President Donald Trump has shown no signs thus far of seriously considering the removal of Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., despite months of controversy and despite his increasing attacks on doctors, vaccines, and public health consensus — but veteran analyst Chuck Todd thinks it's just a matter of time before he's gone.
Todd made the bold prediction in a panel on CNN's "The Arena" Thursday afternoon, following a scorched-earth hearing on Capitol Hill where senators in both parties piled on Kennedy, much to the outrage of some figures in Trumpworld.
"You know the right likes to dunk on Democrats sometimes when they're on the wrong side of an '80/20 issue,' right?" said Todd. "And sometimes some of those criticisms are correct, when it came to when it comes to some of these conversations about law and order and culture and stuff like this. This is an 80/20 issue, vaccines. How do you know it's an 80/20 issue? Because you have John Thune, John Barrasso — these are people who never want to be seen as, as, as going against Trump in any way. It was clever the way both Cassidy and Barrasso, you know, in order to criticize Kennedy, they had to to praise the president."
"Wasn't the president's vaccine program so great, shouldn't he get the Nobel Peace Prize for it?" agreed anchor Kasie Hunt.
"Yes," said Todd. "Almost like, please drive a wedge, get this done. Look, this is — this is beyond disastrous. He is easily the most unqualified Cabinet secretary we've ever had, and we've had plenty of unqualified Cabinet secretaries in a number of places, in a number of agencies. This one is putting lives in danger. Within eight months now, we have multiple states deciding to start their own vaccine protocols, their own, you know, feeling as if they can't trust the CDC."
"And here's the thing," he added. "There are people at the White House who have been alarmed by Kennedy, and it's Trump that says, you know, he's afraid of losing the Kennedy constituency, and he's just been letting Kennedy go, letting Kennedy go. At some point, this will break, and I do think he throws Kennedy overboard, but, you know, he loves his trophy. And for him, the trophy is I got a Kennedy, right?"
"That's the biggest problem they're running into," said Todd. "There are plenty of people in this White House that know this guy is a disaster. Not just politically; this guy is a disaster for all the reasons we've been laying out here."
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