Donald Trump claimed Thursday that Robert F. Kennedy, perhaps the most famous anti-vaxxer in the world, is pretending to be against vaccines for political gain, and that if elected, his “radical left” family will take over the country and cause it to collapse.
Yes, in arguably one of his most absurd videos to date, Trump laid out the reasons Republicans should vote for him and not the third-party candidate, chief among them being that Kennedy’s position on vaccines is apparently a yearslong con. “RFK Jr. is a Democrat plant, a radical-left liberal who’s been put in place in order to help crooked Joe Biden, the worst president in the history of the United States, get reelected,” Trump says in the video. Appealing to conservatives who are attracted to Kennedy’s dangerous views on vaccines, Trump declares: “For those of you that want to vote [for him] because you think he’s an anti-vaxxer, he’s not really an anti-vaxxer, that’s only his political moment.… RFK’s views on vaccines are fake, as is everything else about his candidacy. Don’t think you’re going to vote for him and feel good.”
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In fact, Kennedy has devoted years to spreading anti-vaccine misinformation. As early as 2005, he wrote an article 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. (Rolling Stone and Salon 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.”) Kennedy has also claimed Anne Frank had it easy compared to what anti-vaxxers go through. He wrote a forward for a book that claimed COVID-19 vaccines caused sudden deaths among healthy young people, and 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. He has been blamed for stoking fears about vaccines in the run-up to a measles outbreak in Samoa that killed 70 people. The aforementioned is but a teeny, tiny sample of the work that Kennedy has put into his anti-vaccine crusade.
Elsewhere in the video, Trump declares: “A lot of people think that Junior is a conservative—he’s not. He’s more liberal than anybody running on the Democrat side. A vote for Junior would essentially be a wasted protest vote that could swing either way but would only swing against the Democrats if Republicans knew the true story about him.… The fact is he is a radical-left person, so Republicans, get it out of your mind that you’re going to vote for this guy because he’s a conservative.” He also claims Kennedy’s family has said they “will not let him to be a Republican,” as though that is actually something RFK Jr. has been trying to do.
Speaking of the Kennedy clan at large, Trump ends his video by stating, “I’d even take Biden over Junior because our country would last about a year or two longer than it would with Junior, it would collapse almost immediately. And his family—a radical left, a crazy left, a bunch of lunatics—would take over and our country would die very quickly.”