To look at the short list of names Donald Trump is hoping to appoint to the country’s leading public health roles, it’s easy to see that Covid-19 has remade the country and its ideological arrangements — but perhaps especially the Republican Party.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, is the most conspicuous example — a reflexive anti-establishment agitator who has trafficked in conspiracy theories about the origins of AIDS, 5G and especially the dangers of common vaccines. Kennedy has been an erratic and unreliable figure for many years; though Barack Obama in 2008 considered appointing him to run the Environmental Protection Agency, he has been knee-deep in vaccine conspiracy for well over a decade, and as recently as April was called by Trump a “Radical Left Lunatic.” But he owes his current selection to pandemic backlash and the intuition, in Trump world, that Covid contrarians should be drafted into a broad insurgency against the institutions of science.

Kennedy has called the Covid vaccines, which have probably saved more than 20 million lives globally, “the deadliest vaccine ever made,” and as recently as during his own presidential campaign, he suggested that the coronavirus might be an “ethnically targeted” bioweapon that preferentially spared Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.

But the others named for top public health posts, though not transparent cranks, are also Covid contrarians whose most important qualification for these positions are their crusades against the public health establishment during the pandemic period: Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya to lead the National Institutes of Health, and Johns Hopkins’s Marty Makary to run the Food and Drug Administration. Dave Weldon, Trump’s pick to oversee the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was a vocal vaccine skeptic long before the pandemic.

For many Americans, including me, the performance of that establishment leaves something to be desired. But we may be about to see what a truly contrarian approach looks like instead.

In certain ways, this should be no surprise. Democrats have grown increasingly invested in, and identified with, the management style and worldview of the credentialed elite — with the Republicans, once the party of the country’s establishment, growing a lot more unruly as a party and a coalition.