It shouldn’t surprise anyone — but it’s starting to look like Donald Trump ain’t got no real friends.
Trump has nominated failed presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Secretary of Health and Human Services — because, in Trump’s world, that’s definitely the job for an anti-vaxxer who spent the entirety of a global pandemic spreading medical misinformation, including his absurd warning to “Caucasians and Black people” that Covid-19 might have been engineered to target everyone except Jewish and Chinese people.
Besides being woefully underqualified for the role Trump nominated him for — which has become quite the trend in Trump’s forthcoming administration, which includes a Fox News host with zero experience in national defense that he tapped for Secretary of Defense and a WWE exec he tapped to lead the U.S. Department of Education — RFK Jr. doesn’t even seem to like Trump, or, at least, he didn’t use to.
In fact, according to recently resurfaced audio recordings, RFK Jr. once compared Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler, which, well — it’s not like it’s his most inaccurate statement ever.
From Mediaite:
In audio recordings from Kennedy’s radio show, Ring of Fire, CNN senior reporter Andrew Kaczynski found multiple examples of Kennedy sharply criticizing Trump, including times when he drew connections to the genocidal Nazi dictator. Kennedy’s comments could be viewed as even harsher than those by Vice President-elect JD Vance, who called Trump “America’s Hitler,” because Kennedy assessed the former-and-future president as actually worse than Hitler in a key way.
As Trump made gains in the 2016 GOP presidential primary and eventually won the election, Kennedy “repeatedly accused Trump of exploiting fear, bigotry and xenophobia to build a ‘dangerous’ nationalist movement and warned Trump would destroy both the climate and clean water,” wrote Kaczynski, specifically connecting Trump to “historical demagogues who rose during times of crisis,” like Hitler, Italy’s Benito Mussolini, Spain’s Francisco Franco, and Huey Long and Father Coughlin in the U.S.
Kaczynski quoted a December 2016 episode in which Kennedy said “every statement that Donald Trump makes is fear-based,” encouraging fear of “Muslims” and “Black people, and particularly the big Black guy Obama, who’s destroying this country, who’s making everybody miserable.”
So, just to recap: Not even a decade ago, RFK Jr. was basically calling Trump Orange Mussolini, and he took major issue with the president-elect’s rampant racism and xenophobia as well as his consistent tendency to being a lying-a** liar. Eight years later, absolutely nothing has changed, except now RFK has a shot at a spot in Trump’s Cabinet, and he’s singing the praises of the guy he once compared to Hitler. It’s almost as if, much like Trump and the Trumpified GOP, RFK has abandoned any semblance of integrity for political gain.
As Mediaite noted, Trump’s VP pick, JD Vance, also once compared him to Adolf Hitler, which he did while also calling Trump an “idiot” and “reprehensible.” In fact, earlier this year, it was reported that Vance had previously requested that a blog he wrote in 2012, before Trump’s first term, in which he rebuked the Republican party for being “openly hostile to non-whites” and alienating “Blacks, Latinos, [and]the youth.” Fast forward 12 years, and Vance is out here spreading hate speech about Haitian migrants just so his mango MAGA daddy will keep him in his good graces.
These folks don’t care about Trump, they just want to ride his bandwagon for political clout.
Sad.