It is not a secret that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has struggled with substance abuse issues, but the Cabinet secretary added new details this week during a podcast appearance.

In context, he was talking about his insistence on attending 12-step meetings in person, even during the Covid-19 crisis, when social distancing was the norm. Kennedy said he was unconcerned about the dangerous contagion, even at the height of the pandemic, because of what he had survived in years past.

He told host Theo Von: “I said, ‘I’m not scared of a germ. I used to snort cocaine off of toilet seats.’”

There aren’t many countries where the nation’s health secretary could make such a comment in public and expect to remain in their position. But in 2026, conditions in the United States are rather odd.

In fact, watching Kennedy’s on-air comments, I found myself thinking about one person: Douglas Ginsburg.

In 1987, Ronald Reagan announced that Ginsburg — at the time a federal appeals court judge — was his choice to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. Two weeks later, Ginsburg felt compelled to withdraw his nomination, not because of concerns related to his qualifications or temperament, but because he had admitted to having smoked marijuana in the past.

Though it seems foolish now, at the time this was a deal-breaker. Almost four decades later, in a different Republican administration, a health secretary saying that he “used to snort cocaine off of toilet seats” barely generated news coverage.

A couple of weeks after Trump won a second term, The New York Times published a memorable analysis, noting: “It was not so long ago that nominees for high-level jobs and even some of the more obscure ones had to be above reproach, to the point where a relatively minor tax issue could derail them. But times are evidently changing when it comes to nominations at the dawn of the second Trump administration.”

Ginsburg’s failed Supreme Court nomination stands out, but the Times’ analysis noted that as recently as the 1990s, two candidates for attorney general were rejected after revelations that they hired undocumented immigrants as nannies. In 2008, Barack Obama nominated former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle to serve as health secretary, but he was done in after it was discovered that he hadn’t paid income taxes on the use of a car and driver lent to him while he consulted for a financial firm.

As recently as 2021, Neera Tanden’s nomination to lead the Office of Management and Budget was derailed because senators objected to some of her more acerbic tweets.

Five years later, political standards have reached an unrecognizable level.