'we Love You!’: The Maga Base Gives Rfk Jr. A Rousing Welcome

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sought to woo the MAGA base Saturday evening at the Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual base-rallying gathering that only a few years ago might have viewed some of Kennedy’s policy stances as too left-leaning.

Kennedy said the Democratic Party “had lost its bearings” and that Trump was more aligned with him than liberals on fighting chronic disease, which is at the center of the health secretary’s Make America Healthy Again agenda.

“The only thing that united the Democrats was Trump derangement syndrome,” Kennedy said about his former party.

The crowd applauded, showing how much Trump’s Make America Great Again fans have embraced Kennedy, a member of America’s most famous Democratic family as the son of former U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy and the nephew of President John F. Kennedy.

“I think you got a very loud cheer, I would say almost as loud as for President Donald L. Trump, right,” said moderator Mercedes Schlapp, one of the conference organizers, who interviewed Kennedy on stage at the event held in Grapevine, Texas.

“We love you,” Schlapp told Kennedy, when he thanked CPAC for being such a welcoming audience.

A senior administration official, granted anonymity to disclose internal deliberations, said Kennedy’s presence at CPAC was meant to ensure that hardcore conservative activists see the value of the MAHA agenda and that the administration is getting more done on the domestic front than they realize.

The MAHA movement, founded by Kennedy, is credited with helping President Trump win the 2024 election.

CPAC’s Schlapp praised Kennedy for putting principle over party and said she had invited him at a meeting with CPAC investors when Kennedy was running for president as an independent. Kennedy’s speech at the time left investors impressed, “and they knew that you would be doing something great, and you are,” she said.

In 2024, Kennedy challenged former President Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination, but then dropped out and ran as an independent. In August 2024, he suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump, who promised to let Kennedy go wild on health.

In congressional hearings, Democrats have insulted Kennedy, calling him a charlatan and ignorant, and accusing him of sowing mistrust in vaccines by questioning their safety and seeking to change longstanding federal recommendations about what vaccines children and adults should receive.

Most establishment medical associations and international bodies such as the World Health Organization say that Kennedy’s doubts about vaccine safety are unfounded. In turn, he’s accused them of being bought by pharmaceutical companies.

However, vaccines didn’t come up during Kennedy’s CPAC interview, despite being one of his priorities.

The White House has sought to downplay Kennedy’s changes in vaccine recommendations ahead of this year’s midterm election after polls showed they were much less popular than Kennedy’s efforts to improve food quality.

When Schlapp asked Kennedy on Saturday what his father would think about him aligning himself with a Republican president, the health secretary said he believed his father and uncle would support his choices and even Trump’s.

“I think that if they were around today, that they would be making the same kind of choices that President Trump is, about Iran, about Ukraine, about trying to raise up the middle class,” Kennedy said.

That’s bound to raise some eyebrows as both John F. and Robert F. Kennedy were troubled by the direction of the Vietnam War and ultimately sought to avoid U.S. military escalation. Some of Trump’s loyal supporters feel betrayed by the president’s decision to launch a war against Iran after promising during his 2024 campaign that he would not start new conflicts but that he would end conflicts instead.

Kennedy listed some of his policy achievements in his first year in office, including changes to the dietary guidelines that tell Americans to eat real food instead of ultraprocessed food. He also mentioned efforts by the Health and Human Services Department to reduce the price of some drugs in the U.S. by pressuring other countries to pay more.

The health secretary said HHS has been working to improve the quality of baby formula. “We're going to have the best information out about baby formula by the end of this month,” he said.

Kennedy also addressed his history of substance use, in response to a question from Schlapp, and said Trump’s executive order in February setting up the Great American Recovery Initiative is meant to revamp federally-funded recovery programs to ensure they work.

But he stressed that he believed in the 12-step program, which has a spirituality component that Kennedy said was necessary to get people into recovery.

“I believe that I was born an addict, and I'm hard-wired to drink and drug myself to death,” Kennedy said. “And in order to overcome that kind of biological drive, you need a spiritual fire,” he added, to applause from the audience.

Cheyenne Haslett contributed reporting.