Trump Trashes Vaccines and Appears to Court RFK Jr. In Leaked Call
Leaked video of a call between Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appears to show the current opponents talking about the failed assassination attempt on Trump, his post-shooting call with President Joe Biden, and distrusting vaccinations. Trump also appeared to discuss a future together for the two men—and their ideas.
“Anyway, I would be, I would love you to do so,” Trump said in the video leaked to X on Tuesday morning, seemingly hinting at something Kennedy and him weighed earlier in the call. It’s unclear whether the former president was referring to a spot for the independent candidate in a future Trump administration, encouraging him to drop out and issue an endorsement, or some other potential offer.
“It would be so good for you and so big for you. And we’re gonna win. We’re gonna win. We’re way ahead of the guy,” Trump continued. In some recent polls, the former president is leading Biden by single digits.
Kennedy was quick to denounce the leak, writing, “When President Trump called me I was taping with an in-house videographer. I should have ordered the videographer to stop recording immediately.”
“I am mortified that this was posted. I apologize to the president,” Kennedy posted on X early Tuesday morning.
https://x.com/meridithmcgraw/status/1813201574518288387
Elsewhere on the call, Trump rambled about vaccinations to Kennedy, a persistent purveyor of anti-vaccine misinformation, as Vanity Fair’s Joe Hagan chronicled last year.
“When you feed a baby, Bobby, a vaccination that is like 38 different vaccines, and it looks like it’s been for a horse, not a, you know, 10-pound or 20-pound baby. It looks like you’re giving, you should be giving it to a horse. And, you ever see the size of it, right, it’s this massive, and then you see the baby all of the sudden starting to change radically, I’ve seen it too many times. And then you hear that it doesn’t have an impact, right?” Trump said. (According to a recent study in the medical journal The Lancet, “Since 1974, vaccination has averted 154 million deaths, including 146 million among children younger than 5 years.”)
“But you and I talked about that a long time ago,” Trump continued, appearing to cite previous conversations the two shared about vaccines, to which Kennedy agreed.
The leaked video comes just one day after the Republican National Convention kicked off in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and three days after a lone shooter shot several rounds into a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania—resulting in the death of one attendee.
As Vanity Fair’s Eric Lutz wrote, Trump “got a hero’s welcome” on Monday, showing up with a bandage on his right ear, the one that was bloodied on stage last weekend. Any tension leading up to the RNC “gave way to a mood of celebration,” Lutz continued, “a sense, among those gathered in Trump cowboy hats and flag-sportcoats so tight the stars seem about to burst off the lapels, that their return to power is imminent.”
At one point in the call, Trump mentioned Biden reaching out to him the evening of the violent Pennsylvania rally.
“You know it was interesting, it was very nice, actually. He called me and he said, ‘How did you choose to move to the right?’” Trump told Kennedy. “I said ‘I was just showing a chart,’ I didn’t have to tell him the chart was on all the people pouring into our country.”
Trump also recounted to Kennedy the moment he said he was shot.
“I just turned my head to show the chart and something rapped me,” Trump said. “It felt like a giant, like the world’s largest mosquito. And, uh, it was, it was a bullet going right—you know, it was, what do they call that an AR-15 or something? That was a big gun. Those are pretty, pretty tough guns, right?”
Following the shooting, The New York Times reported that the AR-type semiautomatic rifle found next to the body of the suspected shooter, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, was “purchased by a family member, possibly his father, according to an official briefed on the investigation.”
Prior to the leak, Kennedy claimed that his call with Trump was focused on unifying the country.
“Lots of rumors going around about my meeting this morning with President Trump,” he posted to X on Monday. “Our main topic was national unity, and I hope to meet with Democratic leaders about that as well. No, I am not dropping out of the race.”
