Transcript: Trump’s Unhinged New Vaccine Ramblings Reveal Big Weakness

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the December 17 episode of the
Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

On Monday, Donald Trump bent over backward to reassure people about Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his pick for secretary of Health and Human Services. Trump said RFK’s views on vaccines aren’t that radical and vouched for the polio vaccine himself; but Trump also suggested he isn’t in favor of vaccine mandates in schools and said there are lots of “problems” with vaccines. We think this reveals a political vulnerability: Trump knows RFK’s extreme views are a political problem for him, and knows GOP senators could still tank him if this gets out of hand. Yet Trump also seems aware that he can’t sound too supportive of vaccine mandates because that might alienate some constituencies in his base. Today, we’re talking about all this with Anne Shoup, a senior advisor for the Democratic-allied group Protect Our Care, which is running ads in hopes of derailing RFK’s nomination. We’re going to get into whether stopping RFK is possible, and what more Dems might do right now to oppose Trump’s nominees. Good to have you on, Anne.

Anne Shoup: Thanks so much for having me, Greg.

Sargent: Let’s start with Trump. At a press conference Monday, a reporter asked him about RFK’s anti-vax radicalism. And here’s what happened.

Reporter (audio voiceover): What do say to people who are worried that his views on vaccines will translate into policies that will make their kids less safe?

Donald Trump (audio voiceover): No, I think he’s going to be much less radical than you would think. He’s got a very open mind or I wouldn’t have put him there. He’s going to be very much less radical. But there are problems. We don’t do as well as a lot of other nations, and those nations use nothing.

Sargent: Anne, that doesn’t sound to me like someone who thinks RFK’s confirmation is a sure thing. What do you think?

Shoup: They do have some worries here, but a lot of the Republican senators who may be a little bit more concerned about RFK’s stances on vaccines, they want to try to find a way to get to yes. They’re seeing how this shakes out—with all of the other Trump nominees, the more controversial folks, where RFK is going to land. We’ve seen a lot of comments from senators who might even be surprising like John Cornyn, like Mike Rounds—people that you wouldn’t necessarily expect to oppose a nomination from Trump make comments about vaccines. It’s an uphill battle, but we do think that RFK is able to be defeated. And we’re really amping up the pressure here, trying to do everything we can to make sure that these senators know what is at stake here with this RFK nomination.

Sargent: You guys are running ads in some of these states. Where are you running them? Who are you targeting? What’s the message?

Shoup: We have a Stop RFK war room, and we work with a lot of allied groups and nurses and doctors and public health experts and healthcare activists around the country. And as part of that campaign to tie into this week—RFK is up on the Hill meeting with some Republican senators—we launched these paid ads and 18 billboards across seven states with the message that our health care is in deep peril if RFK Jr. is confirmed.

We’re targeting Lisa Murkowski, Chuck Grassley, Joni Ernst, Mike Crapo, Susan Collins, Bill Cassidy, Tom Tillis, Mike Rounds, John Cornyn, John Curtis, Shelley Moore Capito, and Jim Justice. We think there is a path here. It’s obviously an uphill one because people are hesitant to go against Trump at this juncture, but we’ve seen Matt Gaetz fall. There’s some question about some of his other nominees, so we do think it’s possible.

Sargent: There is one potential silver lining here, which is that Trump clearly sees that he’s got to sound a whole lot more reasonable on vaccines. For instance, the polio vaccine came up at the press conference on Monday, and here’s what happened.

Reporter (audio voiceover): What about the polio vaccine?

Trump (audio voiceover): Well, I’m a big believer in it. I think everything should be looked at, but I’m a big believer in the polio vaccine, the Salk vaccine.

Reporter (audio voiceover): Do you think schools should mandate vaccines?

Trump (audio voiceover): I don’t like mandates. I’m not a big mandate person. I was against mandates. Mostly Democrat governors did the mandates, and they did a very poor thing.

Sargent: Note that he still felt the need to say that he opposes vaccine mandates in schools.

Shoup: I think people want to know when they send their kids to school that they’re safe, so people generally want to ensure that there are some regulations in place here with vaccines. It is a very popular issue. I know we got a little bit politicized when we’re talking about the whole issue of mandates with the coronavirus. That’s why you hear Trump having this jumbled message: He feels like, with his base, he has to talk about, I’m against mandates, but also I’m for the polio vaccine. It’s just very confusing messaging.

What we know is that you don’t have to completely take away vaccines for real damage to be done here. By nominating someone like RFK, he is creating an environment that allows vaccine misinformation and disinformation to spread. And that can have real impacts on people’s health. We saw a real world example of it happen with RFK in Samoa, where he fueled vaccine skepticism. It led to 83 people dying, mostly toddlers and babies. This is real. This happens. We’ve been protected from polio and measles for so long that I don’t know if people really understand the real threat and what’s at stake.

Trump can’t have it both ways. He can’t just say, Well, I’m for polio, but we have to look into all this other stuff. It all fuels vaccine skepticism. That’s why you really are seeing the public health experts and the doctors sound the alarm here.

Sargent: Even RFK is starting to back off now. On Monday, he was on Capitol Hill meeting with senators and was asked about the polio vaccine. According to CNN’s Manu Raju, RFK said, “I’m all for the polio vaccine.” This comes after we learned that his lawyer petitioned regulators to remove approval for the vaccine, and after Mitch McConnell issued a strong statement of condemnation of that. My guess is that someone around Trump, maybe Susie Wiles, had a pretty stern conversation with RFK about all this and said, You got to get on the right side of vaccines and quickly. What do you think?

Shoup: That’s a pretty good theory because he has fairly recently talked about specifically the polio vaccine. In an interview he did in 2023, he said that the polio vaccine caused more deaths than it averted, spreading a completely conspiracy-laden tirade on this vaccine. If you do any research on the polio vaccine, you know just how effective it really was. Having a statement like that is is unbelievable.

He can try to walk this back all he wants. That’s what we’re doing here with Protect Our Care: We’re going to make sure that he’s held accountable for this, and that anybody that votes him through is held accountable.

Sargent: You mentioned a little earlier that it’s still an uphill battle. It really is. A lot of Republican senators are going to be extremely reluctant to oppose Trump on pretty much any nominee. It was hard for them to get to no on Matt Gaetz, and that was just an extraordinarily disastrous pick. My fear is that what we’re seeing right now is a bit of a dance where these senators express misgivings about RFK—I don’t really like that; he’s got to be more serious about vaccines—and then down the line, they profess themselves “reassured by him” and then end up supporting him. You guys are strategizing on this. Is there any way to prevent that from happening?

Shoup: I think so. One way to have a winning strategy on defeating RFK’s nomination is we really have to make sure that people understand the stakes and what RFK believes. One of the problems here is that a lot of people in our country, rightly so, have skepticism about drug companies, about big corporations. So they take what they hear, the general things that RFK talks about, and say, Yeah, I like that. That sounds pretty good. But the place where RFK takes it is deeply anti-science, deeply dangerous, fringe beliefs. We can’t let that spread.

We have found through polling that when people across the political spectrum really know what RFK’s stances are, they move. Of course, Democrats support him a lot less, but Republicans and independents who support him, when they learn his actual positions, they really move on him. So we just have to inform the public, inform the Senate, and let people know what his positions are and how dangerous they are.

He’s opposed to life-saving vaccines. He’s pledged to stop funding for treatments and cures for deadly diseases. Let’s also not lose sight of the fact that he’s never run any major organization. He’s never run an organization. The idea that he has the experience and skills to run a major health care program like Medicare or Medicaid, or that he can run a huge Department of Health and Human Services that oversees healthcare for 125 million people, that oversees the health care system that makes up 17 percent of our economy is absurd. It’s quite literally life and death for people.

Sargent: It seems like Democrats, generally speaking, are taking a bit of a hands-off approach to Trump right now. Shouldn’t the party be saying in unison that these nominees have absolutely no business being anywhere near the agencies they’re being chosen for? You’ve got some Democrats playing footsie with some of these nominees to the degree that they just want to appear like they want to work constructively with the new president’s choices. That seems problematic when the nominees are this bad. Couldn’t the party be doing more to say clearly that any GOP senator who supports these completely crazy and unfit nominees will own the horrible consequences for what happens down the line?

Shoup: I can understand how some of these Democratic senators want to have a reasonable take of, I’m going to take a look at these nominees and take them individually one by one; I try not to say, I’m going to oppose every single Trump nomination, but really look at the facts. But the idea that RFK is at all qualified for the job is just absolutely absurd. It would be good if people could make strong statements about this, but they know that this nomination is really about having a handful of Republicans come out against it.

In the end, the Democratic senators will be aligned against RFK, even if they’ve said some positive statements about some different views that he has. They will, in my opinion, vote against him, but the Republican senators need to know that they will be held accountable for a vote for RFK, and that they will be held accountable for any negative consequences that come from that. Unfortunately, again, this is life and death. It’s very scary of what could come with RFK even being given this platform to spread his beliefs.

Sargent: Exactly. What we need to hear more from Democrats is what you said, which is, If you vote for this guy, or for Pete Hegseth to run the Pentagon, or whoever it is, we will hound you for the rest of your lives for the consequences that are unleashed by this. It’s absolute madness that this person is anywhere near any agency like this. Absolute madness. That’s basically what you’re saying.

Shoup: Yes. And we’re going to have to rely on the Democrats here if we actually do get to a nominations process and he gets beyond these Hill meetings, where he goes in and is questioned if they go through the regular order. If he’s questioned and if there’s a vote, Democrats really need to bring out all of these issues and really grill him and really highlight it then. When they’re given that platform that is part of their role, hopefully we can really see them rise to the occasion. And then after, if he does happen to get through, we’ll have that role of accountability for RFK and for the Trump administration.

Sargent: Just to wrap this up, you guys are trying to figure out if there’s any way to get to the point of stopping RFK, which requires four Republican senators. Are there four that are actually gettable, do you think? If you had to pick the top four who are gettable, who would they be and why?

Shoup: It’s interesting. We know from the ACA repeal fights—of course, John McCain got all of the attention there, but Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins did vote against ACA repeal. And they’ve talked a lot about vaccines, about women’s health, which they’re very concerned about. And we have the HPV vaccine. I think they’re definitely gettable, and they can be fair-minded. And then, I don’t really know. It’ll be interesting.

One thing we didn’t talk about is that RFK is pro-abortion. So we might end up having this weird combination of the anti-abortion senators who vote against him because of his stances on abortion and then mixed in with a Collins and a Murkowski. Is it Crapo? Is it Mike Rounds? Is it McConnell? Is it Cornyn, who made supportive statements about vaccines? We just have to see who is willing to go against Trump to do the right thing, and that is a little bit more difficult to play out. But he is so dangerous that the people that really understand that could be willing to come around.

Sargent: At the end of the day, Anne, I fear that what happens is the public doesn’t get adequately warned; Republican senators basically have some questioning that they’ve got to deal with from the press, but they can get to yes pretty easily; and then we’re stuck with RFK as HHS secretary. What do you think? That seems like a bad outcome to me.

Shoup: If we have RFK as the secretary of Health and Human Services, it would be disastrous. Not only do we have his anti-vaccine takes, but we also just have someone who is completely unqualified running this huge part of the executive branch, that manages important programs like Medicare and Medicaid that are lifelines that people rely on to stay healthy.

What we’ll have to do, if this happens again, is just what we did during the first Trump presidency when my organization was started. What we were started to do was to push back against Republicans who wanted to repeal the ACA. Nobody thought that the ACA would still be here today after Trump was elected. I know that I was terribly scared the night that Trump was elected; I thought that it was gone.

It’s not the time to despair. We can push back on these things. We have to keep a close eye on what’s happening over at HHS, frankly, whether RFK is the nominee or whether it’s somebody else that Trump appoints. We’re going to be keeping a close eye on them, we’re going to be holding them accountable, and we’re going to be trying to protect these vital programs like Medicare, Medicaid, the ACA, all the wonderful provisions that were included in the Inflation Reduction Act that helped to lower cost of prescription drugs and help make people’s premiums more affordable. So we’re going to be doing that work.

Sargent: Critical point you make there, which is that even if, God forbid, RFK does get through, they will run into some pretty tough political sledding when they try to actually do the things they’ve got in mind. It’s not by any means a sure thing that they’ll succeed. Anne Shoup, thanks so much for coming on with us today.

Shoup: Thanks so much for having me.

Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.