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High Popalorum and Low Popahirum
Despite all the echoes of early 20th century European fascism, Donald Trump is still firmly planted in the long American tradition of snake oil salesman, carnival barkers, and con artists. It’s at least as strong a through-line in American history as our puritanism, sitting in counterpoise to its ascetic, moralistic self-deprivation. We celebrate charlatans like P.T. Barnum, make scoundrels into lovable archetypes, and root for the conversion of con artists like “Professor” Harold Hill.
The crossover between hucksters and politicians didn’t begin with Trump.
Louisiana’s Dudley J. LeBlanc, who served in the state legislature intermittently from the 1920s into the 1970s, made a fortune creating the patent medicine labeled Hadacol. In the early 1950s, Hadacol was a marketing marvel, boosted by the traveling medicine show the Hadacol Caravan, which featured some of the leading performers of the day, including Hank Williams. What made Hadacol so popular was less its promise of miracle cures and more its 12% alcohol content. You could drink it in dry counties where little else was available.
Leblanc, whose dubious Wikipedia page credits him with the idea for Social Security, made millions from the high-flying over-leveraged, marketing bonanza of Hadacol before it all collapsed amid unpaid bills, overdue taxes, and scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission (more on which from the Supreme Court below). “The Federal Trade Commission complained that Hadacol’s leeringly prurient ballyhoo (‘The Hadacol boogie makes you boogie-woogie all the time’) is ‘false, misleading and deceptive’ in representing the nostrum as ‘an effective treatment and cure for scores of ailments and diseases,” Time magazine reported in 1951.
The snake oil salesman is such a fixture of our culture that one of American politics’ most famous grifters, Louisiana Sen. Huey Long, famously used the trope to disparage the two major political parties in seeking to set himself apart. The parties were, he said, no different than the patent medicine salesman selling the same product under beguilingly different names: High Papalorum and Low Popahirum. Asked to explain the difference between the two bottles, the salesman explained that they were both made from the same tree but they were different: The former was made from the bark peeled from the top down and the latter peeled from the bottom up.
Yesterday, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s traveling medicine show made a stop at the White House, where President Trump was the featured barker at an off-the-rails press conference. Taking unscientific aim at vaccines and unsubstantiated links between Tylenol and autism, the president went on a long, meandering musing reminiscent of some of the worst of his COVID-era pressers touting bleach and ultraviolet light:
Medical experts, scientists, and public health advocates were aghast at the White House scene.
Roberts Court Sounds Final Death Knell for Indy Agencies
It was fitting that on the day President Trump and his HHS secretary were deriding science and touting unproven cures, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts took a sledgehammer to the FTC.
In another abuse of its shadow docket, the Roberts Court effectively overturned its own century-old precedent on independent agencies and allowed Trump’s firing of the Democratic FTC commissioner to go into effect while the appeal of the case proceeds.
The precedent the Supreme Court effectively overturned, Humphrey’s Executor, was a 1935 case about the firing of an FTC commissioner — so it could hardly be more on point. So eager was the court to change course that it agreed to take up the case immediately rather than wait for the appeals court to hear it. It was a contrast with, for example, the Roberts Court’s refusal to consider Special Counsel Jack Smith’s similar request for expedited treatment in Trump’s presidential immunity case. And we all know how that turned out.
Even Justice Elana Kagan, usually more subdued than her two liberal colleagues on the court, managed outrage and indignation in her dissent: “Our emergency docket should never be used, as it has been this year, to permit what our own precedent bars. Still more, it should not be used, as it also has been, to transfer government authority from Congress to the President, and thus to reshape the Nation’s separation of powers.”
Operation Fast Casual: Homan’s Non-Denial Denial
It wasn’t just extraordinary that the White House would take a public position on the underlying facts of a criminal investigation it blocked and buried. It was also comical that while press secretary Karoline Leavitt denied that border czar Tom Homan had taken the $50,000 in a Cava bag in an exchange allegedly recording by the FBI, Homan for his part didn’t directly deny it in a interview last night on Fox News with Laura Ingraham:
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