Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American
May 4, 2025
YIn an interview aired today on NBC News’s Meet the Press, reporter Kristen Welker asked President Donald J. Trump if he agreed that every person in the United States is entitled to due process.
“I don’t know. I’m not, I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know,” Trump answered.
The U.S. Constitution guarantees that “no person shall…be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Judges across the political spectrum agree that the amendment does not limit due process to citizens. In his decision in the 1993 case Reno v. Flores, conservative icon Justice Antonin Scalia wrote: “it is well established that the Fifth Amendment entitles aliens to due process of law in deportation proceedings.”
In his oath of office, Trump vowed to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
When Welker pointed out that the Constitution guarantees due process, Trump suggested he could ignore it because honoring due process was too slow. “I don’t know,” he said. “It seems—it might say that, but if you’re talking about that, then we’d have to have a million or 2 million or 3 million trials,” he said. “We have thousands of people that are—some murderers and some drug dealers and some of the worst people on Earth.”
“I was elected to get them the hell out of here, and the courts are holding me from doing it,” he added.
Welker tried again. “[D]on’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States?”
Trump replied: “I don’t know. I have to respond by saying, again, I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said.”
Conservative judge J. Michael Luttig explained to MSNBC’s Ari Velshi that far-right scholars have argued that the president does not have to follow the Supreme Court if he doesn’t agree with its decisons: he can interpret the Constitution for himself. Luttig called this “constitutional denialism.” He added that “[t]he American people deserve to know if the President does not intend to uphold the Constitution of the United States or if he intends to uphold it only when he agrees with the Supreme Court.”
Mark Berman and Jeremy Roebuck of the Washington Post reported today that federal judges are becoming increasingly impatient with the incompetence of the Department of Justice lawyers who are defending more than 200 cases against the administration in court. Judges have accused DOJ lawyers of providing inadequate answers and flimsy evidence, defying court orders, and even behaving like toddlers.
Trump has said the justice system is a “rigged system” run by “radical left lunatics,” but former federal judge John E. Jones III, whom President George W. Bush appointed to the bench, agreed that DOJ lawyers have “lost a fair measure of their credibility.”
Authoritarian governments are based on the idea that some people are better than others. This translates into the idea that some people have special insight based only upon their superiority. They don’t have to listen to experts, who just muddle the clear picture the leader can see. When reality intrudes on that vision, the problem is not the ideology of the leader, it is obstruction by political opponents.
As Trump told Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer of The Atlantic about his presidencies: “The first time, I had two things to do—run the country and survive; I had all these crooked guys,” he said. “And the second time, I run the country and the world.”
Trump himself illustrated this ideology again in the interview with Kristen Welker when he explained his trade war. “Look,” he said. “We were losing hundreds of billions of dollars with China. Now we’re essentially not doing business with China. Therefore, we’re saving hundreds of billions of dollars. Very simple.”
It is not, in fact, that simple.
This impulse to downplay expertise and concentrate power in a strongman shows in Trump’s tapping of Secretary of State Marco Rubio as acting national security advisor, as well as acting head of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and acting administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Clearly, Trump doesn’t think he needs experts in at least three of those four senior posts. Perhaps it also shows there are few experts still willing to work in a Trump White House.
The results of this disdain for expertise shows these days most immediately in the policies of Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. As measles continues to spread across the U.S., a spokesperson for Health and Human Services said Friday that Kennedy will turn the country’s health agencies away from promoting vaccination, which is 97% effective in preventing the disease, and toward exploring new treatments for it, including vitamins.
“It’s not that there’s been a lack of studies,” Dr. Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, told Teddy Rosenbluth of the New York Times. Decades of research have not discovered dramatic treatments, while vaccinations have proven safe and effective at preventing the life-threatening disease.
Rosenbluth noted that “[p]ublic health experts are baffled by Mr. Kennedy’s decision to hunt for new treatments, rather than endorse shots that have decades of safety and efficacy data.” This stance seems to contradict Kennedy’s longstanding focus on preventing disease.
Kennedy has also falsely claimed that the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine (MMR) contains “aborted fetus debris,” that parents should “do their own research,” and that he will institute testing for new vaccines with placebo-controlled trials, a practice medical experts warn could be unethical as subjects believe they are protected from disease when they are not.
Infectious disease expert Paul Offit told Jessica Glenza of The Guardian: “It’s his goal to even further lessen trust in vaccines and make it onerous enough for manufacturers that they will abandon it.”
At the end of March, Kennedy also vowed to study possible links between vaccines and autism, although repeated scholarly studies have shown no link. Kennedy has tapped David Geier, who does not have a medical degree and was disciplined in Maryland for practicing medicine without a license, to perform the study.
On Thursday, former New York Times global health reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr. noted that both Geier and Kennedy have made significant money thanks to their anti-vax stands as they monetize alleged treatments and sue pharmaceutical companies.
In Ars Technica on April 30, microbiologist and senior health reporter Beth Mole explored another angle to understand Kennedy’s policies. She noted that Kennedy, who is neither a doctor nor a public health expert, does not believe in the foundational principle of modern medicine: germ theory.
In a 2021 book, Kennedy argued the idea that microscopic viruses, bacteria, parasites, and fungi cause disease serves the pharmaceutical industry and the healthcare industry that grew around it by “emphasiz[ing] targeting particular germs with specific drugs rather than fortifying the immune system through healthy living, clean water, and good nutrition.” He accused those supporting this system, including Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who was a proponent of the Covid vaccine, of misleading the American public.
While Kennedy appears to believe germs exist, he also claims to believe in the older theory of disease called “miasma theory,” although as Mole points out, he misunderstands that theory—the idea that diseases are caused by poisonous vapors—and really appears to believe in another old idea: “terrain theory.” Terrain theory maintains that diseases are signs that the internal “terrain” of the body is out of whack.
This would explain Kennedy’s assertion—refuted by doctors—that the children who died of measles were malnourished. As medical blogger Kristen Panthagani, MD/PhD, explains: Kennedy’s way of thinking is “the belief that infections don’t pose a risk to healthy people who have optimized their immune system.”
While underlying medical conditions certainly affect people’s health, Mole notes that “the evidence against terrain theory is obvious and all around us.” But if you think germs are less important than overall health, things like the pasteurization of milk to kill E. coli, salmonella, and Listeria bacteria—which Kennedy opposes—are unnecessary.
In 1876, German microbiologist Robert Koch discovered that the cause of anthrax was a bacterium. Germ theory challenged established practices In the U.S., where doctors in the 1860s during the Civil War believed the best demonstration of their skill was their bloody aprons and instruments, instruments they kept in a velvet-lined case.
In 1881 the doctor overseeing President James Garfield’s recovery from a gunshot wound repeatedly probed the president’s wound with dirty instruments and his fingers, prompting assassin Charles Guiteau to plead not guilty of the murder by claiming, “The doctors killed Garfield, I just shot him.”
But just four years later, germ theory was so widely accepted that the U.S. Army required medical officers to inspect their posts every month and report the results to the administration, and by 1886, disease rates were dropping. By 1889, the U.S. Army had written manuals for sanitary field hospitals, and the need to combat germs was so commonplace medical officers rarely mentioned it.
And now, in 2025, the top health official in the United States, a man without degrees in either medicine or public health, appears to be rejecting germ theory and reshaping the nation’s medical system around his own dedication to a theory that was outdated well over a century ago.