Donald Trump sweet-talked Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. with anti-vaccine talking points Sunday after surviving an assassination attempt the day prior, according to a leaked video posted on social media Tuesday. He also revealed details of the “very nice” call he got from President Joe Biden after the shooting.
The video shows Kennedy on the call with Trump, whose voice is heard over speakerphone. It appears to have been published without permission by Kennedy’s son, who said the conversation took place Sunday.
In the clip, Trump takes a friendly tone with Kennedy — who as an independent candidate for the White House is currently Trump’s opponent — and discusses false anti-vaccine views that they have both expressed publicly.
“When you feed a baby, Bobby, a vaccination that is like 38 different vaccines, and it looks like it’s fit for a horse, not a 10-pound or 20-pound baby, it looks like you should be giving a horse this thing,” Trump tells Kennedy during the call, as heard in the video.
“You ever see the size of it, 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,” he goes on, wildly exaggerating a typical childhood vaccine schedule. “And then you hear that it doesn’t have an impact. Right? And you and I talked about that a long time ago.”
“Yep,” Kennedy responds.
Trump, like Kennedy, has made his anti-vaccine views a part of his public image, vowing to cut federal funds to schools that have vaccine mandates if he’s elected — despite every state in the country having laws that, with rare exceptions, mandate vaccines for students. (Trump’s campaign has occasionally said he’s only talking about COVID-19 vaccine requirements, not all vaccines.)
Kennedy and Trump’s anti-vaccine talking points have been disproven over and over again; decades of medical studies have supported the current recommended vaccine schedule for infants.
Trump’s mention of speaking to Kennedy “a long time ago” could be a reference to Kennedy meeting with Trump at Trump Tower right before Trump’s 2017 inauguration. After that meeting, Kennedy claimed Trump had tapped him to chair a commission on “vaccine safety and scientific integrity,” something Trump’s team denied and which never materialized.
The audio in the clip is low-quality, making it difficult to make out Trump’s exact wording. But after the anti-vaccine talk, Trump appears to tell Kennedy: “Anyway, I would love you to do so. And I think it would be so big for you. And we’re going to win.”
“Yep,” Kennedy responded.
(Rolling Stone transcribed Trump as saying, “Anyway, I would love for you to serve.”)
“We’re way ahead of the guy,” Trump continued, before revealing details about his call with Biden.
“And you know, it’s interesting, he was very nice, actually. He called me. And he said, ‘How did you choose to move to the right?’ You know, I was looking straight on. 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. But I just turned my head to show the chart. And something [inaudible]. It felt like a giant– like the world’s largest mosquito, and it was, it was a bullet going right– What do they call that, an AR-15 or something, right? That’s a big gun. Those are pretty tough, guns, right?”
At that point, the video stops.
The call is surprising both because of how soon after Trump’s near-death experience it took place and because it showed Trump making political overtures to Kennedy. Notably, though, the video shows Kennedy agreeing with Trump after the former president says, “We’re going to win,” presumably a reference to the race for the White House.
Kennedy separately met in-person with Trump at the Republican National Convention Monday, prompting speculation about a potential Kennedy endorsement of Trump. But Kennedy’s campaign pushed back on that, saying he was not dropping out and hoped to meet with Democratic Party leaders as well.
Kennedy’s son, Bobby Kennedy III, appears to have posted and then deleted the video clip of Kennedy and Trump’s call, in a tweet captured by Mediaite and by NBC News’ Brandy Zadrozny.
“I am a firm believer that these sorts of conversations should be had in public,” he wrote in the tweet. “Here’s Trump giving his real opinion to my dad about vaccinating kids — this was the day after the assassination attempt.”
Neither Kennedy’s nor Trump’s campaign immediately responded to HuffPost’s questions about the call. But Kennedy appeared to confirm the authenticity of the clip on Tuesday morning.
“When President Trump called me I was taping with an in-house videographer. I should have ordered the videographer to stop recording immediately,” Kennedy wrote on X. “I am mortified that this was posted. I apologize to the president.”
