Let's just presume for argument's sake that the Trump administration and its chief flunky at the Department of Health and Human Services are actually serious about identifying a definitive cause of autism by September, as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said this month.

I know. That's a bit of a big ask, as they say. If they were actually serious about what Kennedy described as "a massive testing and research effort," involving "hundreds of scientists from around the world," would they have spent their first 100 days choking off funding for testing, research, and scientists in every HHS division including the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control?

Doubtful. Perhaps that's why Kennedy gave no details for the project and revealed no budget for it.

We didn't need scientists

But again, let's grant a fully undeserved benefit of the doubt and presume further that Kennedy's latest conclusion that an environmental toxin causes autism is found to be correct, again, by September.

This, after our first ridiculous presumption, appears almost plausible by comparison. Kennedy made his pop culture chops spreading the irresponsible conspiracy theorist nonsense that vaccines cause autism, but his reformist views casting suspicion over environmental factors has been shared by the NIH itself, which is on record naming prenatal exposure to pesticides and air pollution as potentially causative.

But let's pretend that some of the world's most specialized scientists, virologists, immunologists, epidemiologists, and others, having studied autism for decades at a supported rate that reached more than $300 million annually from the NIH, were simply not up to the task that Robert F. Kennedy and Donald Trump are about to complete inside of five months.

All this time, all this suffering, and it turns out we didn't need scientists at all. We should have hired a convicted felon and a guy who once dumped a bear carcass in Central Park.

But stay with me.

Fast-forward to Sept. 15. The Steelers are on Monday Night Football, but minutes before kickoff, networks break into their regular programming for a special report from the White House briefing room, where Trump introduces RFK Jr. to unveil the cause of autism that has eluded scientists for generations. It's an environmental toxin, one long-identified as a likely human carcinogen but still widely used in American manufacturing.

RFK Jr. Not a doctor. Not a scientist. Just a hero. Sure, that could happen.

But now what?

Trump doesn't need evidence

How will the Trump administration proceed to, as Kennedy promised, "eliminate those exposures," to prohibit any further use of the toxin within the United States, to support businesses that need to redesign their plants and their manufacturing models, and to lead us to a place of drastically reduced autism and a healthier American future?

You know how. By doing absolutely nothing.

This is the administration that loves environmental toxins. They love fossil fuels. More than anything, they love deregulating any regulation that even limits the amount of pollutants poisoning the climate and their own people.

Not two months into Trump 2.0, his new Environmental Protection Agency withdrew a Biden-era lawsuit against a Louisiana plant that emits chloroprene, which the old EPA classified as a carcinogen. The lawsuit alleged the chemical was linked to significant cancer risk for its mostly Black neighbors, but the new administration sided with the Japanese company's lawyers and withdrew it, according to Reuters.

In announcing the move, the administration said it was fulfilling an executive order to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion, and that the new EPA's guidance was to "end the use of 'environmental justice' as a tool for advancing ideological priorities."

Trump's environmental "vision" has never been about which people happen to be living near which polluters — he could not care less — it's about throwing environmental issues into that hamper in his brain for things he just doesn't want to think about. He's long called climate change a hoax, or a Chinese hoax, and those who can prove otherwise are "climate lunatics."

Lunatic is one of those reflexive Trump pejoratives the president deals indiscriminately to anyone saying anything he doesn't like. It's a symptom of that highly specialized pathology by which you think things are true because you say them, and think things are false because you don't like them.

That is Trump Derangement Syndrome. And Trump is Patient Zero.

A disdained lunatic

One year ago this week, Trump disdained one lunatic in particular, so much that it triggered a spirited round of social media trashing. Perhaps you remember this one:

"(He's) a Democrat 'Plant,' a Radical Left Liberal who's been put in place in order to help Crooked Joe Biden, the Worst President in the History of the United States, get Re-Elected. A Vote for Junior would essentially be a WASTED PROTEST VOTE, that could swing either way, but would only swing against the Democrats if Republicans knew the true story about him. Junior' is totally Anti-Gun, an Extreme Environmentalist who makes the Green New Scammers look Conservative, a Big Time Taxer and Open Border Advocate, and Anti-Military/Vet."

That was the current president, talking about the current Secretary of Health and Human Services, RFK Jr., who four months later would suspend his candidacy and put his full support behind Trump.

"I like him a lot; I respect him a lot," Trump then said. "He's very smart."

There's no cure for that.

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