Former President Donald Trump discussed vaccines with independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—repeating claims he made decades ago but later shied away from while running for president.
A video—shared on X by Kennedy’s son, Bobby Kennedy III, in a now-deleted post—captures the pair’s conspiracy-laden conversation. It was apparently recorded on Sunday, a day after Trump was injured in a shooting at his Pennsylvania campaign rally.
At one point in the 1-minute-and-40-second-long clip, Trump can be heard telling Kennedy Jr. that he would “love” for him “to do stuff”—an apparent reference to potentially working together, perhaps after a Trump victory in November.
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“I think it would be so good for you and so big for you. And we’re going to win,” said Trump.
Kennedy, who has struggled to break through in the polls, responded simply with, “Yeah.”
In video, Trump can later be heard telling Kennedy about his own skeptical thoughts on administering vaccines to babies and apparently taking issue with dosage amounts given:
<p>Something’s wrong with that whole system, and it’s the doctors you find. Remember I said I want to do small doses, small doses. When you feed a baby, Bobby, a vaccination that is like 38 different vaccines, and it looks like it’s meant for a horse, not a, you know, 10-pound or 20-pound baby. It looks like you’re giving, you should be giving a horse this. And do you ever see the size of it, right? You know, it’s just massive. And then you see the baby all of a sudden starting to change radically. I’ve seen it too many times. And then you hear that it doesn’t have an impact, right? But you and I talked about that a long time ago.</p>
Trump previously flirted with vaccine skepticism before the 2016 presidential election, repeating the long-debunked claim that vaccines given to children lead to autism.
Trump repeated the claims as late as 2015 at a Republican primary debate before the 2016 election. “I mean, it looks just like it’s meant for a horse, not for a child, and we’ve had so many instances, people that work for me, just the other day, 2 years old, 2-and-a-half years old, a child, a beautiful child, went to have the vaccine and came back, and a week later got a tremendous fever, got very, very sick, now is autistic,” Trump said, echoing the statement he made to Kennedy.
An environmental lawyer known for his outspoken anti-vaccination stance, Kennedy Jr. has long pushed debunked vaccine conspiracy theories, including an infamous 2005 article suggesting vaccines caused autism—a claim widely discredited by scientists.
He apparently did not mean for the video to be publicly viewed—in apologizing to Trump on Tuesday, Kennedy Jr. explained that the former president called as he was being filmed on camera by a campaign videographer.
“I should have ordered the videographer to stop recording,” Kennedy wrote on X. “I am mortified that this was posted.”
In a post uploaded alongside the leaked video, Kennedy’s son wrote about his rationale for sharing the clip, writing how he is “a firm believer that these sorts of conversations should be had in public.”
“Here is Trump giving his real opinion to my dad about vaccinating kids,” the younger Kennedy wrote, adding Trump “could have picked a unity ticket, instead he picked JD ‘fire all the unvaccinated nurses’ Vance.”
Kennedy III added, “Two parties, indivisible, under Pfizer, with liberty and justice for sum.”
Later in the recording, the topic turns the assassination attempt on Saturday, when investigators say 20-year-old Thomas Crooks opened fire during Trump’s campaign stop in Butler, Pennsylvania, injuring Trump, killing one man, and injuring two others.
“I just turned my head to show the chart and something wrapped me,” said Trump in the clip. “It felt like a giant—like the world’s largest mosquito. And it was, it was a bullet going around. You know, what do they call that, an AR-15 or something? That was a big gun. That was a pretty tough guns, right?”
The Trump campaign has not publicly acknowledged the leaked call as of late Tuesday morning.
The leak perpetuated more rumors about the fate of Kennedy’s own campaign, after speculation kicked up again Monday when Kennedy met with Trump in person in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where the Republican National Convention is being held this week.
The chatter prompted Kennedy to clarify “national unity” was the “main topic” of their meeting.
“No, I am not dropping out of the race,” he added.
