The News
Donald Trump is trying to court Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s supporters with a new emphasis on childhood health — without fully crossing the line to embrace Kennedy’s unorthodox views on science and medicine.
Trump is returning to a plank in his platform that he rolled out last June with little fanfare in a policy video where he vowed to “address the sharp rise in chronic illnesses and health problems, especially among children.” Trump promised then to appoint a commission “charged with investigating” the causes.
The issue largely vanished from Trump’s campaign in favor of more salient topics, like the border and the economy, until Kennedy endorsed Trump last month in a speech focused in part on Americans’ health. Kennedy said he had been surprised to learn that he and Trump “are aligned on many key issues” — including public health.
At a Trump rally later that day, Kennedy asked voters if they wanted “a president who is going to make America healthy again.” Trump, at that same event, reiterated his promise to “establish a panel of top experts” — who he said would work with Kennedy — to investigate chronic health problems and childhood disease.
The former president has since begun incorporating the “Make America healthy again” phrase (dubbed “MAHA” internally) into his rally speeches, looking to appeal to a certain outsider, wellness-focused cohort of voters that the campaign sees on the margins of party politics.
“We’re going to get toxic chemicals out of our environment, and we’re going to get them out of our food supply,” Trump said at a Pennsylvania event last week. “We’re going to get them out of our bodies.”
That’s a mirror of the softer element of Kennedy’s pitch: A focus on the high cost of these illnesses, what is in America’s food, and discussions about the rising rates of conditions like obesity, asthma, diabetes, autism, and more. Throughout the last week, Kennedy has highlighted his history with environmental efforts and compared his focus on health to that of his uncle, who sought to improve America’s fitness — adding the hashtag #MAHA to many of his posts.
One person close to the Trump campaign told Semafor that the team is planning to focus even more on the topic and roll it out in a broader way in the coming weeks.
“The people who follow him [Kennedy] are all from the health movement, those are his voters, so it adds a whole separate constituency,” the person said.
Another person close to the campaign also said that the issue had gained more importance internally as an opportunity to excite Kennedy’s small, but potentially critical, pool of voters.
“It couldn’t be an issue until we brought [in] Kennedy — you know from the Agenda 47 that Trump agrees with [it], and probably if it was polling right, it might be on the front line of policy, but it wasn’t because it didn’t,” the person explained.
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Shelby’s view
Anything involving Kennedy and children’s health is going to be viewed through the lens of his longtime public skepticism of vaccines, which public health experts are worried could do real damage by seeding preventable outbreaks.
Trump, whose Project Warp Speed COVID-19 vaccine effort was a signature success of his presidency, has also expressed some related doubts about childhood vaccines, which he reiterated to Kennedy on a leaked phone call in July. And while he hasn’t joined Kennedy and many of his own supporters in criticizing the COVID-19 vaccine his administration helped create, he has threatened to “defund” public schools that require it for students.
Democrats have already begun highlighting some of Kennedy’s public health stances — on Tuesday, a DNC spokesperson said in a press release that Trump “now owns all of RFK Jr.’s baggage, including his dangerous public health stances that have cost children their lives,” referring to a recent push by some anti-vaccine advocates against the measles vaccine.
Kennedy made his vaccine skepticism a staple of his own presidential run. But one of the people close to Trump suggested that the downside of associating with Kennedy over this topic was exaggerated.
“Everybody knows this issue and it’s been written about ad nauseam,” the person said. “If anything, he only has upside, because the mainstream media has been so negative about him on this one topic, and when he starts talking about all these other things that he focuses on, it’s all upside.”
The Trump campaign has nonetheless tried to keep Kennedy’s potential influence on a second administration ambiguous, perhaps trying not to further provoke concerns among swing voters. When asked about Kennedy having a role in an upcoming administration, Trump spokesman Brian Hughes noted that “on major policy issues where supporters and surrogates of President Trump’s campaign demonstrate leadership, it would make sense that those people are considered for future roles.” But, he cautioned that it was “certainly premature to speculate about a place in an administration.”
That said, Hughes added that Kennedy and the former president broadly agree on protecting “the health and well-being of America’s families, particularly our children.”
The View From Andrew Yang
Andrew Yang, a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate who Kennedy considered as a running mate, suggested that his party should offer Kennedy-curious voters some substance on health policy.
”There are many sincere people who follow RFK who now believe that Trump is going to be a better president for this issue,” he said.
In this telling, there’s a risk in dismissing a winnable debate for the party by assuming Kennedy supporters’ concerns are strictly the purview of cranks and conspiracy theorists and not addressable with more conventional policies. It’s not like Democrats wouldn’t have a story to offer: As some detractors pointed out after Kennedy’s endorsement, the Trump administration followed conservatives’ lead in trying to roll back regulations on hazardous chemicals and nutrition standards — and the Biden administration often went the opposite direction.
Notable
- The New York Times detailed how Trump’s push to “Make America Healthy” could face roadblocks: Namely, his own record.
- RFK Jr. had dropped in the polls by the time he suspended his campaign, but his support could offer Trump some key voters in a race that’s essentially tied. It’s part of why Trump has buried the hatchet with him and others, Semafor reported last week.
David Weigel contributed to this report.