Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has not only endorsed Donald Trump, but he is helping the former president’s transition team select personnel to serve in a second administration, according to comments Kennedy made in an interview Monday with Tucker Carlson.
“I’m going to work to get him elected,” Kennedy told the former Fox News host. “I’m working with the campaign. We’re working on policy issues together. I’ve been asked to go onto the transition team and to help pick the people who will be running the government, and I’m looking forward to that.”
Prior to ending his longshot presidential bid, it had been reported that Kennedy approached the campaigns of both Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, floating his endorsement in exchange for a position in their administrations. Harris’s campaign did not engage with Kennedy—something that could not be said for him and Trump.
A leaked phone call from last month revealed just how close the two have become recently, with Kennedy agreeing with Trump when he tells him “we’re going to win.”
Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, Kennedy’s campaign director, told The New Yorker that a potential role for her father-in-law as secretary of health and human services “is an incredibly interesting one.” Kennedy is a strident vaccine skeptic who insists he isn’t.
Kennedy’s decision to support Trump—let alone have a say in staffing for a potential Trump administration—has been condemned by several of his siblings. Five of them signed a statement over the weekend indicating their opposition to his stance, with Kerry Kennedy telling MSNBC on Sunday that she was “outraged and disgusted by my brother’s gaudy and obscene embrace of Donald Trump.”
While RFK Jr. is fully on board with Trump, it seems that arrangement is borne more out of his political ambitions than his personal feelings about the former president. The New Yorker reported earlier this month that in a recent text message, he called Trump a “sociopath” who was “barely human.”
Kennedy’s interviewer on Monday also has a history of making private comments about Trump that are at odds with his public statements. Carlson, in text messages after the 2020 election, wrote of Trump, “I hate him passionately.” During the Jan. 6 insurrection, Carlson described the then-president as a “demonic force,” and a “destroyer.”
