“I think he’s going to be much less radical than you would think,” Trump said during a wide-ranging news conference at Mar-a-Lago. “He’s going to have an open mind, or I wouldn’t have put him there.”
Trump’s comments came as Kennedy kicked off a week of meetings with GOP senators to shore up support for his nomination. Some Republican senators have expressed concerns over Kennedy’s history of vaccine skepticism and wanted to hear directly from the former Democrat about what he believes.
Trump also said he thinks there are “problems” with vaccines and again hinted at a false connection between vaccines and autism rates.
“There are problems. We don’t do as well as a lot of other nations, and those nations use nothing,” Trump said.
It’s a position Trump has flirted with for years, but it’s recently come to the forefront as the president-elect has allied with Kennedy.
Trump also signaled he was opposed to vaccine mandates, which have long been part of the country’s public health policy. “I don’t like mandates; I’m not a big mandate person,” Trump said when asked whether schools should mandate vaccines.
Trump’s opposition to school mandates was a common theme on the campaign trail, though his aides said he was only referring to COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
