Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is not the man ideological conservatives would have chosen for HHS secretary. That’s obvious when reading the editorials here, at the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post. In this case, he is much like the man who is trying to hire him, Donald Trump. He is a name-brand somebody who has volunteered to champion a suite of policies that many incumbents oppose, and enough Americans are willing to get behind him despite the worst that can be said of him.

RFK Jr. is sitting before the Senate today not because he is a conservative but because he isn’t one. He represents something else in our politics that has some crossover appeal. He is very likely the reason Trump won the popular vote, which has quelled the kind of brinksmanship that had met his arrival in Washington in 2017. Many conservative moms identify with MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) instincts about our food supply and the regulation of chemicals. And while I have some rather severe things to say about RFK Jr. when it comes to his record on childhood vaccines, I also think it’s crazy for conservatives to reflexively adopt the current FDA’s status quo as if ingesting Red Dye No. 5 were some ancient and profound liberty.

If the GOP follows conservative advice and spikes him, it will be doing something to maintain the lines of conservative orthodoxy. And it will be doing it at a cost. Because it will also be the first step in dismantling Trump’s narrowly winning coalition.