CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins tore apart President-elect Donald Trump’s selection of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services with a raft of damaging clips.
Trump is making news this week with cabinet picks that are drawing outrage. The selection of former Congressman Matt Gaetz (R-FL) to be Trump’s attorney general was met with near-universal shock Wednesday. Trump has picked Fox News host Pete Hegseth to lead the Department of Defense and former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) as his nominee for the director of national intelligence.
But he wasn’t done. On Thursday night, Trump made good on a campaign promise by nominating RFK Jr. as Secretary of Going Wild On Health — or rather, HHS.
On Sunday night’s edition of CNN’s The Source with Kaitlan Collins, Collins opened her show by telling viewers that calling RFK Jr. a vaccine skeptic “is really putting it lightly” — and provided video evidence to support her criticism:
KAITLAN COLLINS: Moments ago, President-elect Donald Trump just wrapped up his remarks, speaking at his Mar-a-Lago Club, where the room is filled with several of the people that he just named to his incoming cabinet, including one of his latest and most controversial picks, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who Trump has chosen to be the nation’s Health Secretary, despite how the vaccine skeptic has no medical degree or public health experience.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DONALD TRUMP: Today, I nominated him for, I guess, if you like health and if you like people that live a long time, it’s the most important position. RFK Jr.
And I just looked at the news reports. People like you, Bobby. Don’t get too popular, Bobby. Don’t. (LAUGHTER)
TRUMP: You know, you’ve reached about the level now. We want you to come up with things and ideas and what you’ve been talking about for a long time.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
COLLINS: With that pick, Trump is tapping Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run the sprawling Department of Health and Human Services.
If he’s confirmed by the Senate, and that is still an if tonight, Kennedy would oversee agencies, like the National Institutes of Health, the FDA, the CDC, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, operations of the Affordable Care Act, which provides health care for millions of Americans, just to name a few of the responsibilities that he would have.
And saying that RFK Jr. is a vaccine skeptic is really putting it lightly. He has pushed conspiracy theories and lied about science on many occasions.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR., TRUMP’S HEALTH SECRETARY PICK: Tiny, infinitesimal amounts of merch — mercury, parts per billion, will cause profound neurological injury in children. It’s coming from our own vaccine.
COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and — and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and — and Chinese.
The capacity for these chemicals that we are just raining down on our children, right now, to induce these very profound sexual changes in them, is something we need to be thinking about as a society.
Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland, you could hide in an attic, like Anne Frank did.
Today, the mechanisms are being put in place that will make it so none of us can run, and none of us can hide. They’re putting in 5G to harvest our data and control our behavior.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
COLLINS: Needless to say, that is not true.
But to tell you how we got here tonight. RFK Jr., of course, had mounted his own presidential race. He later dropped out, to help clear Trump’s path to 270 electoral votes, and later formed a close-knit relationship with the Republican nominee, who promised, on the campaign trail, to let Kennedy go wild on health policy, if he won. Now, Kennedy might get that chance.
Just a few days ago, we heard from RFK, threatening mass firings at the FDA. Posting that the “FDA’s war on public health is about to end… Preserve your records, and… Pack your bags,” he said.
Tonight, he struck a bit of a different tone, saying, quote, “I look forward to working with the more than 80,000 employees at HHS to free the agencies… so they can pursue their mission to make Americans once again the healthiest people on Earth.”
