Trump Speaks on RFK Jr. Nomination: ‘Nobody’s Going to Do it Like You’

President-elect Donald Trump praised Robert F. Kennedy Jr. while speaking at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday night, saying that “nobody’s going to be able to do it like you.”

Trump nominated Kennedy for Secretary of Health and Human Services earlier in the day, a move that will likely rattle the public health community given Kennedy’s long history of pushing anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and promoting medical treatments whose effectiveness has not been sufficiently proven.

The president-elect referenced Kennedy’s unsuccessful 2024 campaign as an independent presidential candidate, claiming that Kennedy was “doing incredibly well” until he “decided he can’t do it, went independent, and now he’s with us all the way.”

“And today I nominated him for, I guess, if you like health and you like people that live a long time, it’s the most important position,” Trump said.

Trump also told Kennedy that “people like you.” He then joked, “Don’t get too popular, Bobby,” as the audience at the Mar-a-Lago gala broke into laughter.

“You know, you’ve reached about the level,” the president-elect added. “We want you to come up with things and ideas and what you’ve been talking about for a long time, and I think you’re going to do some unbelievable things. Nobody’s going to be able to do it like you, and boy does he feel it in his heart.”

While campaigning with Kennedy, Trump promised that in his second administration, Kennedy would have carte blanche to “do what he wants” with women’s health and that Kennedy could generally “go wild” on health-related matters.

The president-elect’s decision to nominate Kennedy as the nation’s chief health officer may have come as a surprise to his own staffers, many of whom had ruled out nominating Kennedy to lead the Health and Human Services department, The Guardian reported last week.

CNN also reported that some of Trump’s advisers were worried Kennedy wouldn’t be able to get the security clearance necessary to be a Cabinet-confirmed official.

Kennedy is one of several controversial Cabinet nominees Trump announced this week. He also tapped the Fox News host Pete Hegseth for defense secretary and the former Florida Representative Matt Gaetz for attorney general.

Shortly before Thursday’s event at Mar-a-Lago, Trump announced that he had selected three of his personal lawyers to serve in other key Justice Department roles: he picked Todd Blanche as deputy attorney general, D. John Sauer as solicitor general, and Emil Bove as principal associate deputy attorney general.

Blanche and Bove played crucial roles on Trump’s legal team in the Manhattan DA’s hush-money case in New York, where Trump was convicted of 34 felonies, as well as the special counsel Jack Smith’s classified documents case in Florida, which was dismissed earlier this year. Sauer, meanwhile, was instrumental in arguing for Trump to get absolute immunity from criminal prosecution before the Supreme Court this year.