Kenn Dowell. Cleveland-born, Glenville-raised. Never afraid to say what needs to be said.
Built on The Cleveland Observer’s reporting
This is my perspective on reporting by Ron Calhoun of The Cleveland Observer, “Trump names Cleveland Heights pastor for CDC role” (Sept. 24, 2026). The reporting is theirs. The opinion is mine. Read the original →
I know Pastor Darrell Scott. I know some of his family. So let me say up front that this is not a hit piece, and it is not a victory lap. It is a question about what a seat is worth and who it is supposed to serve.
On Sept. 1, President Trump went on Truth Social and announced that Scott, founder and pastor of New Spirit Revival Center in Cleveland Heights, would serve “as an Advisor for tobacco health issues on the Advisory Committee to the Director” at the CDC. Ron Calhoun at The Cleveland Observer did what good local reporting does. He didn’t stop at the announcement. He read the fine print. Most of what you need to understand this story is in his piece, and you should read it.
Here is my read.
Loyalty is the currency
Start with how Trump explained the pick. He didn’t lead with a résumé. He led with the relationship. “Pastor Darrell Scott has been with us from the very beginning,” he wrote.
That part is true. Scott has been tied to Trump politically for more than a decade. He co-founded the National Diversity Coalition for Trump in 2016, spoke from the stage at the Republican National Convention that July, and was named to the transition team that November. Before any of that, The Root reported in 2016, he had spent years working to elect Democratic mayors right here in Cleveland.
So this is a man who changed teams early, stayed when it cost him, and got paid in the currency Trump deals in, which is position. I don’t say that as an insult. That’s how power works on both sides of the aisle. You show up early, you stay, and when the door opens your name is on the list. Every operator in this town understands the transaction. The question was never whether loyalty earned the seat. The question is what you do once you’re sitting in it.
What the seat actually is
This is where the Observer’s reporting matters. The Advisory Committee to the Director advises the CDC director and the HHS secretary on strategy, priorities and health disparities. It does not regulate cigarettes, vapes or any nicotine product. It is a voice at the table. It does not touch the lever.
It is a voice at the table. It does not touch the lever. www.realpower.tv
The committee allows no more than 15 outside members, and 12 of them are supposed to bring expertise in fields like public health, health disparities or biomedical research. Scott’s own church biography lists decades of ministry, juvenile detention and shelter work, radio ministry and anti-drug campaigns. It lists no training in medicine, epidemiology or tobacco control. When the Observer published, the CDC’s member roster still didn’t include him, and nobody had said what his term, category or voting status would be.
On paper, that’s a seat with a lot of empty room around it. Room can be filled with substance, or it can be filled with nothing.
Loyalty got him the chair. What he does with it will tell us who the chair was for.
— Kenn Dowell
The office that went dark
Now look at what he walks into. The Associated Press reported in August that Congress set aside $246 million for the CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health, and that the office was left with few or no staff after the federal health cuts that began in 2025. That is the office that ran Tips From Former Smokers. The CDC credits that campaign with pushing more than 16 million smokers to try to quit between 2012 and 2018, and with about a million who actually did.
The money is on paper. The people who did the work are gone. And into that hole steps an adviser.
Why this lands on our block
Here is the part that should make every pastor, every mother and every brother on the corner sit up. In 2020, about 81 percent of Black adults who smoked used menthol cigarettes, compared with 34 percent of white adults who smoked, according to CDC data the Observer cited. That didn’t happen by accident. The tobacco companies spent decades putting menthol on our billboards and in our corner stores.
About 81 percent of Black adults who smoked used menthol cigarettes, compared with 34 percent of white adults who smoked. www.realpower.tv
In January 2025, Trump’s FDA withdrew the proposed ban on menthol cigarettes. Now the announcement naming Scott talks about “solutions to reduce harm,” a phrase nobody in the administration has defined. In the tobacco world, harm reduction usually means moving smokers onto vapes and other nicotine products. The Observer noted that days before the announcement, the FDA authorized a new JUUL device. It also noted there is no evidence the two are connected, and I’m not saying they are.
But I know what that phrase can turn into when the people defining it don’t live where we live. Harm reduction for whom? For the lungs in Glenville, or for a balance sheet somewhere else?
Make the seat count
So here is my challenge to Pastor Scott, from somebody who knows him and wants this to be worth something.
You have a seat nobody else from our side of town has. Use it. Put menthol on the table at every meeting. Ask where the $246 million went and who is going to staff that office. Bring the church into quitting the way the CDC itself has asked faith communities to do. Carry Cleveland’s numbers through the door with you. If harm reduction means getting our uncles off menthol for good, fight for it. If it means trading one habit for another sold by the same people, say no, and say it out loud.
Loyalty got him the chair. What he does with it will tell us who the chair was for.
And to the rest of us: don’t sit back and wait on anybody’s appointment. Watch this seat. A year from now, ask what it produced. That is how you hold power accountable, no matter which party handed it out.
Watch this seat. A year from now, ask what it produced. www.realpower.tv
Reporting credit: The Cleveland Observer, “Trump names Cleveland Heights pastor for CDC role,” by Ron Calhoun, Sept. 24, 2026. Also cited: President Trump’s Truth Social post of Sept. 1, 2026; CNN on the FDA’s January 2025 withdrawal of the proposed menthol ban; The Root (2016). Photo: Pastor Darrell Scott at the 2016 Republican National Convention, Voice of America, public domain.
This story first ran in the RealPower.TV digital newsprint. Read it on RealPower.TV →
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Tomorrow, We Roll to the Polls
Early voting opens Tuesday, and Cleveland is going together.
Tuesday, Oct. 6 · 12–5 PM. Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, 1803 Superior Ave. Free food, fun and live music. Bring your ID if you’re voting, and bring somebody who wasn’t planning to come. Register so we can count you →