As if Donald Trump’s presence in the looming presidential campaign wasn’t spooky enough, the past few months have been filled with haunting revelations about the people vying to lead our country. There is Kristi Noem, the South Dakota governor who is rapidly losing her shot at being Trump’s running mate because she can’t stop talking about killing her dog. And then there is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the man who hates vaccines but loves push-ups — and, according to the New York Times, claims to have had a dead worm in his brain.
The Times recently dug up a 2012 deposition from Kennedy’s divorce proceedings with his second wife, during which he apparently argued that his earning power had been damaged by “cognitive problems.” The politician reportedly stated that, two years earlier, he’d been suffering from memory loss and mental fogginess that doctors believed was caused by a tumor. Before he was operated on, one doctor suddenly told him he believed the spot on his brain scans was actually — in Kennedy’s words — “a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died.”
Oh?
Understandably, the Times went looking for more detail and apparently spoke with Kennedy this past winter, when he explained that, instead of undergoing surgery, he went through a series of tests and brain scans, which showed the spot in his brain — which, again, he suspected to be a decomposing worm — was not changing. He claims doctors later decided it was indeed the remains of a parasite, which didn’t require treatment, and that he no longer has memory loss or fogginess.
Of course, the theory that a parasitic worm crawled into RFK, Jr.’s brain and took a little nibble would explain a lot. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility — tapeworm eggs can travel to the brain once a human swallows them, and those larvae create cysts similar to the one Kennedy described. Still, experts told the Times that it was “unlikely” a parasite would go full zombie and start eating brain tissue.
However true or not true Kennedy’s story is, the whole “worm in the brain” thing pokes a glaring hole in his carefully painted public image as a virile presidential candidate at the top of his physical game. Kennedy has spent decades touting patently false anti-vaccine pseudo-science and is now running as an independent on a platform of almost exclusively conspiracy theories. Though Biden is 81 and Trump is 77 and Kennedy is not that far behind them at 70, his campaign has involved taking strides to show voters that, unlike his aging opponents, he can bench-press. His 2012 confession that “I have cognitive problems, clearly,” is not exactly helping his case.
Still, when asked if his allegedly defunct parasite — or the mercury poisoning he also claims to have had in 2010 thanks to eating too many “predatory fish” — could impact his presidential abilities, his spokeswoman said, “That is a hilarious suggestion, given the competition.” Okay, but in a huge win for both Trump and Biden, neither of them have (to our knowledge) ever had dead worms in their brains. So there!
