TYLENOL-GATE
At a White House press conference on Monday, Trump and R.F.K. Jr. declared that pregnant women shouldn’t take acetaminophen—the active ingredient in Tylenol—because it increases the risk of autism. One of them spoke from experience. Trump admitted that his mother, Mary Anne, would pop a pill or two while pregnant with him to nurse her hangovers. “So, taking Tylenol is not good, all right? I’ll say it. It’s not good,” he said, eyes watering, short orange fingers trembling. (The latter, perhaps, another birth defect courtesy of Mom’s vices.) R.F.K. Jr. backed him up, pointing to F.D.A. studies that suggest a “potential association.” Never mind the 25-year study of 2.5 million children proving the opposite. In the spirit of canceling Colbert and coming for Kimmel, Trump tweeted post-conference: “Aspirin and Ibuprofen, you’re next!!!”
MORE VACCINE-MANIA
Also during the announcement, which Trump is calling the “Big Beautiful Announcement” and experts are calling “the saddest display of a lack of evidence, rumors, recycling of old myths, outright lies, and dangerous advice ever witnessed by anyone in authority in the world claiming to know anything about science,” Trump claimed that the vaccine that prevents measles, mumps, and rubella is linked to autism in children, and that babies shouldn’t receive the hepatitis-B vaccine as the virus is transmitted sexually. (False: babies can be infected from their mother during delivery or through contact with trace amounts of blood or bodily fluids.) He punctuated his remarks with asides sure to instill confidence in parents everywhere, such as “This is based on what I feel” and “I’m not a doctor, but I’m giving my opinion.”
R.F.K. JR. ON THE FRITZ
At the United Nations meeting this week in New York, R.F.K. Jr. rejected the council’s newly drafted political declaration on combating chronic disease and promoting mental health on the basis of its “radical gender ideology” and references to “a constitutional or international right to abortion.” (The text of the declaration does not mention reproductive rights or gender ideology.) “We believe in the biological reality of sex,” the health secretary concluded in his statement. To which the baffled chair of the committee responded, “Did we ask?”
A.I. HITCHENS VS. REAL-LIFE R.F.K. JR.
The British author and journalist Christopher Hitchens died in 2011. Yet every so often the contrarian polemicist feels compelled to return from the grave to set the world’s disorderly ways straight. He does so as a cartoon in a tan suit, broadcasting from heaven with a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label close at hand, should the news ever prove too much to bear. (Shots! Shots! Shots!) We’re not making this up: it’s a YouTube channel called Christopher Hitchens Resurrected, and his latest warranted target is R.F.K. Jr. For nine minutes, cartoon Hitch hurls witty sour-nothings at the MAHA leader. A stand-out is how he likens R.F.K. Jr.’s appointment to making an arsonist a firefighter—“except arsonists at least understand how fire works.”
Carolina de Armas and Paulina Prosnitz are Junior Editors at Air Mail
