Trump and Kennedy are the modern-day Odd Couple

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The most important – the most fascinating, the most debated – relationship in the United States isn’t that of Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift. It isn’t the one between Donald and Melania Trump, either.

It’s the alliance of President and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

And this week’s release of a long-anticipated report on children’s health provided a reminder of all that rests on the state of that relationship: the status of vaccines, the products in the country’s grocery stores, the future of anti-pandemic responses, the nature of medical inquiry at major research universities and the global reputation of American public health institutions and initiatives. Even the colour of American foods is at stake.

Seldom, if ever, have ties between an American president and a cabinet member been so public, so controversial and so consequential. Andrew Johnson’s relationship with his secretary of war Edwin Stanton led to his 1868 impeachment, but the ripples of that imbroglio didn’t reach every American’s medicine cabinet and grocery shelves or affect lunch at the country’s rough-hewn one-room schoolhouses.

This one does.

How it develops – and whether it lasts – may be the drama that shapes daily American life more than anything done by Secretary of State Marco Rubio (managing negotiations in Ukraine), Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth (remaking the Pentagon in his putative secretary of war role), Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick (point man for Mr. Trump’s tariff policy) or Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent (whose threat to punch a housing official in the face personifies the pugilistic nature of the Trump years).

“The relationship between a president and a secretary of health and human services is a critical relationship, and especially now because this is the most dangerous cabinet appointment in American history,” Donna Shalala, one of Mr. Kennedy’s predecessors as HHS secretary, said in an interview. “People could die because of Kennedy’s ideas.”

There are indications the President doesn’t fully agree with the Kennedy agenda. But the Bobby/Donald relationship isn’t only a matter of health policy. It’s also deeply political, for the constituency supporting Mr. Kennedy is much the same constituency that is troubled about the President’s ties to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein – a matter Mr. Trump tried to dismiss this week by calling it a “dead issue.”

So far the Donald/Bobby relationship resembles nothing so much as a speeding passenger car heading straight for a crash barrier covered with galvanized zinc – or into an oncoming Ford F-450 Super Duty truck. The collision hasn’t happened, but observers can’t take their eyes off the likely impending smash-up.

RFK Jr. demands scrutiny of vaccines and autism in latest ‘Make America Healthy Again’ report

That’s because the two men share so much. Celebrity. Determination. Iron will. Imperviousness to criticism. An itch for iconoclastic ideas. Defiance of conventional thought. A magnetic pull toward controversy. Complex relationships with family. Former membership in the Democratic Party. Resentment of pharmaceutical giants. Also, three marriages.

So far the relationship endures, though not without hints that the ties that bind have begin to fray.

Several Republican lawmakers have expressed deep skepticism with Mr. Kennedy, even betrayal at his confirmation-hearing pledges about open-mindedness on vaccines. Washington insiders noted the President was absent from the release of Mr. Kennedy’s Make Our Children Healthy Again strategy earlier this week, and some focused on the document’s relatively mild commentary on pesticide companies and the food industry. Criticism continues to swirl around the capital about the massive wave of resignations and high-profile firings of established, respected health officials who have expressed their impatience with Mr. Kennedy and his management style – and his impatience with, if not for contempt for, conventional modern medical practices.

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In the zero-sum-game environs of Trumpworld, attention focused on anyone besides the President is attention Mr. Trump isn’t getting – and Mr. Kennedy’s high profile could prove to be a liability. Mr. Trump stokes controversy as a participatory sport but he doesn’t enjoy it as a spectator sport (unlike the Ultimate Fighting Championship cage match he hopes to stage on the White House lawn).

That may explain the unexpectedly mild language in the children’s health report and Mr. Kennedy’s tortured answer when asked whether he agreed with the President’s recent comment – they work, “pure and simple” – on the effectiveness of vaccines. The secretary bobbed and weaved in the familiar Washington way before saying, “I agree with that,” even though his agreement was both half-hearted and a half-truth. He also believes vaccines have deleterious side effects and contribute to autism.

The Trump-Kennedy ties are more bizarre, and yet more natural, than any between Felix Unger and Oscar Madison, the principals in the old Odd Couple television show and film adaptation.

Both politicians used to be outsiders. Mr. Trump was way outside the GOP when he joined Republican presidential debates in 2015, just as Mr. Kennedy was an outsider when he joined the 2024 Democratic presidential race before becoming an independent candidate and eventually siding with Mr. Trump.

Both were tendentious. Mr. Trump’s views on tariffs and Mr. Kennedy’s views on vaccines were regarded as fringe, even eccentric – positions the two men fought, in parallel struggles, to force into mainstream debate, if not yet into broad consensus. The two men have virtually identical low approval ratings – 44 per cent for Mr. Trump and 45 per cent for Mr. Kennedy, according to a CBS News poll this month.

Last year’s alliance of Kennedy and the former president, who was seeking redemption through re-election, startled political insiders – until they reckoned with the logic of a union between two men who cultivated controversy and transformed the disrespect, even the denigration, of the political establishment (and, in Mr. Kennedy’s case, the medical establishment) into political power.

The two were natural disrupters a time when disrupters – in business, technology, the media and the arts – were, to use a phrase in broad circulation, powerful influencers.