A Wicked Appointment That Deserves More Attention

In 2018, Steve Bannon summed up the basic political strategy of Trumpism: “Flood the zone with shit.” That is, train a firehose of lies, nonsense, disinformation, propaganda, and outrageous actions on Democrats, progressives, the media, and the citizenry. None of them will be able to keep up fully and counter every piece of crap hurled in their direction. It’s just too much to contend with—for media outlets, for political rivals, for elected officials, for voters. And when so much garbage is flying, some portion of it will get through whatever defenses are raised and stick.

This is what’s been happening with Trump’s appointments for his second term. The parade of deplorables is too long for the public or the press to process. Our attention spans are not wide enough to focus intently on each of the terrible picks. And the truly horrible choices—Matt Gaetz, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kash Patel, and Tulsi Gabbard—provide cover for the other still-but-less-horrible appointees. Did you know that Trump has designated as the next Internal Revenue Service commissioner a former GOP congressman and auctioneer named Billy Long, who made money promoting an iffy tax credit that’s a magnet for fraud? Or that that the man he named his senior adviser for Arab and Middle Eastern affairs—his daughter Tiffany’s father-in-law, billionaire businessman Massad Boulos—has no experience as a diplomatic envoy?

Which brings me to Dr. Mehmet Oz. Trump has tapped the former talk show doctor to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, an agency in charge of health insurance programs that cover more than 150 million Americans. While the Oz appointment did not set off the alarm bells triggered by Trump’s decision to name anti-vax and conspiracy theory monger Kennedy to head the Department of Health and Human Services and Covid-downplayer Jay Bhattacharya to run the National Institutes of Health, Trump’s selection of this Oprah spinoff is about as disturbing and consequential.

Usually, this position goes to a health care policy nerd. You can’t name the current CMS commissioner, I’d bet. I couldn’t until I looked her up: Chiquita Brooks-LaSure. She once was the lead Medicaid analyst in the Office of Management and Budget. Later, after working on Capitol Hill, she joined the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight and toiled on policies related to the Affordable Care Act. She then managed the health division of a national law firm and served on the Virginia Health Benefit Exchange Advisory Committee. As I said, a health care policy nerd. Even her predecessor, Seema Verma, who was appointed by Trump and tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act and reduce Medicaid benefits, had deep experience in health care policy (and a serious ethics controversy).

Oz doesn’t possess this sort of know-how. Worse, he has a terrible record as a medical expert. As I reported when Oz unsuccessfully ran for US Senate in Pennsylvania two years ago against John Fetterman, he had:

…long come under fire for championing unproven therapies and products—in other words, quack nostrums—on his show. During a 2014 appearance before a Senate committee, then-Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) lambasted him for hawking “miracle” and “magic” weight-loss cures: “You know it’s not true. So why, when you have this amazing megaphone, do you cheapen your show like that?” That same year, a British medical journal released a report saying that “no evidence could be found” for about a third of the medical recommendations Oz had presented on his show.

In a lengthy profile of Oz that ran in the New Yorker in 2013, reporter Michael Specter noted that Oz had “consistently” booked “guests with dubious authority” to challenge conventional medicine. One of his chief examples was an osteopath named Joseph Mercola who had quit practicing as a doctor to run a highly profitable business peddling alternative health products and dietary supplements. The FDA had warned Mercola for issuing false claims about products that supposedly combat cancer and heart disease. And Mercola had a spotty record in other ways. He had claimed avian influenza was a hoax, contended that vaccines were dangerous and caused AIDS, and promoted an Italian doctor who said cancer was a fungus that could be treated with baking soda. (In 2018, this doctor was sentenced to five and a half years in prison on a manslaughter charge for treating a brain cancer patient with this supposed remedy.)

Yet Oz vouched for Mercola, hailing him as a “pioneer in holistic treatments” and a person “your doctor doesn’t want you to listen to,” a man who “is challenging everything you think you know about traditional medicine and prescription drugs.” In an odd comment to Specter, Oz said, “If I don’t have Mercola on my show, I have thrown away the biggest opportunity I have been given.” 

During the Covid crisis, Mercola became a prominent purveyor of Covid denialism. He asserted that there was no pandemic and that Covid was a “scam.” As he pushed falsehoods about the vaccines, the FDA sent him a warning letter for promoting unapproved and unproven treatments for Covid—such as a vitamin C, vitamin D, and other products—in possible violation of federal law. In a report released in March 2021, the Center for Countering Digital Hate assigned Mercola the top spot on its “Disinformation Dozen” list of people “responsible for the bulk of anti-vaxx content shared or posted on Facebook and Twitter.” A few months later, the New York Times cited the center’s report and dubbed Mercola the “most influential spreader of coronavirus misinformation online,” noting he had posted more than 600 articles on Facebook “that cast doubt on Covid-19 vaccines” and had reached “a far larger audience than other vaccine skeptics,” with his claims echoing across Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. (In an email to me in 2022, Mercola maintained the “Disinformation Dozen” paper was a “fake report” tied “directly into dark money politics” and was “debunked by Facebook, was not a peer reviewed primary reference, and was not validated in any way.”)

In the opening months of the Covid pandemic, Oz, whom Trump in 2018 appointed to a federal council on sports, fitness, and nutrition, took actions of his own considered counterproductive by many public health experts. On Fox News, he suggested reopening schools because doing so “may only cost us 2 to 3 percent in terms of total mortality.” After this comment drew widespread criticism, Oz said, “I misspoke.” He repeatedly touted using hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid, though experts noted the drug was unproven in addressing the coronavirus. According to the New York Times, “Oz promoted chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine in more than 25 appearances on Fox in March and April 2020.” (In 2022, CNBC reported that Oz and his wife owned shares in two pharmaceutical companies that supplied hydroxychloroquine.) When one study found that Covid patients treated with hydroxychloroquine were more likely to die than untreated patients, Oz stopped promoting the drug. Eventually hydroxychloroquine was shown to not yield any benefit in the treatment of Covid. 

In addition to boosting quackery, hyping an alternative-medicine advocate who would become a top Covid denier, and championing a phony cure for Covid, Oz has avidly promoted Medicare Advantage, a program run by private health insurance corporations that competes with traditional Medicare and that has been wracked with problems for recipients (including misleading promises of coverage, high rates of denied claims, and delays in insurance approval). It’s a boondoggle for the companies and has been associated with incredibly wasteful spending. Yet Trump allies—see Project 2025—want to expand Medicare Advantage and shove more Medicare recipients into it, which could lead to a death spiral for Medicare. As the American Prospect reported, “On his now-defunct TV show, The Dr. Oz Show, he repeatedly touted Medicare Advantage. Disclosures later showed, during his failed campaign for a Pennsylvania Senate seat in 2022, that Oz owned $600,000 of stock in two of the largest Medicare Advantage sponsors, UnitedHealth Group and CVS/Aetna.”

Oz’s fondness for the privatization of Medicare may be the most dangerous element of his appointment. Trump has vowed that he won’t cut Medicare, but he has picked a pal who wants to undermine it—and who has had a personal financial interest in doing so—to run Medicare.

Trump’s recruitment of a quack-friendly TV doctor with little experience in health care policy to head CMS ought to be a major controversy. Oz presents a threat to the programs CMS manages—including the Children’s Health Insurance Program—which are vital to the health and well-being of close to half the population. (Medicaid serves 79.4 million people; Medicare, 67.8 million; and CHIP, 7.1 million.) Perhaps when Oz reaches the confirmation process and appears before the Senate Finance Committee—if Trump doesn’t resort to recess appointments—the absurdity of this appointment will draw more scrutiny. But when a zone is flooded with shit, a lot of the garbage can escape notice.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland.corn@gmail.com.

Our most recent Our Land Zoom get-together was so much fun that I promised to do another one before we say farewell to 2024. So let’s gather virtually Wednesday, December 18, at 8 p.m. ET. As most of you know, these sessions are only open to premium subscribers. On the day of the hoedown, these readers will be emailed a Zoom link. Click on it at the appointed hour, and our highly trained Our Land bouncers will let you in. As we head into 2025, I think we all may need a bit of camaraderie, and I hope to hold these events more regularly. If you’re not a premium subscriber and would like to join this community and participate, please sign up here. And let me once again thank our premium crowd for parting with a few dollars each month to support this newsletter. In return, members of this noble band get a whole bunch of extra features in each issue, the opportunity to join me and their fellow Our Landers for these conversations, and, I hope, the satisfaction of knowing that because of them we can keep this newsletter going.

Time for another installment of our new feature that highlights prominent people who sane-wash or normalize Donald Trump and his crew and who legitimize a fellow who tried to overturn an American election, incited political violence, and openly expressed a desire to impose authoritarian measures once he returns to the White House.

Billionaire Jeff Bezos, who blocked the newspaper he owns, the Washington Post, from endorsing Kamala Harris, recently went on about how psyched he is for Trump 2.0. At the New York Times BookDeal Summit, he told reporter Aaron Ross Sorkin, “I’m actually very optimistic this time around. I’m very hopeful about—[Trump] seems to have a lot of energy about reducing regulations.”

Is Bezos also optimistic about mass deportations, a war on vaccines (and the next measles outbreaks), and Trump’s signaling that he wants his Justice Department and FBI to go after his political enemies and critics? He just proved there was good reason for me to have featured Bezos in a recent issue titled “The Cowardice of the Elites.”

I was disappointed to see my old pal Greta Van Susteren normalize one of Trump’s worst appointments. After Trump announced his intention to shitcan FBI Director Chris Wray and replace him with Kash Patel, a MAGA provocateur unqualified for this important position, Van Susteren tweeted, “I like that @FBI nominee is a former Federal Public Defender - too many people in law enforcement (and judges) have never fought on the ground floor for rights of people like a Public Defender does daily - let’s hope he does not forget his roots.”

I’m a fan of public defenders, who perform an invaluable and underappreciated task and who see an important side of the criminal justice system most of us miss. But Patel’s experience as a PD hardly compensates for his promotion of dangerous conspiracy theories—the 2020 election was stolen from Trump and the January 6 riot was sparked by “strange agitators” and federal agents—and his support of the QAnon conspiracy movement. Nor does it make up for his call to use the government to investigate Trump’s foes. Focusing on his past as a PD distracts from the peril Patel represents, as well as the threat Trump poses to American democracy.   

If you have a nomination for Accomplice Watch, email me at ourland.corn@gmail.com.

Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist. On October 26, 1970, after being sidelined for three years from boxing for his refusal to be drafted into the military during the Vietnam War, Muhammad Ali made his grand return to the ring in a bout against Jerry Quarry in Atlanta. It was not much of match. Ali dispatched Quarry in three rounds with a TKO, but the high-profile fight not only was an important political-cultural moment—Ali was the most prominent draft resister in the land—but it was a milestone for Atlanta, marking the rise of the burgeoning Black Power elite in the Southern city. The fight was a magnet for Black businesspeople, Black celebrities (Diana Ross!), and Black gangsters from across the country. Bert Sugar, a boxing historian, later observed that the fight “marked the greatest collection of black money and black power ever assembled up until that time. Right in the heart of the old Confederacy, it was Gone with the Wind turned upside down.”

What also happened that night was a big-time robbery. At a house party following the fight—where up to 200 people had gathered to gamble, dance, drink, and snort—masked gunmen forced the celebrants to strip to their underwear and lay on the floor, doing so for hours as new bands of partygoers showed up. The crooks made off with about a million dollars in cash and valuables. The next day, news of this brazen theft supplanted that of Ali’s comeback, and the message of a New Atlanta—the “Black Mecca”—was shoved aside by a crime that won national attention.

It's a helluva story—true-crime rift with sociopolitical currents, and a cameo from The Greatest—and in 2020, an iHeart podcast told the tale, focusing on Gordon Williams, a.k.a. Chicken Man, the street hustler who organized the party, and J.D. Hudson, one of the first Black detectives on Atlanta’s police force, who worked the case. Afterward, Shaye Ogbonna, a film and TV writer, had the bright idea to turn the podcast into a dramatic series, and the Peacock streaming service said yes. The result is Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist, a saucy eight-episode series that opens with this notice: “Based on some shit that really happened.”

The show is a delicious mix of ’70s-style detective shows and Blaxploitation films. There are Afros aplenty, hip-hugging bell bottoms, bushy sideburns and ’staches, a mess of racist good ol’ boys, and a never-ending stream of soul and R&B tunes. There’s also the prolific use of the n-word that might be off-putting to some ears these days. Kevin Hart and Don Cheadle excel as Chicken Man and Hudson. At first the hustler is suspected by Hudson and Frank Moten (Samuel L. Jackson), the Black Godfather from NYC who’s robbed at the party, to be the brains behind the heist. But, as a viewer might expect, he and Hudson eventually team up to pursue the perps, as well as the baddies who orchestrated the caper. As Vivian “Sweets” Thomas, the Chicken Man’s partner in crime and luvin’, Taraji P. Henson effectively channels the bold spirit of Pam Grier. Kudos to Hart, best known as a funnyman, for going toe-to-toe with Cheadle and Jackson in this fast-spinning cops-and-robbers-and-robbers merry-go-round and holding his own.  

Fight Night fiddles with the facts. It seems there are more shotgun blasts in this recounting than the real version. But with crisp acting from the cast, a host of plot twists, and dead-on costume and set design, it’s an entertaining and well-composed love letter to the emerging Black culture of the late 1960s and early 1970s.