President Donald Trump is “stuck” with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. despite knowing he holds “deeply unpopular” views, the president’s longtime biographer has said.
Author Michael Wolff says that Trump—who has been on a firing tear this spring, losing his hand-picked attorney general, DHS secretary, and labor secretary—may be reluctant to send Kennedy packing out of fear of alienating the Kennedy scion’s MAHA coalition.
“They are now stuck with RFK Jr. and the anti-vax face,” Wolff told Inside Trump’s Head co-host Joanna Coles, referring to the White House. “Now what I’m hearing is that they’re trying to get rid of him, and they are trying to get him, the way this was put to me, they are trying to get him to go.”
“They don’t want to fire him because the MAHA constituency is significant, they feel, to the Trump base,” he added. “So they want him to go away, but not go away mad.”
The White House and the Health Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Kennedy, 72, has become the face of the Make America Healthy Again movement, having spent years as a staunch anti-vaccine crusader before rising to the helm of the Department of Health and Human Services, where he has taken aim at everything from food dye to alternative milk.
As the midterms inch closer, however, the Trump administration appears to be coming to the realization that most Americans do not actually share Kennedy’s anti-vaccine views.
“Among Donald Trump’s problems—this is a central one—[is] that he has staffed the administration with people who everyone thinks are jokes,” Wolff said. “This is certainly true of RFK Jr., but also very specifically directed at him because he has become the face of something that is deeply, deeply unpopular, which is the anti-vax position.”
Trump’s own moves this year suggest he is not a full anti-vaxxer himself. He chose Dr. Erica Schwartz, a Brown University-educated physician who has publicly supported vaccines, to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in April.
Kennedy revealed last week that the president did not seek his input on the new CDC director. The appointment of Schwartz came amid dismal polling showing that the administration’s current vaccine messaging is too polarizing, reports The Washington Post.
“So the White House is trying to essentially curtail or limit RFK Jr., and they’re trying to put in their own people who are mostly less extreme, certainly on the anti-vax side, than RFK,” Wolff told Coles. “We are seeing the gradual defenestration of RFK Jr.”
Despite his unpopular stance on vaccines, administration officials still see Kennedy’s MAHA movement as crucial to winning the midterms, the Post reported. That might save Kennedy from suffering the same fate as three women who used to be on Trump’s cabinet.
The president has so far fired Kristi Noem, who helmed DHS; Pam Bondi, who ran the Justice Department; and Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who resigned as labor secretary amid a probe into her professional conduct and alleged affair with a subordinate.
Some MAHA voters have already begun sharpening their knives over the Trump administration’s support for Bayer, a German company embroiled in a high-stakes feud to end thousands of lawsuits accusing its weedkiller RoundUp of causing cancer.
Also enraging MAHA was that Trump signed an executive order in February supporting elemental phosphorus and glyphosate-based herbicides, which are despised by those in MAHA for potentially causing cancer.
“There were millions of Democratic and independent moms in particular that voted Republican because they believed Trump that he was gonna do something about pesticides in the food,” Moms Across America founder Zen Honeycutt told CNN.
“A lot of these moms held their nose and voted for Trump in 2024, and they’re not sure that they’re willing to vote red in the midterms again,” MAHA influencer Alex Clark added in the same segment. “It’s very important for the GOP to recognize that MAHA voters are not loyal to a certain political party. MAHA voters are a coalition that’s up for grabs.”
