Not long after he halted his own presidential campaign and endorsed GOP nominee Donald Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seems poised to be named to Trump’s second-term transition team.
The New York Times spoke to one of Trump’s advisers recently, and they told the paper of the plans.
For the last few months, Kennedy has been trying to build support for his third-party campaign — after de-registering as a Democrat earlier this year. But, with trouble doing so, and being deemed ineligible for the ballot in New York, he began to look for other options.
Rumors swirled last week that Kennedy was considering halting his own campaign and negotiating with Trump that would see him endorse the GOP nominee in exchange for a position in his administration, were he to win the White House come November’s elections.
Kennedy confirmed that he was in talks with Trump, saying recently:
“We’re working on policy issues together.”
He added that he was asked “to help pick the people who will be running the government, and I am looking forward to that.”
That role, as Kennedy describes it, is far from what a lot of people suspected when word first broke about him negotiating with the Trump campaign. Many people feared Trump would decide to pledge an important role in his Cabinet to Kennedy, a radical who is anti-vax and spouts conspiracy theories often.
This role is more of an advisory one, but it could allow Kennedy to put his two cents in on some of the positions that matter most to him — those that have a role in public health policy.
That possibility is still very worrisome to many people, especially those in the medical community. For instance, Jonathan Howard, who works at New York University as a neurologist and tracks the anti-vax movement quite closely, told The New Republic recently:
“If RFK Jr. were to gain any position of power, there’s no question that he’d try to staff the Trump administration with anti-vax activists.”
He added that this might ultimately result in more “misinformation about all vaccines” being spread, which could potentially result in “decreased vaccination rates” and resulting “suffering and death.”
Democrats are very likely to try to use this as an angle to steer voters away from Trump. If they’re able to convince uncommitted voters that Kennedy is going to exert influence over public health policies under a hypothetical Trump administration, that might be able to swing them to their side.
At the same time, Kennedy could work to “soften” the impressions of some of these same voters toward Trump, as The New Republic wrote.
Even though he’s out there on some of his positions, Kennedy comes off less brash and in-your-face than Trump does, which could end up endearing some of these undecided voters to Trump.
One more wild card to this is what the other influential members of the famed Kennedy family will do. Most of them are completely in opposition to RFK Jr., who has gone far off the policies of his father Robert Kennedy Sr. and uncle, former president John F. Kennedy.
