Earlier this month, The Washington Post reported, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. confirmed, that the then presidential candidate had attempted to meet with Kamala Harris, in the hopes of negotiating a potential position in her administration in exchange for an endorsement. Unfortunately for Kennedy, Harris and her team were not interested, which left the son and nephew of two of the most famous Democrats in history—whose legacies he frequently invokes—with one of two choices: back Harris for the good of the country despite not receiving any personal gain in exchange, or go all in on a man whose reelection could mean the end of democracy as we know it. And he chose door number two!
Less than a week after suspending his campaign and endorsing Donald Trump for president, Kennedy announced during an interview with Tucker Carlson on Monday that he is “working with the [Trump] campaign” and has “been asked to go onto the transition team and to help pick the people who will be running the government,” which he is “looking forward” to.
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Setting aside the decision to back Trump—which numerous Kennedy family members have denounced, and which at least one Kennedy sibling has called “a flagrant attempt to set fire to my father’s memory”—the idea of RFK Jr. helping “pick the people who will be running the government” is more than a little worrisome. As a reminder, Kennedy:
- Is an anti-vaxxer of the highest order
- Wrote an article in 2005 that was published in Rolling Stone and Salon, called “Deadly Immunity,” in which he alleged that the government had covered up a link between vaccines and autism. (Both outlets later retracted the piece, and the Salon editor who worked on it said that after it went up, “we were besieged by scientists and advocates showing how Kennedy had misunderstood, incorrectly cited, and perhaps even falsified data.... It was the worst mistake of my career. I probably should have been fired.”)
- Wrote a forward for a book that claimed COVID-19 vaccines caused sudden deaths among healthy young people that featured on its cover a 12-year-old who’d never received the COVID-19 vaccine and died as a result of a malformed blood vessel in his brain
- Has been blamed for stoking fears about vaccines in the run-up to a measles outbreak in Samoa that killed 83 people
- Once claimed Anne Frank had it easy compared to what anti-vaxxers go through
- Has more than once suggested chemicals in the environment can make children gay and trans
- Following a sexual assault allegation, said, “I am not a church boy”
- Recently admitted to staging an elaborate bear-murder scene in Central Park
- Once, according to one of his daughters, sawed a dead whale’s head off and strapped it to the roof of his car, causing his children to have to wear plastic bags on their heads to avoid the “whale juice” that was “pour[ing] into the windows.”
- Said in a 2012 divorce deposition that a worm “got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died”
Maybe not the person you want deciding who should get top jobs running the country.
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