or when you told Americans that there's no safe and effective vaccine?”
Kennedy replied: “Both things are true”.
Former CDC directors and health professionals have condemned Kennedy’s approach. In a joint op-ed, they warned:
“Public health shouldn’t be partisan. Vaccines have saved millions of lives under administrations of both parties. Parents deserve a CDC they can trust to put children above politics, evidence above ideology and facts above fear”.
Senator John Barrasso, a physician, added:
“I’m a doctor. Vaccines work”.
When trust erodes, so does the very architecture of care. The tug of war between Kennedy’s populist health reform, Trump’s political backing, and the scientific community’s alarm has left America’s health landscape deeply polarized. As Kennedy invoked his father’s legacy:
“Progress is a nice word, but change is its motivator. And change has its enemies.”
The question remains: will this change heal or harm?
Public health is not a stage for performance—it’s a covenant with the people. And right now, that covenant is being rewritten in ink that smudges truth with ideology.
While this political theater unfolds, the communities most devastated by COVID-19—Latino and Black families—remain largely unacknowledged in the administration’s rhetoric.
In Louisiana, Black residents made up 70% of COVID-19 deaths, despite being only 32% of the population. Latino patients in the West and Midwest were hospitalized at rates over nine times higher than non-Hispanic Whites during the pandemic’s peak. These aren’t just numbers. They’re testimonies of structural neglect.
The virus didn’t discriminate, but our systems did. Marginalized communities faced compounded risks: frontline jobs without protections, multigenerational housing that made isolation impossible, and limited access to care. Vaccine rollout was uneven. Trust was fractured.
The state of health in America isn’t just a tug-of-war between Kennedy, Trump, and the CDC. It’s a reckoning.
Will we build a health system rooted in dignity, science, and mutual recognition—or will we let force of personality and chaos dictate the terms of our survival?
America’s health deserves more than slogans. It deserves stewardship.
Hugo Balta is the executive editor of the Fulcrum and the publisher of the Latino News Network.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.