DeSantis’s Mulligan on RFK Jr.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis, in a clip teasing his interview on The Megyn Kelly Show, takes another whack at discussing the sort of role Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would have were DeSantis elected president.

In the clip, he says, “The word I used is let’s ‘sic’ him on these agencies to hold him accountable and that would be part of being kind of outside the agency and getting answers and bringing accountability to bear.”

To be clear, in his initial answer when asked about a potential RFK Jr. running-mate slot, DeSantis said that, given Kennedy’s liberal views, the president should instead “sic him on the FDA if he’d be willing to serve, or sic him on CDC.” In that initial response, it’s hard to see what “willing to serve” would imply if not a role within the administration.

But let’s just take DeSantis at his word that he was talking about having RFK Jr. serve as a sort of ombudsman of the FDA or CDC. This would still be a terrible answer. I have had plenty of criticisms of the CDC and FDA and believe both are in need of serious reforms. But the left-wing RFK Jr. has a long history of making conspiratorial claims on matters of public health that would only do more damage were he in any sort of position of trust, whether inside or outside of the administration. The fact that DeSantis feels the need to extend some sort of olive branch to RFK Jr. suggests one of two things: Either DeSantis believes RFK Jr. has valuable insights into medical issues, or he is too fearful of upsetting the anti-vaxx contingent within the Republican base. Neither possibility speaks well of DeSantis or the campaign he is running.