The Republican Party is facing strong headwinds as it lumbers toward the midterm elections, which are just weeks away. Its main pitch to voters is essentially: “We understand you may hate some of our policies and the fact that the affordability crisis has gotten worse while we’ve controlled all three branches of government — but you can’t vote for Democrats, because they’re crazy!”
So far, it doesn’t seem like the American public is buying what they’re selling. A recent PBS News/NPR/Marist poll found that voters favored Democrats over Republicans on a generic ballot 53% to 41%. Independents, those pesky sorts who are often credited with or blamed for swinging elections, prefer Democrats by 25 percentage points. The Wall Street Journal last week published a survey of registered voters that found President Donald Trump’s approval rating at just 37%, a record-low for presidents going into the midterms since the Journal started recording such data in 1990. Even former President Joe Biden, despite the disastrous U.S. military withdrawal in Afghanistan and pandemic-induced inflation, had a 43% approval rating in the Journal’s survey ahead of the 2022 midterms.
So what are some of the top officials in the Trump administration, including Vice President JD Vance and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., doing to solidify the GOP’s reputation as the party of not-crazy? They’re sharing a bill at the “Make American Healthy Again” summit in Washington, with Russell Brand, the comedian turned podcaster who will soon face trial on charges of rape and sexual assault in the United Kingdom. (Brand has pleaded not guilty and denied the allegations.)
Ever since Brand’s entertainment career cratered, he has found new purpose as a peddler of fact-bereft conspiracy theories that track with MAGA obsessions.
Mehmet Oz, administrator of the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, introduced Brand at the summit on Tuesday as the moderator of a panel on “Reform at CMS” along with Oz and Dan Brillman, the director of the Center for Medicaid at HHS.
“Russell Brand was backstage hugging the Secretary of Agriculture (Brooke Rollins),” Oz said. Brand quickly added, “She initiated that contact, I should make clear, doctor!”
Oz responded to this apparent light-hearted reference to the sexual assault charges against Brand with a hearty guffaw and a literal knee-slap. I’m big on due process and the presumption of innocence, but Oz’s hee-haw signaled that to an administration which paints with a black-and-white brush, Brand is viewed as one of the good guys. Just look at the millions in taxpayer dollars the administration is spending on propaganda ads featuring Trump’s voice warning of a “final battle” with all of MAGA’s political enemies (i.e., anyone not in thrall of Trump). The message: you’re either with Trump or with the America-hating villains.
Ever since Brand’s entertainment career cratered, he has found new purpose as a peddler of fact-bereft conspiracy theories that track with MAGA obsessions. And the right has repaid him: When the sexual assault accusations against Brand were first made public in 2023, MAGA heavyweights like Elon Musk, Alex Jones and Ben Shapiro rushed to his defense, intimating or outright saying that Brand was being set up by nefarious “establishment” forces that were threatened by his supposedly brave conspiracy pablum. Shapiro, ostensibly an intellectual leader of the MAGA movement, said at the time, “When Russell has just decided that he is not in favor of a lot of sort of left-wing narratives, ranging from COVID to wokeness, when that happens suddenly you have a coordinated attack … I find the timing at least somewhat suspicious. When I say ‘somewhat,’ I mean ‘a lot’ suspicious.”
Some of those non-left-wing narratives that Brand has pushed without evidence include the claim that Covid-19 vaccines cause “turbo cancer” in young people. Despite his admitted hedonistic lifestyle, Brand now says he’s a devout Christian — though he couldn’t name a single biblical passage when asked to do so on live TV. And in April Brand told Tucker Carlson that “it seems like the ultimate aim of [Covid vaccines] may have been population reduction.”
Let’s stay with that last one for a moment.
This MAHA/MAGA folk hero said vaccines that were fast-tracked by Trump himself as part of Operation Warp Speed in 2020 — which were the single-greatest factor in ending the Covid pandemic — “may have” been designed to cause a population-reducing number of deaths. This is the guy who shared the stage with two Trump administration officials on Tuesday (who he didn’t ask about the supposed population-culling vaccine conspiracy), just a few hours before the HHS secretary and vice president appeared on that same stage.
And this is the party that has so few accomplishments to run on, and so many unpopular failures it wants Americans to ignore (the disastrous Iran war; the failing trade war; the president’s many taxpayer-funded vanity projects, to name just three), that all they can attempt to sell to voters is that Democrats are “crazy.”
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