Trump Says RFK Jr. Can Do “Pretty Much What He Wants” on Public Health in a Second Term
From mass deportations to the total erosion of reproductive rights, there are dozens of reasons to deeply fear Donald Trump returning to the White House. Another one you can add to the list? The fact that he’s apparently going to give notorious anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. power over the health of the nation.
Speaking to reporters on Election Day, Trump said of the former third party candidate, “Let me tell you, he’s a great guy, RFK. He’s gonna do pretty much what he wants as far as I’m concerned. He wants health for women, for men, for children. I happen to agree with a lot of the things he says.”
Trump’s comments come days after Kennedy said during a livestream that Trump had pledged to give him “control” of multiple federal health agencies in a second term, telling viewers: “The key that I think—you know, that President Trump has promised me—is control of the public health agencies, which are HHS and its subagencies—CDC, FDA, NIH, and a few others—and then also the USDA, which is—which, you know, is key to making America healthy. Because we’ve got to get off of seed oils, and we’ve got to get off of pesticide-intensive agriculture.”
If you’re not familiar with Kennedy’s oeuvre on “health,” you might not understand why putting him in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services would arguably be one of the scariest things Trump has ever done. Among other things, Kennedy is one of the biggest anti-vaxxers on the planet and has been accused of stoking fears about vaccines in the run-up to a measles outbreak in Samoa that killed 83 people; to that end, he once implied that Anne Frank, she of Holocaust fame, had it easy compared to what anti-vaxxers go through. Kennedy has also, on more than one occasion, suggested that chemicals in the environment can make children gay and trans; insanely claimed that HIV does not cause AIDS; and declared last year: “COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
Outside of his dangerous misinformation about public health, Kennedy had also admitted to staging an elaborate bear-murder scene in Central Park because he didn’t have time to eat the bear’s flesh, and said in a 2012 divorce deposition that a worm “got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died.”
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