Washington:

Donald Trump introduced Friday that Kennedy household scion and infamous vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would play a “huge position” in his administration if the Republican former president had been to win subsequent week’s election.

Talking to reporters outdoors an upscale halal restaurant in Dearborn, Michigan, Trump exuded confidence in Kennedy, who has spent twenty years fueling vaccine disinformation, claiming he had the right credentials for a high-level job.

“He will have an enormous position in well being care,” Trump declared, including with a trademark flourish: “He is aware of about it higher than anyone.”

Trump famous that Kennedy has “bought some views that I occur to agree with very strongly and I’ve for a very long time,” however he dodged questions on whether or not he particularly endorsed Kennedy’s vaccine rhetoric.

Kennedy, a 70-year-old former Democrat, ran as an impartial earlier on this election cycle earlier than dropping his marketing campaign in August to help the 78-year-old Republican tycoon. 

He’s extensively rumored to be a contender for a cupboard place, with hypothesis centering on the position of secretary of well being and human providers.

“For 19 years, I pray each morning, and not using a single exception, that God would put me able to finish this power illness epidemic,” Kennedy stated Friday at a rally alongside Trump in Michigan.

Throughout a raucous rally in New York’s Madison Sq. Backyard on Sunday, Trump teased he would permit Kennedy to “go wild on well being,” with out elaborating. 

And on Thursday night time, he prompt to a Nevada crowd that Kennedy’s portfolio would prolong to “ladies’s well being,” additional angering Democrats already incensed over Republican-led abortion rights rollbacks in additional than 20 states.

Trump doubled down on that concept on Friday.

“He is so into well being and all, he will handle ladies’s well being and males’s well being and your kids’s well being,” the candidate stated.

Kennedy added: “We’re the sickest nation on this planet, and that is the sickest technology of youngsters. And if you happen to elect Kamala Harris, you are going to get extra of the identical.”

Cupboard appointments require Senate affirmation by a easy majority of 51 votes, with the vice chairman breaking ties if wanted.

For the reason that mid-2000s, Kennedy — whose father was assassinated in 1968 whereas vying for the Democratic presidential nomination — has risen to turn into a number one determine within the international anti-vaccine motion. 

His claims embody calling Covid-19 vaccines the “deadliest ever made” and suggesting the virus was “ethnically focused” to hurt Black and white individuals whereas sparing “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese language.”

He was as soon as a well-respected local weather lawyer and was extensively reported as a number one candidate for chief of the Environmental Safety Company below former Democratic president Barack Obama, earlier than finally being handed over.

5 of his siblings denounced his determination to endorse Trump, calling it a “betrayal of the values that our father and our household maintain most pricey.”

Kennedy’s presidential run this 12 months featured some weird moments — together with his declare to have recovered from a parasitic mind worm and an admission that he dumped a useless bear cub in Central Park after initially selecting it as much as “pores and skin” it.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV workers and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)