Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is too left-wing to be a part of a Republican administration, even if that Republican is President-elect Donald Trump.
Trump chose Kennedy to be the next secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. This has already earned plenty of backlash as Kennedy is, as David Harsanyi wrote last month, “a proven scaremongering authoritarian” who peddles the Hollywood liberal celebrity idea that vaccines cause autism and believes the government should make food and health choices for you. On those grounds alone, Kennedy is unfit to lead a department of health bureaucrats who showed during the pandemic they could worsen peoples’ lives.
But, Kennedy is also a progressive elitist from a political dynasty of power-hungry Democrats. He ran for president in 2024 as a Democrat before shifting to an independent run only because the Democratic Party was tailoring the primary to help President Joe Biden. Before Kennedy dropped out of the race and backed Trump, he attempted to sell his endorsement to Vice President Kamala Harris in exchange for a Cabinet position in her administration. He is a power-hungry Kennedy to his core, with all the left-wing inclinations of that political dynasty.
You can see that through his various positions recently and in his time in politics. In 2018, Kennedy said that the “Parkland students are right” and the National Rifle Association “is a terror group,” in reference to the Parkland school shooting and the child gun-control activists who Democrats promoted in the aftermath. Those same students who Kennedy praised as being “right” don’t believe the Second Amendment should stand as it currently exists.
Kennedy is famously a climate change zealot who wanted to jail people he decided were climate change deniers and use the government to shut down oil companies. Kennedy also said this past May that the government should not be involved in restricting abortion “even if it’s full term,” a particular problem given HHS’s ability to use taxpayer funds to promote abortion.
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Kennedy walked back that gun control position as well as his position on abortion (which was itself a walk back after Democratic backlash to him supporting a ban on abortions after the first trimester of pregnancy). At best, this means that Kennedy was unprincipled enough that he changed his opinions whenever a Democratic Party narrative tried to shame the public into obedience. At worst, he is an unprincipled, power-hungry politician who will say whatever as long as it puts him in a position to wield government power over people, perhaps in the Department of Health and Human Services.
Kennedy is a progressive posing as a former Democrat turned MAGA Republican. He belongs nowhere near government power, especially in a Republican administration such as Trump’s, which we are told is opposed to left-wing elites and political dynasties who have spent the last several decades making the country worse.