The Guy Who Wants to Be Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services Keeps Doing Weird Stuff With Animals

On Friday, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. abandoned his presidential campaign and endorsed Donald Trump as commander-in-chief.

Kennedy has signaled that he's gunning for a role in the Trump administration. Trump, meanwhile, recently told CNN that he was considering giving Kennedy a role in his administration, and in an interview that aired on Monday, Kennedy told the conservative pundit Tucker Carlson that he and Trump are "working on policy issues together."

As for which position Kennedy is specifically looking to nab? Nothing's been confirmed, but last week, prior to the campaign's suspension, Kennedy's running mate Nicole Shanahan — the ex-wife of Google cofounder Sergey Brin — offered a hint: per NBC, while speaking to a podcaster Shanahan floated the suggestion that Kennedy would make an "incredible" secretary of health and human services.

That Kennedy would want this position in the administration — or any other health or environment-related role — isn't surprising. A former environmental lawyer, Kennedy has gained notoriety in recent years for his open-armed embrace of a slew of health-related conspiracy theories, most famously the debunked notion that vaccines cause autism. His campaign has largely been based on his rejection of the COVID-19 vaccine and pandemic protocols in general, and he even made the ludicrous claim that the COVID-19 virus had been genetically modified to avoid "Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese."

In other words, based on his conspiratorial and unscientific approach to human health alone, putting Kennedy anywhere near a position like health secretary would be dangerous — and that's before you even get to the animal stories.

The Kennedy scion has long been known as an animal aficionado with a penchant for taxidermy; per the NYT, his taxidermy collection includes the stuffed body of a pet turtle and a Sumatran tiger once gifted to his father, the late Robert "Bobby" Kennedy, Sr. But his presidential campaign has revealed a string of increasingly bizarre stories about various concerning interactions with deceased animals, the latest of which may warrant an official inquiry.

It started back in May, when The New York Times reported that during divorce proceedings in 2012, Kennedy disclosed that a parasitic worm "got into [his] brain and ate a portion of it and then died." (Per the NYT, Kennedy invoked the alleged brain worm to explain self-described "cognitive problems" he was experiencing.)

Shortly after that, in July, a Vanity Fair article — which also included resurfaced sexual assault allegations brought against Kennedy by a former babysitter for his children — included a photo of Kennedy, taken in Korea in 2010, posing with the carcass of what strongly appears to be a dead, barbecued dog. It was later that year that doctors would allegedly discover the worm in his brain.

And barely a month after that, Kennedy himself released a deeply strange video in which he told the one-time comedian Roseanne Barr that he had dumped a dead bear cub in New York's Central Park and staged it to look like a bike accident. Basically, as he tells it, in 2014 he was on his way to go falconing — again with the animals — when a woman driving ahead of him hit the young bear, killing it. At first, Kennedy told Barr, he'd intended to skin the bear and store its meat in his fridge, as it was in "good condition." But he left the bear in the car for too long — as one does? — causing it to spoil, and so, because there had apparently been a string of bike accidents in Central Park, he decided to drop the bear there. Because there aren't any bears in Central Park, however, the dead cub became big news. (Kennedy released the video to get ahead of a forthcoming New Yorker article that revealed the incident.)

And you'd think that would be the end of it, right? Alas, not yet. Just this week, a bizarre Town & Country interview with Kennedy's daughter, Kathleen "Kick" Kennedy, resurfaced — and it might just contain the most deranged Kennedy story of them all.

In the interview, which was originally published back in 2012, Kick recalled that her father had wielded a chainsaw to saw off the head of a dead, beached whale at Hyannis Port, Massachusetts — and then, with the family in tow, strapped it to the roof of their car for the drive back to the family's home in Mount Kisco, New York. The drive was five hours long, and per Kick's retelling, it sounds hellish.

"Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet," Kick told Town & Country. "We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger."

"But that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us," she added.

It's one thing to be interested in oddities, like taxidermied critters or even old bones. But lopping off the allegedly still-juicy head of a beached whale is extremely weird behavior that goes way beyond simply being a hobbiest, even by Kennedy's increasingly weird standards. On Monday, according to The New York Times, the "political arm" of the Center for Biological Diversity called for an investigation into Kennedy's alleged whale-sawing, citing federal laws prohibiting individuals from collecting soft tissues from protected marine mammals and, separately, carrying those collected parts across state lines.

Though no specific role for Kennedy in the Trump administration has yet been confirmed, Kennedy is on Trump's transition team, meaning that he'd at minimum play a role in staffing, reviewing, and organizing a Trump-led government. And at the end of the day, Americans deserve to have real experts helming government agencies, including the ones responsible for human, animal, and environmental health — and not a weirdo conspiracy theorist who can't seem to stop desecrating animal corpses.

More on RFK: RFK Junior Threatens to Eat "Five More Brain Worms"