“It’s not unusual.” That’s how Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the anti-vaccine activist and secretary of Health and Human Services, described an ongoing measles outbreak in and around Texas that has already infected more than 100 people and killed one child. This incident is, in fact, unusual. Until this week, someone hadn’t died of measles in this country since 2015, and endemic spread of the virus was declared eliminated in the United States 25 years ago.

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Nothing could have prepared Americans for what the first 50-ish days of the second Trump administration have been like. Even some Cabinet members and Republican members of Congress seem caught off guard.

In 1956, an aspiring young actor named Gene Hackman joined the Pasadena Playhouse in California, struggling to find a way into a field he’d been fascinated with since childhood. Hackman, who was born in 1930, had already served five years in the Marine Corps, then bounced around New York, Florida, Illinois, and other places without much luck.

In a little over a month, the Trump administration has started to hollow out America’s federal health agencies. Roughly 2,000 probationary workers have been fired en masse, by virtue of the fact that they were relatively new to their jobs. But the long-term impact of those terminations could pale in comparison to a lesser-noticed spate of departures that has recently roiled the health agencies. In the past two months, the FDA, CDC, and NIH second in commands have all resigned or retired.

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At the close of his RNC speech accepting his party’s nomination for vice president in July, then-Senator J. D. Vance lingered on the specific patch of earth where he hoped he would one day be buried.