The Far Right Really Wants Trump to Pick America's Top Anti-Vaxxer As His VP

If you thought that the 2024 presidential election couldn’t get stranger than a former president campaigning while under indictment for paying hush money to a porn star, then you clearly have not been paying attention to Roger Stone.

The former Trump adviser has spent the last week promoting the idea that former President Donald Trump should pick Robert Kennedy Jr., America’s top anti-vaxxer and a Democrat, as his running mate.

And Stone, who has worked on 13 presidential election campaigns including those for Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Trump, claims in his decades-long career he has never seen a reaction like the one he has got since floating the Trump-Kennedy “dream ticket for 2024” last week.

“In the 44 years I’ve been active in American politics, I’ve got nothing that resembles the reaction to the outside-the-box idea that I put forward on my Substack last week,” Stone said over the weekend in a video entitled “The Growing Interest in a Trump / RFK Jr. Ticket in 2024.”

In the Substack blog published last week, Stone lays out the reasons why he believes that Kennedy would be a good fit for the role of Trump’s vice president. 

He points out that some of Kennedy’s statements on foreign policy read like those of an America First politician while claiming that the Democratic establishment would attempt to keep Kennedy off the ballot and “kneecap him” like they supposedly did to Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2020— “but for different reasons,” Stone wrote.

Stone is an acquaintance of Kennedy’s, and admits there are a lot of policies where Kennedy and Trump disagree, such as gun control, climate change, and abortion.

But potentially most consequential of all are the pair’s stance on vaccines. Trump, while initially a vaccine sceptic, has touted his administration’s rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine as saving millions of lives during the pandemic.

Kennedy, on the other hand, is the most prominent anti-vaccine activist in the United States and has used the pandemic to significantly boost his political profile while raking in huge sums of money. 

Stone may be the loudest voice pushing the so-called “bipartisan national unity ticket” but he wasn’t the first to come up with it. The idea of Trump picking RFK as his vice president has been floating around far-right and extremist platforms ever since Kennedy announced his intention to seek the Democratic nomination last month.

Over on the pro-Trump message board known as The Donald, which was central to the planning of the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, members appear excited about the possibility of Kennedy joining the 2024 ticket.

“Trump with a Dem VP would blow normies fucking minds!,” one member wrote. 

While the members acknowledged Kennedy’s anti-gun and pro-abortion stances, they still seemed willing to back him.

“I would take him for the fact that he fought the establishment and would ensure a massive victory, as the Democrats message is such garbage and many people are sick of the garbage candidates they force on them,” one member wrote.

Others suggested that Trump should stick with someone like failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake as his VP pick, but give Kennedy another role in the administration, such as attorney general or head of the Department of Justice.

On Stone’s own blog, one reader commented that Trump’s inability to admit when he’s wrong could scupper a potential Trump-Kennedy ticket.

“Trump would have to renounce his support for the Covid bioweapon jabs before RFK Jr would consider a run on the same ticket,” the reader wrote. “But Trump has shown repeatedly that he does not have the character to admit he is wrong about anything.”

Kennedy, Trump, and Stone did not respond to requests for comment.

The idea of Trump picking a Democrat as his running mate may seem impossible, but Stone pointed out over the weekend that it would not be unprecedented, as former President Abraham Lincoln picked Democrat Andrew Johnson as his running mate back in 1864, though he admitted that didn’t exactly end well for the Republican.  

“This of course did not work out very well, because it ended up essentially inviting the assassination of Abraham Lincoln,” Stone said, adding: “We don’t wish that, of course, on Donald Trump.”