MSNBC's Joe Scarborough urged President Donald Trump to drop his controversial pick to oversee public health as questions about his leadership grow louder.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a series of moves that will limit eligibility for the next round of COVID vaccines as the virus surges, and the Health and Human Services secretary is locked in a power struggle with newly confirmed Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Susan Monarez over vaccine policy.
"Operation Warp Speed, one of the most successful government operations in quite some time," the "Morning Joe" host said, "and yet he says it, and then you have RFK Jr., who immediately starts firing people who actually would agree with that statement. Why? What's the loyalty to RFK Jr.?"
Trump successfully pushed for the development of the coronavirus vaccine during his first term, but his political base has always been skeptical of the shots, which political analyst John Heilemann said put the president in a tough spot.
"That's where Donald Trump has always been on the question of vaccines, and I don't want to, we're not going to argue the merits of this, you and me and Mika [Brzezinski] and everybody else who's connected to rationality and scientific inquiry doesn't have any doesn't have any question," Heilemann said. "This shouldn't be a rock and a hard place. Donald Trump, we have one of the clearest, most dramatic and most unequivocal accomplishments of his first term was Operation Warp Speed. It was Operation Warp Speed, and he has been never, never has been comfortable with fully embracing the achievement there as a political asset or as a scientific accomplishment, and that's because a decent-sized chunk of his base are anti-vax skeptics. That is the explanation for why RFK Jr. is at the top of HHS. I think it's a purely political thing."
"Trump has been trying to figure out how to straddle the fact that a large number of his supporters hate the COVID vaccine, don't believe in vaccines in general," Heilemann continued. "That's a rising number of people in America, and they are all firmly entrenched in MAGA, so how does he square that circle? Well, he can't, he doesn't want to. He knows better than to denounce the thing that he accomplished, so on one hand, he talks about how he accomplished that thing, but he talks about it relatively rarely, I mean, compared to how much you or I would talk about it if we were president of the United States. If we were running for president, the first thing we would lead with. It's all we'd talk about."
"One of our colleagues, Rachel Maddow, often says watch what he does, not what he says, or at least watch both," Heilemann added, "and in this case, the appointment of RFK Jr. says a lot more than any of the words Donald Trump utters about the questions of the vaccine, because RFK Jr. is running roughshod, he is turning out to be the worst nightmare, the people who feared what would happen if he took over HHS."
Scarborough agreed, but suggested it may be time for the president to cut Kennedy loose.
"Let me tell you what, whatever Donald Trump thinks he may be getting from RFK," Scarborough said, "it's not worth it."