The Snake Oil Salesmen In The White House

5 minutes read time.

In a rambling and reckless press conference on Monday that horrified the global medical community, President Trump and his Health Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., used the full weight of the White House to promote a dangerous cocktail of debunked medical theories, fringe science, and personal anecdotes, all under the guise of addressing the causes of autism. It was a stunning display of anti-scientific demagoguery, a performance that experts have labeled “irresponsible,” “unhinged,” and the “saddest display of a lack of evidence… I have ever witnessed by anyone in authority.” This was not a good-faith effort to advance public health; it was a cynical and cruel performance that used the platform of the presidency to validate dangerous misinformation, a spectacle of snake oil salesmanship that will have real, tragic consequences for American families.

The centerpiece of the administration’s bizarre presentation was a sustained and baseless assault on Tylenol, one of the most common and trusted medications in the world. At least a dozen times, the President of the United States looked directly into the cameras and instructed pregnant women to avoid the drug. “Don’t take Tylenol,” he repeated, urging them to simply “tough it out” if they were suffering from a fever. This advice, offered with the casual certainty of a man who believes his gut instinct is a substitute for decades of medical research, is not just wrong; it is profoundly dangerous.

Every major medical body, from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists to the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine, has been unequivocal: untreated fever during pregnancy is a known risk factor for miscarriage and serious birth defects, including neural tube defects and congenital heart conditions. For decades, these organizations have recommended that acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, is the safest available option for pregnant women to manage these risks. The administration’s reckless advice to “tough it out” is a direct contradiction of this established medical consensus, an instruction to ignore a proven danger in favor of an unproven, speculative fear. The international condemnation was swift and brutal, with health regulators in the United Kingdom and Australia immediately issuing statements to refute the President’s claims and reassure their own citizens of the drug’s safety.

The grotesque irony of the press conference was that while the administration was demonizing a proven, necessary medication, it was simultaneously touting a fringe, understudied supplement as a miracle cure. Secretary Kennedy announced that the FDA would be directed to fast-track the approval of leucovorin, a form of vitamin B9, as a potential treatment for autism. While a handful of small, preliminary studies have suggested the drug might be helpful for a subset of children with autism who have a specific metabolic disorder, the scientific community is unified in its assessment that the evidence is nowhere near sufficient to endorse its widespread use.

As former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb, a man who understands the rigorous process of drug approval, stated, “I don’t think you should go out and use it right now based on the body of evidence that exists.” The administration’s move is a perversion of the scientific process, a leap from a tentative hypothesis to a presidential endorsement. It is a bizarre and dangerous inversion of medical logic: a necessary medication is declared dangerous, while a speculative supplement is declared a breakthrough.

Throughout the press conference, the President and his Health Secretary recycled a “greatest hits” of long-debunked anti-vaccine talking points, a cascade of falsehoods and misrepresentations that have been the stock-in-trade of the fringe for decades. Trump declared that the way childhood vaccines are administered is a “disgrace,” a statement that directly undermines the carefully calibrated schedule that has all but eradicated diseases like measles and polio. They cherry-picked and distorted statistics, claiming an autism rate of one in 12 boys and asserting with absolute certainty that the Amish and Cubans “have no autism”—claims that are demonstrably and laughably false.

This performance was a masterclass in what is correctly identified as selling snake oil. It preys on the fears of vulnerable parents, offering them a simple, villainous explanation (vaccines, Tylenol) for a complex neurological condition, and then provides them with a simple, magical cure (leucovorin). It is a strategy designed to stoke fear and guilt, particularly among mothers. As one expert on a New York Times panel lamented, “It took me straight back to when moms were blamed for autism.”

For the autistic community itself, the rhetoric was devastating. The press conference framed their existence not as a form of neurodiversity, but as a “horrible crisis” to be prevented, a tragedy to be fixed. It is a dehumanizing perspective that denies their personhood and reduces them to a set of symptoms to be eradicated. As autistic writer and advocate Eric Garcia stated, “I don’t want to say we’re going back. We’re going somewhere worse.”

This is the ultimate, tragic outcome of the administration’s war on science. This is not a good-faith effort to understand a complex condition or to advance public health. It is a reckless and cruel political performance that uses the most powerful platform in the world to validate dangerous misinformation. It is a cynical play that offers false hope while creating real harm, a sad and sorry spectacle of snake oil salesmen who have, against all odds, managed to take over the country store.