When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suspended his independent presidential campaign and backed Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump in August, he told The Epoch Times that it was a “heartwrenching decision” and a “necessary step” to achieving his mission of “saving millions of Americans” from what he calls “the chronic disease epidemic.”
Now, Trump is president-elect, and he has said that he would offer Kennedy a position in his administration where the Children’s Health Defense founder could “focus on health.”
For Kennedy, a potential role as Secretary of Health and Human Services, a position heading a health-related agency, or any health-related post at the White House would represent the realization of a long-lived ambition.
Fighting chronic disease, improving children’s health, and addressing corporate capture of government agencies are Kennedy’s passions, and those topics were a vital part of his platform while running for president.
“I prayed to God every day for the past 19 years that America’s health crisis would be solved for the next generation. That is a major reason why I ran for president,” Kennedy told The Epoch Times. “President Trump wants to leave as his legacy healthy children and a healthier country. Those are deep interests we share.”
It is uncertain what role Kennedy will have in Trump’s new administration. The president-elect in August said he would establish a panel of top experts working with Kennedy “to investigate what is causing the decades-long increase in chronic health problems and childhood diseases, including autoimmune disorders, autism, obesity, infertility, and many more.”
During a rally at Madison Square Garden in New York on Oct. 27, Trump proclaimed about Kennedy, “I’m going to let him go wild on health. I’m going to get him go wild on the food. I’m going to let him go wild on the medicines.”
In his victory speech in the early hours of Nov. 6, Trump said of Kennedy, “He’s going to help ‘Make America Healthy Again.’ He’s a great guy, and he really means that he wants to do some things, and we’re going to let him go do it.”
On Aug. 23, as he declared his support for Trump, Kennedy said: “If I’m given the chance to fix the chronic disease crisis and reform our food production, I promise that within two years, we will watch the chronic disease burden lift dramatically.”
In recent days, Kennedy has said he will eliminate the nutrition departments of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) because they are not protecting children and recommended to Trump that pharmaceutical advertising on television be banned.
He told The Epoch Times that he would revamp the NIH to focus on what’s causing autism, autoimmune diseases, and neurodevelopment diseases instead of developing drugs and serving as an incubator for pharmaceutical products.
A staunch advocate for regulating chemicals in food, Kennedy recently suggested that McDonald’s should use tallow fat instead of seed oils to make its French fries healthier. He has chastised American food manufacturers for using ingredients like artificial dyes.
Some have speculated that Trump may make Kennedy the secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) or the head of one of its sub-agencies.
The HHS oversees 13 agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health.
That post would require Senate confirmation, a measure that could become easier when Republicans take majority in the chamber in January.
Kennedy has vowed that, if given the chance, he will dismiss the officials who lead those agencies and appoint replacements who will “turn them back into healing and public health agencies.”
On Oct. 25 in a post on X, Kennedy hinted about some decisions he would make if he had a role leading one of those agencies.
“FDA’s war on public health is about to end. This includes its aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals and anything else that advances human health and can’t be patented by Pharma,” Kennedy wrote.
“We enriched these corporations and their captive agencies. And now, they want to go and commoditize all of the things we value in our lives,” Kennedy said.
Little will change until giant or private corporations stop controlling the FDA, CDC, and the Department of Agriculture, he noted.
“Their function is no longer to improve and protect the health of Americans,” he told the rallygoers. “Their function is to advance the mercantile and commercial interests of the pharmaceutical industry that has transformed them and the food industry that has transformed them into sock puppets.”
Kennedy told The Epoch Times that, when his uncle John F. Kennedy was president in the early 1960s, about 1 percent of children in America had a chronic disease.
“That number may be as high as 60 percent in America today,” he noted.
According to Kennedy, the chronic disease epidemic among American children is a form of abuse.
“Children are the most precious assets that we have in this country,” he said. “How can we let this happen to them? How can we call ourselves a moral nation, the most exemplary democracy in the world, if we are treating our children like this?”
Ultra-processed foods are a primary culprit in the medical crisis among the young, he said.
Seventy percent of American children’s diet is now ultra-processed, he said, “which means industrially manufactured in a factory.”
He said these ultra-processed foods have chemicals that didn’t exist a century ago, and that they are partly responsible for the rise in disease. Though many of these chemicals are banned in Europe, he noted, they are ubiquitous in American foods.
“We are literally poisoning our children systematically for profit,” he said. “Pesticides, food additives, pharmaceutical drugs, and toxic waste permeate every cell in our bodies.”
Cast as an “anti-vaxxer” by critics, Kennedy has consistently said that he instead believes in vaccine safety and informed consent.
During an interview with The Epoch Times last year, he explained that he would not take away vaccines.
“I’ve never been anti-vaccine. People should have choice, and that choice should be informed by the best information possible. I’m going to ensure that there are science-based safety studies available and people can make their own assessments about whether a vaccine is good for them,” he said.
At a forum hosted by Tucker Carlson in October, Kennedy recounted what Trump said when they talked about working together in a unity movement.
“He asked me to root out the corruption and end the conflicts of interest in our regulatory agencies, corporate capture that has turned our regulatory agencies into the sock pockets of industries they’re supposed to regulate,” Kennedy said.
“And he asked me to restore the tradition of gold-standard, empirically-based, evidence-based science and medicine in our regulatory agencies, and to restore the transparency so that these agencies have to—must—stop hiding science from us when it clashes with the commercial ambitions of the pharmaceutical industry.”
Kennedy will continue his MAHA campaign as he awaits a potential post in the Trump administration. Regardless of what role he would serve, the 70-year-old attorney, children’s health advocate, and fitness enthusiast is confident he will deliver the results he envisioned when his presidential campaign ended and his backing of Trump began.
“I can get the corruption out of the agencies. I’ve been doing it for 40 years [as an attorney],” he told The Epoch Times. “I’ve sued all those agencies. I have a PhD in corporate corruption.”
