Trump’s brain rot cabinet

Last week, baffling many and delighting a few, HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. declared during a Trump administration cabinet meeting that he’s engaged in a hunt for what he said were 300,000 missing children trafficked by the Biden administration.

“We have ended HHS’s role as the principal vector in this country for child trafficking,” Kennedy declared. “During the Biden administration, HHS became a collaborator in child trafficking for sex and for slavery, and we have ended that. We’re very aggressively going out and trying to find these 300,000 children that were lost by the Biden administration.”

To even remotely understand what Kennedy is talking about requires one’s brain to be thoroughly bathed in the corrosive acid of the right-wing internet, where it’s taken on faith that the Biden administration either allowed hundreds of thousands of children to be trafficked or perhaps actively participated in that trafficking themselves. 

Kennedy’s comments are an excellent demonstration of how, in the Trump era, public statements by administration figures and their congressional backers are heavily influenced by the far-right and conspiratorial internet—sometimes in addled, confused, or strangely remixed forms. Why is Attorney General Pam Bondi promising to release an “Epstein client list” that probably isn’t real?Why is Kennedy also claiming that vaccines are made from “fetus debris,” which is a lie, and promising to fight chemtrails, which don’t exist, but which he recently claimed DARPA is spraying into the sky? Why is Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) claiming he wants a Congressional hearing into “what actually happened” on September 11, as he claimed a “controlled demolition” brought down building 7? Why are Donald Trump and Elon Musk reviving a 1970s conspiracy theory which claims that the gold inside Fort Knox might be gone? Why was a government website where Americans could once order free Covid tests has been transformed into a webpage promoting an extremely longwinded version of the still-unproven lab leak theory? Why is Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) declaring there were “two shooters” involved in the JFK assassination, before hosting a hearing that in no way proved that?

Rumors, conspiracy theories, memes, jokes, contextless claims and thinly-sourced allegations all now find their way at lightning speed to the White House and to other senior Republican officials, where they’re immediately spat back out in statements and public appearances. These statements make it incredibly clear how deeply online and profoundly conspiracy-brained the modern GOP is—and how much taxpayer-funded time the Trump administration plans to spend pursuing ideas that range from ludicrous to already debunked. 

Kennedy, who has previously admitted that he falls for online misinformation “all the time,” and his bald claim that HHS engaged in the trafficking of children caused uproar and confusion, even among the conservative faithful. “If true, this would be a really really big deal,” tweeted collegiate swimmer turned conservative activist Riley Gaines. “Arrest and prosecute!!!!” “HOLY SHLIT,” tweeted Chaya Raichik of the far-right Libs of TikTok. 

The way that the claim about 300,000 missing children made it out of Kennedy’s mouth helps to demonstrate how conspiracy theories function in the current, fever-dream version of the GOP. The claim has a long and increasingly convoluted pedigree in right-wing and conspiratorial spaces: versions circulated during the Biden administration, when a self-proclaimed HHS whistleblower named Tara Rhodas claimed the agency routinely released unaccompanied migrant children into the care of people affiliated with gangs like MS-13. Rhodas suspected that these sponsors would then traffic the children.

The claims are a pastiche of true and unproven: in one 2021 case highly publicized by Republican lawmakers, two children were sent to a home where their sponsors had suspected MS-13 ties. Other migrant children—in cases Republican lawmakers have been less excited to discuss—were sent to places where they were labor trafficked, forced to work in slaughterhouses, farms, and factories.

While the Biden administration may have helped create this situation by pressuring caseworkers to move children out of shelters and release them to sponsors as quickly as possible, Kennedy’s more QAnon-ish claim—that 300,000 children have simply vanished into thin air—seems to have its roots in a August 2024 report from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General. That report found the government “could not monitor the location and status” of all unaccompanied minors known to be in the country, including some 291,000 who ICE had never made steps to remove, and another 32,000 who did not appear for court dates. The report did not state that any of the children had been trafficked. As an expert at the Acacia Center for Justice’s Unaccompanied Children Program explained to CBS, this isn’t a problem of “missing kids” but one of “missing paperwork.”

It’s a very long walk from those facts to claiming that the children are “missing,” let alone being sex trafficked. But by in October 2024, JD Vance claimed during a debate with Governor Tim Walz that 300,000 children were missing. Trump gave a lurid version of the line in a December Time interview. “We have 325,000 children here during Democrats—and this was done by Democrats—who are right now slaves, sex slaves or dead,” he said. “What I will be doing will be trying to find where they are and get them back to their parents.” That month, incoming Trump border czar Tom Homan suggested that the “missing” youth had been trafficked and pledged to track them down in an interview with the Washington Post where, with no apparent sense of irony or contradiction, he also discussed how the administration would bring back the family separation policy Trump deployed during his first term.

But while most people who heard about Kennedy’s claim greeted it with bafflement, reflexive outrage, or, rarely, demands for further proof, according to author and journalist Mike Rothschild, the QAnon community celebrated.

“Kennedy’s comments at the Trump cabinet meeting/praise-a-thon are a great example of a conspiracy theory that makes little sense outside the right wing influencer bubble, but a cause for celebration inside it,” Rothschild, who has written a book about QAnon and another on antisemitic conspiracy theories, explains.

Whether he knows it or not, Rothschild adds, “Kennedy is pushing hardcore QAnon-style moral panic to an audience of devotees who are desperate for Trump to finally sweep away the bad guys and deliver on the promises Q made years ago,” namely to uncover sex trafficking being conducted by high-level Democratic politicians. 

“For people who aren’t steeped in these theories, it sounds like the ravings of a madman,” Rothschild adds. But Q and its ilk are so mainstream on the right now that it’s finding a large and receptive audience.”

Embracing conspiracy theories has worked incredibly well for the current GOP and Trump administration, a way to keep their base captivated and profitably enraged. In one ongoing example, a February attempt to release Epstein names and flight logs to a group of conservative influencers quickly turned into a mess once it became clear the files weren’t new at all. Nonetheless, Attorney General Bondi has continued to insist new information on the case is forthcoming, claiming this week that the FBI is combing through “tens of thousands of videos of Epstein with children.” While Rep. Luna’s first JFK hearing did not produce the second gunman she’s said she’s in search of, she has pledged to keep working to provide “needed transparency about federal secrets to the American people,” including about the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.

And while Kennedy’s son Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has provided no further information about the 300,000 children he claims are missing, there’s no question that their speculative existence will be mentioned again, whenever it might be politically profitable to do so.