Kurt Vonnegut was one of the most gifted writers of his generation. So what was his parting advice to writers before his death? “Don’t use semi-colons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites, representing exactly nothing. All they do is suggest you might have gone to college.” The speech delivered at Clowes Hall, Indianapolis in 2007, just two weeks before his death, is a masterpiece in writing, but one line that stood out was his explanation of Marx’s infamous “opium of the masses” line to describe religion. Vonnegut argued, in the inimitable style that only he could, that Marx wasn’t badmouthing religion at all but stating the fact that back in the 1840s that was simply the only painkiller available for “toothaches or cancer.”He said: “As a sincere friend of the downtrodden, he was saying he was glad they had something which could ease their pain, at least a little bit, which was religion. He liked religion for doing that and certainly didn’t want to abolish it. OK? He might have said today as I say tonight that religion can be Tylenol for a lot of unhappy people, and I’m so glad it works.” Or to borrow a line from Scarlett Johansson’s husband, it was a time when the only two things doctors prescribed were prayers and cocaine.Tylenol, or to use its generic name paracetamol, was in the news recently when Donald Trump suddenly put on his ‘Doctor’ cap and claimed that acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, was causing autism, warned pregnant women to avoid the drug, and said the USFDA would include warnings for its use — much to the chagrin of scientific consensus. The problem, however, is that Americans no longer ‘trust the science’. Much like with the Democrats, Americans have had a very messy break-up with scientific consensus — and some of it is thanks to “Dr” Trump, but also because of the mendacious propaganda that passed itself off as science.
America’s Long Love Affair with Quackery
“Dr” Donald Trump at 79 is, in many ways, a medical marvel — or at least a medical anomaly. His diet would put anyone else in the hospital, if not six feet under. But Trump dodges ill-health the way he does bullets. He barely exercises (golf doesn’t count as cardio), doesn’t drink water, but washes down his daily McDonald’s order with Diet Coke. He likes his steak well-done and drowned in ketchup, barely eats vegetables, skips breakfast, and eats sugary sweets like an adolescent left home for a weekend. It’s hardly surprising that such a deity would attract a cult that worships its own fitness fantasies.But claiming MAGA invented pseudoscience is like claiming McDonald’s invented obesity. Americans have always had a soft spot for snake oil: from televangelists hawking miracle water, to Hollywood actors selling their sweat, to pyramid schemes dressed as wellness. MAGA didn’t start the fire, but it poured gasoline on it, livestreamed the flames, and then wheeled out Joe Rogan to discuss the issue.
RFK Jr. and the Cult of MAHA
Former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Susan Monarez testifies before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions hearing on Capitol Hill, in Washington Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2025. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
During his first term, Trump batted for hydroxychloroquine as a “game-changer” and pushed ivermectin as the people’s cure. But the party really started once MAHA — Make America Healthy Again — fused with MAGA and RFK Jr. joined the cast. If Trump is a generalist, then RFK Jr. is the high priest of medical quackery, and his church is MAHA: a movement that believes in beef tallow oil, clean eating, and avoiding vaccines.MAHA isn’t a policy platform so much as a faith community. It’s built on a simple creed: everything that makes you sick — food, drugs, pesticides, vaccines — is the fault of corrupt elites, and everything that can heal you is already in your kitchen or your garden. That worldview fuses wellness culture with anti-establishment populism, turning kombucha and kale into political slogans.The movement’s core flock are the so-called “MAHA moms” — suburban parents who distrust Big Food, Big Pharma, and now Big Science. For them, RFK Jr. isn’t a bureaucrat; he’s a faith healer. His speeches blend medical jargon with moral crusading, promising liberation from toxins, chemicals, and shots. And like all cults, MAHA thrives on paranoia: the enemy is vast, shadowy, and everywhere. Processed cereal is poison, Tylenol causes autism, vaccines corrupt children’s DNA, pesticides soak the soil with cancer.The genius of MAHA is that every small “win” feels cosmic. When artificial dyes are removed from snacks, it isn’t a technical tweak — it’s proof the movement is winning. When a state restricts SNAP purchases of soda, it’s heralded as revolution. That the same administration reapproves banned pesticides or guts USDA farm programmes is quietly ignored, because acknowledging contradiction would mean questioning the prophet.Inside government, Kennedy has hardened the movement’s worldview into policy theatre. His autism “package,” which linked Tylenol to autism and promoted leucovorin as treatment, wasn’t just a policy misstep — it was a sermon, designed to validate the faithful. Scientists fled, experts protested, but for believers it was confirmation that the establishment was rattled. Every resignation at the CDC is spun as proof that the deep state is panicking.The cult dynamic explains why Kennedy’s sanctity endures even as MAHA’s promises falter. Trump can deregulate pesticides, Monsanto can pour millions into Republican PACs, autism research can be gutted — but Kennedy is untouchable. He is cast as the lone uncorrupted figure in a swamp of betrayal, the one man who “knows the truth” because he already did his own research.The tragedy is that MAHA was supposed to be a rebellion against toxins and corruption. Instead, it has become a rebellion against science itself. What began as suspicion of food dyes has metastasised into suspicion of every mainstream institution — from the FDA to medical journals. For every fact-check that shreds MAHA’s claims, the cult doubles down, convinced that suppression is proof of truth.
The Collapse of Scientific Credibility
In March 2025, the New York Times published a piece by Zeynep Tufekci titled We Were Badly Misled About The Event That Changed Our Lives, admitting that the scientific establishment and public health authorities mishandled the early discussion of Covid-19 origins, suppressing legitimate inquiry into the lab leak theory and even branding sceptics “racist.”Tufekci showed how consensus was manufactured: Nature Medicine dismissed lab leak as implausible while its authors privately called it “so friggin’ likely.” The Lancet letter framed it as conspiracy, secretly orchestrated by EcoHealth’s Peter Daszak. Senior NIH adviser David Morens bragged about making emails “disappear.” Risky research continued under “BSL-2 plus” conditions, like testing for gas leaks with a match.Here’s the uncomfortable truth: the reason Dr Trump — or any MAGA medical act — resonates is because the other side squandered its authority. Covid wasn’t just a pandemic; it was science’s trial by fire — and science failed. The establishment press parroted Fauci and ignored Merton’s Laws.Masks first didn’t work, then became mandatory. Vaccines promised to stop transmission, then walked back to “well, at least you won’t die.” Natural immunity was mocked until papers showed it mattered. Two weeks to flatten the curve stretched into two years of shifting rules. Each reversal might have been defensible — science evolves — but spoken with priestly certainty and later reversed with bureaucratic hedging, it felt less like humility and more like deceit.And the cracks weren’t limited to Covid. Climate change is real, but exaggerated apocalypse countdowns turned urgency into eye-rolls. Biological sex is real, yet some scientists stumbled over the word “woman,” as if chromosomes could be edited by press release. Sports medicine shows men’s and women’s bodies differ, yet governing bodies pretended biology was bigotry. The pattern was identical: evidence blurred by ideology, scepticism treated as sin, the public left to conclude that “science” was just another political brand.So when Trump thunders about Tylenol causing autism or RFK Jr. resurrects aluminium panic, people listen — not because the claims are credible, but because the “experts” lost theirs.
The Reckoning
Which brings us back to Vonnegut, Marx, and Trump. Vonnegut reframed Marx: religion wasn’t a narcotic to dull the masses, but a painkiller to ease their suffering. Trump, in his own warped way, has turned that metaphor inside out.If religion was the Tylenol of the 19th century, Trump has made Tylenol the religion of the 21st — a new faith to be distrusted, a new orthodoxy to rebel against. And it works because the old priests of science — the Faucis, the Nature editors, the New York Times — betrayed their flock when it mattered most.Merton’s laws weren’t broken by Trump. They were abandoned by the very people meant to uphold them. And when science behaves like propaganda, don’t be surprised if people start preferring the propaganda that at least entertains them.In that sense, “Dr Trump” isn’t the disease; he is the symptom— inflamed, impossible to ignore — that shows just how sick the body of science has become.
