After his nomination was voted out of the Senate Finance Committee, it looks as if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is likely to be confirmed by the Senate to run the Department of Health and Human Services. Nobody is voting for RFK because they actually believe he is an appropriate person to head HHS. That’s not why Donald Trump picked him, either. Fundamentally, RFK is a coalition choice: He left the Democrats, then abandoned his third-party bid, endorsed Trump, and brought some of his voters with him.
It’s traditional American politics to reward this sort of thing with a cabinet post. (If anything, this is even more common in parliamentary systems, as most recently illustrated in Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet.) More conventionally respected American presidents such as Abraham Lincoln have made them. Trump is hardly the first.
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