Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. accused Erin Burnett of falling victim to “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” a go-to catchphrase for those among the MAGA crowd, over a fact-checking segment the CNN anchor aired Wednesday night.
During the “Erin Burnett OutFront” clip in question, CNN correspondent Tom Foreman went to a grocery store to see if a salmon-based meal cooked by RFK Jr. as part of his new cooking show, “The Real Food Show,” really costs as much as the he and his co-hosts say. Foreman came to the conclusion that Kennedy’s show was being dishonest about the affordability of the meal.
“While the show repeatedly says this dish will cost less than $20 to feed a family of four, just getting all those ingredients into our kitchen cost a whopping $70.54,” he told CNN viewers. “Yes, it certainly is tasty and it appears healthy. But the problem remains.”
“I do not see, having made this, how you can walk into a grocery store with $20 and come out with everything you need for this, making that part of the claim for many consumers, I think, very hard to swallow,” Foreman further noted.
Trump Derangement Syndrome has so debilitated @ErinBurnett that she has abandoned both common sense and basic arithmetic.
— Secretary Kennedy (@SecKennedy) August 21, 2026
CNN wants us to incorporate the full package price of every ingredient, regardless of what is used in the recipe.
If you put a squirt of ketchup on your… https://t.co/0vUy9yoJdC
Kennedy sent a fiery response Thursday on X, disputing Foreman and Burnett’s logic and accusing them of deliberately ignoring “basic arithmetic.”
“Trump Derangement Syndrome has so debilitated @ErinBurnett that she has abandoned both common sense and basic arithmetic,” the HHS secretary wrote. “CNN wants us to incorporate the full package price of every ingredient, regardless of what is used in the recipe.”
“If you put a squirt of ketchup on your burger, would you be surprised if the restaurant charged you for the whole bottle?” his tweet continued. “‘The Real Food Show’ uses standard recipe costing: we count what the recipe actually uses. The rest stays in your kitchen for the next meal — and the meals after that.”
“Our goal is simple: help Americans reclaim their kitchens, cook healthy food without breaking the bank, and stock their pantries with high-quality ingredients they can use again and again,” Kennedy concluded. “That’s how we Make America Healthy Again.”
Burnett and Foreman are not the only news personalities that have taken issue with RFK Jr. in recent weeks. MS NOW’s Joe Scarborough slammed both the HHS secretary and President Trump earlier this month for the latter’s executive order reducing the number of federally recommended childhood vaccines. Kennedy also got into a shouting match with CNN’s Dana Bash in early August about his vaccine skepticism and the Trump administration’s pandemic policies.
