In this respect, Trump's version of populism resonates with longstanding themes of the conspiracy-theory right. For years, right-wing sites have thrived on "miracle-cure" ads that position drs. and the medical system as an elitist conspiracy. These responses pick up on... https://twitter.com/sivavaid/status/1247218834584547328

the real anxieties of people facing a profoundly broken health care system: one that leaves millions without any coverage and millions more with inadequate coverage for an insanely expensive system. The right/populist response is not to address the political economy of the system

But to posit a conspiracy of medical professionals who "don't want" members of the public to know about cheap, easy, and effective remedies so they can foist expensive alternatives on them. This conspiracy theory mobilizes anti-"elitist" narratives against expertise...

(note the scorn dripping from Trump's sarcastic formulation: "Gee, let’s take a couple of years and test it out, and let’s go and test with the test tubes and the laboratories." Those are the university eggheads who want to pull the wool over the common sense wisdom of the people

This is a pastiche of political economic critique that deflects attention away from corporate capture of the health care system and toward over-educated pinheads who make everything more complicated than it needs to be. It's not the system, it's the test tube types...

I started doing some research on these ads a while back. It wasn't uncommon to find the miracle-cure ads right next to content furiously attacking initiatives leading up to the Affordable Care Act. In the place of structural, regulatory response to the real anxieties about...

the US health care system, advertisers were responding with an ongoing flow of patent medicines and miracle cures. Trump's temperamentally or instinctively taps into this dynamic:

Even as he engages in an ongoing assault on the ACA, he mobilizes the promise of the miracle cure. He pits his gut wisdom, his instinctive "feel" against the "elitist" test tube, egghead crew (represented in the briefings by Fauci),