"Only the Best and Most Serious People"

The consequences of Trump inserting unfit sycophants in positions of power are tragic and immeasurable

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., testifying before Congress in May. (Photo by Samuel Corum via Getty Images)

In 2016 when Donald Trump was running for president, he boasted that, if elected, he’d “surround [himself] only with the best and most serious people…We want top-of-the-line professionals.” That laughable pledge, long forgotten when he was selecting his team of miscreants and sycophants for his second term, came screaming back in decidedly ugly ways this week.

Permit me to share with you a tender story that helps explain why and how these bad choices can cause so much damage and grief.

On Saturday, The New Yorker published an intimate, beautifully written and deeply thoughtful essay by Tatianna Schlossberg, the 35-year-old granddaughter of President John F. Kennedy and daughter of Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg and Edwin Schlossberg.

Last year, on May 25, the same day that her daughter was born, Tatianna learned that she had acute myeloid leukemia, with a rare mutation called chromosome 3 inversion. Thus began a series of treatments to overcome this deadly disease, including multiple rounds of chemotherapy, a bone marrow transplant and CAR T-cell therapy, which was in clinical trials. She almost died more than once, yet tried to hold onto her sense of humor as she dealt with all the “indignities and humiliations.”

That was not easy, not when she got news like this: “During the latest clinical trial,” she writes, “my doctor told me that he could keep me alive for a year, maybe.” Tough stuff, especially for a young mother with small children, even if you are lucky enough to have a loving husband and a supportive family.

But this took on greater significance for her, given her family history as a Kennedy. “For my whole life, I have tried to be good, to be a good student and a good sister and a good daughter, and to protect my mother and never make her upset or angry,” she writes. “Now I have added a new tragedy to her life, to our family’s life, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.”

Her reality of her terminal diagnosis has also led Tatianna to reflect on what she had missed as she battled with leukemia over the last year. “I didn’t ever really get to take care of my daughter—I couldn’t change her diaper or give her a bath or feed her, all because of the risk of infection after my transplants,” she writes. “I was gone for almost half of her first year of life. I don’t know who, really, she thinks I am, and whether she will feel or remember, when I am gone, that I am her mother.”

But here’s the thing that caused me to reflect on this regime’s reckless political choices. One of the possible cancer treatments that had the potential to save Tatianna’s life was in government-funded clinical trials. Yet her uncle, vaccine-skeptic Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was chosen by Trump to lead the Department of Health and Human Services and confirmed by the Republican Senate. Trump didn’t say that RFK, Jr. was one the “best and most serious people” or a “top-of-the-line professional.” He said he would “let Bobby go wild” on health, despite the fact that he had never held a job in medicine, public health or government.

Considering the ripple effects

It’s impossible to fully measure the scale of damage Kennedy and Trump have wrought to public health. Nor is the heart-rending story of Tatianna Schlossberg, who comes from an affluent and connected family, an example of the worst of the worst outcomes. But it shows how careless and cruel choices have ripple effects that make our world less safe and secure.

“As I spent more and more of my life under the care of doctors, nurses, and researchers striving to improve the lives of others,” she writes, “I watched as Bobby cut nearly a half billion dollars for research into mRNA vaccines, technology that could be used against certain cancers.” She also noted that he cut billions in funding for medical research from the National Institutes of Health, which resulted in the cancellation of hundreds of grants and clinical trials.

“Suddenly, the health-care system on which I relied felt strained, shaky,” she writes. “Doctors and scientists at Columbia, including [her doctor husband] George, didn’t know if they would be able to continue their research, or even have jobs…I was especially concerned that I wouldn’t be able to get [my vaccines] again, leaving me to spend the rest of my life immunocompromised, along with millions of cancer survivors, small children, and the elderly.”

This week we learned more about RFK, Jr. from journalist Ryan Lizza, the ex-fiancé of journalist Olivia Nuzzi who conducted a sexting affair with the married Kennedy, about whom she was writing a profile. I won’t detail the “poetry”about oral sex that the understandably aggrieved Lizza shared that RFK, Jr. wrote to his fiancée, except to say that he is far from “the best and most serious people” nor someone who would ever be described as ethical. (Nor, by the way, is Nuzzi.)

The first mistake was for 77 million voters to re-elect a man as dangerously unfit and incompetent as Trump, one who was immunized and unleashed by John Roberts’ Supreme Court. But the second and related mistake was for a GOP-majority Senate to confirm a dangerous collection of incompetents who would surrender themselves to carry out whatever sick or reckless act that their unthinking dear leader wanted.

• Where was a Secretary of State or a Secretary of Defense to tell Trump that a hero’s welcome and lavish attention for the murdering Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was not such a good idea, even if Trump saw an opportunity to further enrich himself and his family?

• Where was an Attorney General to push back against Trump’s attacks of “sedition” and his demands of arrest and execution for six Democratic lawmakers who were sticking up for our Constitution by asserting that members of the military should reject illegal orders?

• Where was a Secretary of State who would ensure that a 28-point plan to end the Ukraine war—one that we now know was concocted by the Russians—would not be dropped on Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky as a Trump ultimatum to keep getting U.S. support?

• And in what world except Trump’s America does a real estate developer and investor like Steve Witkoff, officially Trump’s Special Envoy to the Middle East, become the chief broker of the Kremlin-backed plan to force Ukraine’s surrender?

Serving the public good

This list could go on and on. But as dangerous and infuriating as these choices are, let them be a reminder of why we need competent, capable and experienced professionals in such positions of power. While voters cannot control every appointment that their elected leaders make, they can ensure that they elect leaders who recognize their responsibility to serve the public good rather than themselves and the richest among us. That’s the only way to make our country safer, healthier and capable of repair.

Maybe, just maybe, the story of Tatianna Schlossberg will convince a few of us—who are lucky to be healthy—to try a little harder, to fight a little harder, to make things better.

These days, Tatianna says of her children, “I try to live and be with them now,” adding that “being in the present is harder than it sounds, so I let the memories come and go.” There’s her daughter with “curly red hair like a flame,” stomping “around the house in bright-yellow rain boots, pretending to talk on my mother’s phone, a string of fake pearls around her neck, no pants, giggling and running away from anyone who tries to catch her.” And there’s her son, who when she told him she “didn’t want ice cream from the ice-cream truck, and he hugged me, patted me on the back, and said, ‘I hear you, buddy, I hear you.’”

We’ve all been gifted this life. And, on this Thanksgiving week, let me say: May our gratitude lead us to both expect more from those who’ve been granted power and demand that they fulfill their duty to our Constitution and the public good.

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