What do Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance have in common? They both called Donald Trump a Nazi before groveling at his feet for their own political advancement.
According to audio obtained by CNN's KFile of Kennedy during his time as a host of the radio show “Ring of Fire,” in 2016 Trump's nominee to head the Department of Health and Human Services compared Trump to authoritarians like Adolf Hitler, and lauded critiques calling his supporters “belligerent idiots” and comparing them to “outright Nazis.”
In one 2016 episode, during which he interviewed journalist Matt Taibbi, Kennedy heaped praise on his guest for his description of Trump's base.
“One of the things that you write so beautifully, and your stuff is so fun to read, but you write about Trump, 'The way that you build a truly vicious nationalist movement is to wed a relatively small core of belligerent idiots to a lot larger group of opportunists and spineless fellow travelers whose primary function is to turn a blind eye to things,'” Kennedy said, quoting Taibbi's writing. “'We may not have that many outright Nazis in America, but we have plenty of cowards and bootlickers, and once those fleshy dominoes start tumbling into the Trump camp, the game is up.'”
After quoting the passage, Kennedy told Taibbi that the similarities between Trump and Hitler only extended so far. “Hitler had like a plan, you know, Hitler was interested in policy,” Kennedy said. “I don't think Trump has any of that. He's like it not compos mentis. He'll get in there and who knows what will happen.”
In other episodes Kennedy — a former climate and energy lawyer — heavily criticized Trump's environmental policies, describing them as “pollution-based prosperity.”
“Trump isn't just gonna destroy the climate, but he's also promised last week when he spoke to the oil industry, the shale gas industry, he promised that he would get rid of the Clean Water Act,” Kennedy said. “So he's just gonna open the floodgates to every kind of pollution.”
He's not the only member of Trump's administration who's compared the incoming president to a Nazi. In 2016, future VP Vance suggested that Trump might be “America's Hitler,” in text messages with a former roommate.
“I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he's America's Hitler,” he wrote.
In an op-ed written that same year, Vance wrote that Trump was “unfit for our nation's highest office.”
Both men were able to bow and scrape their way into Trump's good graces.
In a statement to CNN, Kennedy said: “Like many Americans, I allowed myself to believe the mainstream media's distorted, dystopian portrait of President Trump. I no longer hold this belief and now regret having made those statements.”
Kennedy abandoned his bid for the presidency in August, endorsing Trump in virtually the same breath. Before his exit, the candidate reportedly begged both of his opponents for a job in their future administrations. Trump accepted.
Kennedy is a known vaccine conspiracy theorist, pusher of medical misinformation, and the subject of sexual assault allegations. He is nevertheless in line to take control of the NIH, CDC, and FDA — and is only one of a cadre of scandal-plagued administration picks made recently by the president-elect..
On Thursday, former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) withdrew his nomination as Trump's Attorney General amid the fallout of an investigation by the House Ethics Committee into allegations that in 2017 he had sex with an underage girl at a “sex party” hosted by a now-convicted sex trafficker.
After meeting with senators on Thursday, Gaetz wrote in a social media post that “while the momentum was strong, it is clear that my confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition,” and that he would be “withdrawing [his] name from consideration to serve as Attorney General.”
Gaetz was not the only Trump nominees facing dubious confirmation odds. On Thursday, Vance met with Republican senators to discuss the nomination of Fox News host Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense. Hegseth has been embroiled in allegations that he sexually assaulted a woman during a 2017 trip to Monterey, California. On Thursday, Mediaite obtained previously unpublished details from the police report made to law enforcement regarding the alleged assault. No charges were filed, but earlier this week CNN reported that Hegseth — who denies the accusation — had paid out a settlement to the woman in order to prevent news of the allegation from making its way to his employers at Fox.
