Robert F. Kennedy Jr. compared Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler and disparaged his supporters on his podcast in 2016.
Kennedy, who ultimately backed Trump in the 2024 election after dropping his own independent bid, is now a newly selected cabinet member to lead Trump’s Health and Human Services Department — but the old comments reflect the fact that Kennedy was a lifelong Democrat before joining forces with the Republican president-elect.
In the now-eight-year-old radio show broadcasts, first reported by CNN, Kennedy said Trump was stoking fear on the campaign trail with his rhetoric and compared him to Hitler, the former-segregationist Gov. George Wallace and other divisive leaders. On another episode from 2016, Kennedy also said that Trump was unlike Hitler because “Hitler had like a plan, you know, Hitler was interested in policy.” And Trump did not, he said.
Kennedy also praised then-Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi’s description of Trump supporters on the show, reading from an article of his: “We may not have that many outright Nazis in America but we have plenty of cowards and bootlickers.” (Taibbi, who now writes for his own Substack, has since made more sympathetic statements about Trump, including that he has been the victim of Democrats’ use of “lawfare.”)
Kennedy recently said that such inflammatory rhetoric, including comparing Trump to Hitler, “divides our nation and inspires assassins,” in a post on X this October.
Kennedy’s old comments echo similar statements from now Vice President-elect JD Vance, who also compared Trump to the Nazi leader but reversed his viewpoint. Kennedy is now distancing himself from the past comments, with a similar rationale also used by Vance.
“Like many Americans, I allowed myself to believe the mainstream media’s distorted, dystopian portrait of President Trump. I no longer hold this belief and now regret having made those statements,” he said in a statement to CNN. His spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
But throughout Kennedy’s longshot independent bid for the White House this year, Kennedy blasted Trump over his first-term cabinet picks, his divisiveness and his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol.
“President Trump said he was going to drain the swamp, then he brings John Bolton in to run the NSA. That is like putting a swamp creature in charge of draining the swamp,” Kennedy said in an interview with Ben Shapiro.
“Why do you give him a second term if he’s messed it up so badly the first time?” Kennedy said to Shapiro. “He said he was going to do that the first time.”
Kennedy also attacked Trump’s other cabinet members in interviews and in his stump speech, as well as laying out a list of Trump’s first-term personnel picks that he took issue with in a post on X in June, about two months before his endorsement of Trump.
During an April interview on CNN, the political scion also called Trump a “threat to democracy” because of his attempt to overthrow the 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
Now, Kennedy is poised to hold a potentially powerful role in the next Trump administration, pending his confirmation to his cabinet post.
While on the campaign trail as an independent, Kennedy said that he wouldn’t take any cabinet position in a potential Trump second term in August during a local CBS interview. Less than two weeks later he’d dropped out and endorsed Trump.