COLOGNE, Germany — On a warm evening in early September, Annalena Baerbock took the stage on a packed city square here. There were just over three weeks to go until Germany’s general election, which will take place on Sunday, and around 2,000 people had come out to see the progressive, pro-environment Green party’s first-ever candidate for chancellor. “You can feel the change here on Wilhelmplatz,” Baerbock told the audience, to cheers and applause.
As she spoke, four young girls toward the front of the crowd climbed a metal divider to get a better look at the candidate. Baerbock, energetic with microphone in hand, occasionally referred to them in her speech: When ahandful of right-wing protesters started shouting, she reminded them there were children present, and during her Q&A session, she came over and answered the girls’ question about how to live a more climate-friendly life. Over the course of the rally, other girls wandered over from their parents until about a dozen stood there, grouped together near the stage, eyes turned up toward Baerbock.
These girls have an experience of politics American girls don’t: They have never known a country in which a woman didn’t hold the highest office in the land. For the past 16 years, Angela Merkel has been a steady hand at the country’s helm and arguably the most powerful woman in the world.
But in Baerbock’s candidacy, they’re also watching a real-time demonstration that even in Germany — a country often held up as a model for embracing and re-electing a powerful woman leader — sexism isn’t easy to root out of politics. It can be difficult even to disentangle the two.
Baerbock was an early contender in the election, leading her two main rivals for several weeks in the spring — an unprecedented feat for the Greens, who have never before had a real shot at the chancellery. Since then, she has come under unrelenting attack for a series of off-the-trail missteps, including revelations of plagiarism and resume inflation, while male rivals have more easily sidestepped their minor scandals. She has also been the target of frequently gendered disinformation attacks, one of which featured her face photoshopped onto a naked woman’s body with a caption implying she was a sex worker. Along the way, Baerbock has faced more familiar examples of sexism, such as questions about whether she can balance the chancellorship with being a mother.
The Greens are now polling at 16 percent, behind the center-left Social Democrats and Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats, and Baerbock is effectively out of the chancellor’s race. Baerbock herself has avoided speaking too explicitly about sexism in the campaign, though others close to her have been vocal on the subject. In an interview with POLITICO Magazine this month, she mentioned the connection but was cautious about blaming the attacks on gender.
“There are always going to be moments when, especially as people run out of real arguments, they hit below the belt — we know that about campaigning,” Baerbock said. “But in this election, there’s also been an element of hate and smear campaigning, that’s been exacerbated by social media, at times gender-based.”
Her candidacy has left German political observers wrestling with the question of just how open-minded Germany actually is when it comes to women leaders. Baerbock might be the second woman to run for Germany’s top office, but she’s the first to experience the post-Merkel climate for female politicians seeking the job. It’s a contradictory environment in which a female candidate is no longer a historic first and embracing gender is far more culturally accepted — but in which the winner will preside over a parliament that is still more than two-thirds male, more skewed than many of Germany’s European neighbors. And, at least for Baerbock’s supporters, it’s hard not to look at the substance and tone of the attacks on her and detect very different treatment than her rivals.
“One can’t say that Germans don’t trust a woman to do [the job of chancellor]. We had a first example,” said Franziska Brantner, a member of parliament from the Greens who led the party’s campaign in the state of Baden-Württemberg earlier this year. “But still, a female candidate is getting different attacks — and on a different level — than male counterparts.”
Female politicians in Germany are disappointed, but not surprised, that a country that has broken such a visible gender barrier still has so far to go.
“You would think that, with a female chancellor leading the government, things would have steadily improved for women in politics,” said Sawsan Chebli, a state secretary in Berlin’s city government who is running for the Bundestag as a Social Democrat. “I wish that were the case.”
In many ways, Baerbock is exactly what Merkel wasn’t: She’s young (just 40 years old), running on a platform of structural change (Merkel leads one of the two major centrist parties), and has openly embraced being a woman and mother (the chancellor has, until recently, largely avoided discussion of gender).
When Merkel first ran for chancellor in 2005, she faced her own uphill road: Ascending the ranks of the male-dominated CDU, she was referred to as “Kohl’s girl,” a reference to former Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Merkel’s mentor and predecessor as party leader. She’s gotten questions about her clothes, and critics have implied that as a woman without children she doesn’t fully understand the lives of mothers and families. Even the well-known nickname often applied to Merkel, Mutti (or “mother”), has sexist undertones.
The difficult atmosphere Merkel has confronted might help explain why women’s representation hasn’t advanced as much as some hoped during her 16-year tenure. She chose early on to strategically downplay her gender, and likely calculated that for a leader of the conservative CDU, becoming a vocal champion of feminist politics would be a liability.
Just 31 percent of the members of Germany’s parliament are women, which is higher than the U.S. Congress (27 percent) and the global average (25 percent) but lower than many of Germany’s European neighbors. Four years ago, the percentage was actually higher — 37 percent — but dropped when the heavily male, far-right Alternative for Germany party won seats in 2017. In executive positions, women are far rarer: Just 9 percent of Germany’s mayors are women, and women lead only two of the 16 federal states.
Only since Merkel announced that she wouldn’t seek a fifth term has she begun to speak more openly about gender and feminism. In 2019, in a rare long-ranging interview, she discussed the challenges of being a woman in politics (“I wear the same blazer four times within two weeks, the letters start pouring in,” she said) and the need for gender parity in public life, which she said “just seems logical.”
And earlier this month, she finally used a word that remains loaded in German politics: “Yes, I’m a feminist,'” Merkel said for the first time.
That Merkel has become more comfortable opening up about the topic may be a sign of the changing times. Baerbock, by contrast, speaks on the campaign trail about being a mother to two young daughters, and spent much of a recent debate performance discussing policies to lift up women in Germany.
But the Green candidate has confronted a challenge that Merkel, who still doesn’t have a Twitter account, didn’t have in 2005: online hate speech and disinformation attacks that experts say are often gendered and disproportionately target women.
Baerbock has been hit by an especially high amount of disinformation, according to studies by the German Marshall Fund and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, from Russian state-backed sources as well as from inside Germany. Some of these attacks play on preconceived notions about the Greens, like the false claim that the party wanted to ban housepets to reduce carbon emissions. But other attacks have been distinctly sexist: One image that made the rounds online featured Baerbock’s face photoshopped onto a naked female body with the caption, “I was young and I needed the money.”
Michael Kellner, the Greens’ campaign manager, has spoken out about the disproportionate challenges Baerbock has faced due to her gender. “As an experienced campaign manager, I can tell you that this spread of hate and lies affects women much more than men,” he told Die Zeit in June.
Female candidates from across Germany’s political spectrum are familiar with online abuse. Earlier this year, the magazine Der Spiegel found that 69 percent of female parliamentarians in Germany had experienced “misogynistic hate,” and 36 percent described physical attacks on themselves or on their office or home. Similarly, the European Academy for Women in Politics and the Economy recently found that female mayors in Germany experience significantly more harassment.
This comes as Germany, like other countries, is grappling with an overall rise in hate speech, fueled in part by the AfD — a party which, like similarly-minded politicians in the U.S., continually pushes the boundaries of what’s considered acceptable speech.
Wiebke Winter, a 25-year-old Bundestag candidate from Merkel’s center-right CDU, said that overall, Germany’s political scene has become more welcoming to women because parties like hers recognize they need to be more representative of the population as a whole.
But after a recent TV appearance where she discussed her role as her party’s new adviser on climate issues, her Twitter account was flooded with hateful attacks. “I really don’t know why,” Winter said in an interview. “I think I broke too many clichés at once: I’m a woman for climate in the CDU, and that’s not the story that people want to tell.”
The online harassment was one thing, but when someone started burning her campaign posters close to her home, she contacted the police.
Chebli, the SPD candidate in Berlin, travels with police protection due to the volume of credible death threats she’s received. In Chebli’s case, multiple factors make her a target: She’s not just a woman, but also a Muslim daughter of refugees who speaks openly about racism in Germany. “Women who have a voice, who are visible, who defend themselves — these are the ones who are most often affected,” she said. “What happens online isn’t detached from what happens in analog life.”
Many of the online attacks targeting Baerbock are examples of what the German Marshall Fund calls “sexualized subversion of credibility” — playing on gender stereotypes to enhance existing concerns about a female candidate’s competence and trustworthiness. Baerbock took a number of hits that undermined her credibility in voters’ eyes, and her candidacy never fully recovered.
After a near-flawless campaign rollout in April, Baerbock’s party shot to first place in the polls. She appeared on the cover of Der Spiegel, posing confidently with her hands on her hips, projecting the assuredness and ease that her opponents (both middle-aged white men) were lacking at the time. But the Greens’ numbers began to decline after a series of unforced errors. First, German media reported that Baerbock hadn’t disclosed supplementary income from her party. Then, evidence emerged that she had inflated parts of her resume and plagiarized numerous passages in her book (she has since apologized for the plagiarism, promising to add more accurate citations).
Baerbock’s missteps quickly became the defining narrative of her campaign: “Not even a quarter [of Germans] still believe Baerbock!” read one headline from the tabloid Bild.
But while Baerbock’s allies acknowledge the campaign’s errors, some believe gender bias is subtly amplifying an existing narrative of incompetence and inexperience. Both her rivals, the CDU’s Armin Laschet and SPD’s Olaf Scholz, had minor plagiarism scandals of their own; while neither was as extensive as Baerbock’s, those revelations made far fewer waves and haven’t defined their campaigns in the same way. And some of the more serious scandals the two male candidates have faced, whether Laschet’s failure to distance himself from an ultraconservative candidate in his party or Scholz’s involvement in a major tax-evasion controversy, also had less of an impact. (On Thursday, my POLITICO colleagues marveled at how Scholz had survived multiple scandals, calling him the “Teflon candidate.”)
“Annalena Baerbock obviously has to meet stricter standards than her competitors,” the writer Tanja Dückers argued in a column for Deutschlandfunk.
Petra Weißflog, head of the Greens in the eastern city of Cottbus, said things have improved for women in politics since she first ran as her party’s lead candidate in Brandenburg in 1994. But she can’t help feeling the party’s male co-leader, Robert Habeck, would have been treated differently than Baerbock.
“These small faux-pas that happened with Annalena, they weren’t her fault: That was her advisers, who didn’t vet things as carefully as they should have,” Weißflog said. “I think if these things had happened to Robert, everyone would have simply said, ‘Well, he’s a very busy man.’”
For advocates of women in politics, the questions about Baerbock’s credibility highlight a familiar difficulty: how to distinguish legitimate scrutiny of a candidate’s competence from what they see as unfairly heightened expectations for women.
The Barbara Lee Family Foundation, which studies the challenges women face running for office in the United States, has found that voters tend to assume men are qualified but need more evidence to believe the same of a woman — especially when she is running for executive office.
Amanda Hunter, the foundation’s executive director, says this dynamic makes it doubly difficult for Baerbock, who is already facing questions about her qualifications for the job due to her lack of executive experience. “Attacking a woman’s qualifications is a tried and true tactic in a campaign, because it can be very effective,” she said. “So the allegations of plagiarism, for example, or whether or not she inflated her resume — those chip away at the assumption that she is competent, which is already a weak spot for women.”
Watching Baerbock’s campaign try to recover from real political stumbles while grappling with whether the reaction had a gendered element, I was reminded of the spring of 2015. Back then, I covered Hillary Clinton’s nascent presidential campaign for National Journal, including the unfolding scandal over Clinton’s private email server. The server was a substantive problem that also exacerbated an existing narrative about Clinton — that she considered herself above the rules — just as Baerbock’s issues have underscored her youth and lack of experience.
Of course, Clinton was one of the most experienced presidential candidates in recent memory and a well-known, highly polarizing figure long before her campaign. Baerbock, meanwhile, was a political newcomer when she became the Greens’ co-leader in 2018 and, unlike Clinton, is running on a progressive platform advocating fundamental change. Her party proposes investing massively in climate infrastructure, phasing out coal years earlier than the current government planned and raising taxes on high earners, among other initiatives.
Still, the sense that smaller scandals are cumulatively having an intangible, yet undeniable, impact on a female candidate’s chances feels remarkably familiar.
Baerbock nodded to the parallels in her conversation with POLITICO Magazine: “It’s a phenomenon that we’ve already seen in the latest U.S. elections,” she said.
Verena Duden, a Greens supporter in the northern city of Kiel, said after a party rally this summer that she did see a gender element to the way Baerbock’s credibility had tanked.
“The mistakes happened, that’s not a question,” she said. “But I think … in politics, people react much more aggressively to women. Especially in social media, where you don’t have to use real names to express yourself, I really have the feeling that there really is a difference.”
Despite the hurdles female German politicians face, one thing has certainly improved since Merkel’s first run in 2005: Openly discussing gender-based discrimination and abuse is far more accepted.
When Winter was attacked on Twitter, she was heartened by the support she received. “Many other people jumped on top of it, even from other parties, which I really appreciate — from the Green Party, from the Social Democrats, from the liberals,” she said. “So many people called and asked me how I was.”
Taking audience questions toward the end of her rallyin Cologne, Baerbock was asked, “How do you deal with people who insult you?” There were a few knowing chuckles from the audience as Baerbock considered her answer.
“That’s a very good question,” she said seriously. “How do I deal with it when people attack me? I have a very, very amazing party. And I have so many people who say, ‘That’s not how we should speak to each other.’”
“The absolute most important thing,” she added, “is that you’re not alone.”
NEW YORK (AP) — In a new video posted early Election Day, Beyoncé channels Pamela Anderson in the television program “Baywatch” – red one-piece swimsuit and all – and asks viewers to vote.
In the two-and-a-half-minute clip, set to most of “Bodyguard,” a four-minute cut from her 2024 country album “Cowboy Carter,” Beyoncé cosplays as Anderson’s character before concluding with a simple message, written in white text: “Happy Beylloween,” followed by “Vote.”
At a rally for Donald Trump in Pittsburgh on Monday night, the former president spoke dismissively about Beyoncé’s appearance at a Kamala Harris rally in Houston in October, drawing boos for the megastar from his supporters.
“Beyoncé would come in. Everyone’s expecting a couple of songs. There were no songs. There was no happiness,” Trump said.
She did not perform — unlike in 2016, when she performed at a presidential campaign rally for Hillary Clinton in Cleveland – but she endorsed Harris and gave a moving speech, initially joined onstage by her Destiny’s Child bandmate Kelly Rowland.
“I’m not here as a celebrity, I’m not here as a politician. I’m here as a mother,” Beyoncé said.
“A mother who cares deeply about the world my children and all of our children live in, a world where we have the freedom to control our bodies, a world where we’re not divided,” she said at the rally in Houston, her hometown.
“Imagine our daughters growing up seeing what’s possible with no ceilings, no limitations,” she continued. “We must vote, and we need you.”
Harris used the song in July during her first official public appearance as a presidential candidate at her campaign headquarters in Delaware. That same month, Beyoncé’s mother, Tina Knowles, publicly endorsed Harris for president.
Beyoncé gave permission to Harris to use the song, a campaign official who was granted anonymity to discuss private campaign operations confirmed to The Associated Press.
Outside of sports and a “Cold front coming down from Canada,” American news media only report on Canadian events that they believe are, or will be, influential to the US. Therefore, when Justin Trudeau’s announcement, having finally read the room, that Canada will be reducing the number of permanent residents admitted by more than 20 percent and temporary residents like skilled workers and college students will be cut by more than half made news south of the border, I knew the American media felt Trudeau’s about-face on immigration was newsworthy because many Americans would relate to Trudeau realizing Canada was accepting more immigrants than it could manage and are hoping their next POTUS will follow Trudeau’s playbook.
Canada, with lots of space and lacking convenient geographical ways for illegal immigrants to enter the country, though still many do, has a global reputation for being incredibly accepting of immigrants. On the surface, Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver appear to be multicultural havens. However, as the saying goes, “Too much of a good thing is never good,” resulting in a sharp rise in anti-immigrant sentiment, which you can almost taste in the air. A growing number of Canadians, regardless of their political affiliation, are blaming recent immigrants for causing the housing affordability crises, inflation, rise in crime and unemployment/stagnant wages.
Throughout history, populations have engulfed themselves in a tribal frenzy, a psychological state where people identify strongly with their own group, often leading to a ‘us versus them’ mentality. This has led to quick shifts from complacency to panic and finger-pointing at groups outside their tribe, a phenomenon that is not unique to any particular culture or time period.
My take on why the American news media found Trudeau’s blatantly obvious attempt to save his political career, balancing appeasement between the pitchfork crowd, who want a halt to immigration until Canada gets its house in order, and immigrant voters, who traditionally vote Liberal, newsworthy; the American news media, as do I, believe immigration fatigue is why Kamala Harris is going to lose on November 5th.
Because they frequently get the outcome wrong, I don’t take polls seriously. According to polls in 2014, Tim Hudak’s Progressive Conservatives and Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals were in a dead heat in Ontario, yet Wynne won with more than twice as many seats. In the 2018 Quebec election, most polls had the Coalition Avenir Québec with a 1-to-5-point lead over the governing Liberals. The result: The Coalition Avenir Québec enjoyed a landslide victory, winning 74 of 125 seats. Then there’s how the 2016 US election polls showing Donald Trump didn’t have a chance of winning against Hillary Clinton were ridiculously way off, highlighting the importance of the election day poll and, applicable in this election as it was in 2016, not to discount ‘shy Trump supporters;’ voters who support Trump but are hesitant to express their views publicly due to social or political pressure.
My distrust in polls aside, polls indicate Harris is leading by a few points. One would think that Trump’s many over-the-top shenanigans, which would be entertaining were he not the POTUS or again seeking the Oval Office, would have him far down in the polls. Trump is toe-to-toe with Harris in the polls because his approach to the economy—middle-class Americans are nostalgic for the relatively strong economic performance during Trump’s first three years in office—and immigration, which Americans are hyper-focused on right now, appeals to many Americans. In his quest to win votes, Trump is doing what anyone seeking political office needs to do: telling the people what they want to hear, strategically using populism—populism that serves your best interests is good populism—to evoke emotional responses. Harris isn’t doing herself any favours, nor moving voters, by going the “But, but… the orange man is bad!” route, while Trump cultivates support from “weird” marginal voting groups.
To Harris’s credit, things could have fallen apart when Biden abruptly stepped aside. Instead, Harris quickly clinched the nomination and had a strong first few weeks, erasing the deficit Biden had given her. The Democratic convention was a success, as was her acceptance speech. Her performance at the September 10th debate with Donald Trump was first-rate.
Harris’ Achilles heel is she’s now making promises she could have made and implemented while VP, making immigration and the economy Harris’ liabilities, especially since she’s been sitting next to Biden, watching the US turn into the circus it has become. These liabilities, basically her only liabilities, negate her stance on abortion, democracy, healthcare, a long-winning issue for Democrats, and Trump’s character. All Harris has offered voters is “feel-good vibes” over substance. In contrast, Trump offers the tangible political tornado (read: steamroll the problems Americans are facing) many Americans seek. With Trump, there’s no doubt that change, admittedly in a messy fashion, will happen. If enough Americans believe the changes he’ll implement will benefit them and their country…
The case against Harris on immigration, at a time when there’s a huge global backlash to immigration, even as the American news media are pointing out, in famously immigrant-friendly Canada, is relatively straightforward: During the first three years of the Biden-Harris administration, illegal Southern border crossings increased significantly.
The words illegal immigration, to put it mildly, irks most Americans. On the legal immigration front, according to Forbes, most billion-dollar startups were founded by immigrants. Google, Microsoft, and Oracle, to name three, have immigrants as CEOs. Immigrants, with tech skills and an entrepreneurial thirst, have kept America leading the world. I like to think that Americans and Canadians understand the best immigration policy is to strategically let enough of these immigrants in who’ll increase GDP and tax base and not rely on social programs. In other words, Americans and Canadians, and arguably citizens of European countries, expect their governments to be more strategic about immigration.
The days of the words on a bronze plaque mounted inside the Statue of Liberty pedestal’s lower level, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” are no longer tolerated. Americans only want immigrants who’ll benefit America.
Does Trump demagogue the immigration issue with xenophobic and racist tropes, many of which are outright lies, such as claiming Haitian immigrants in Ohio are abducting and eating pets? Absolutely. However, such unhinged talk signals to Americans who are worried about the steady influx of illegal immigrants into their country that Trump can handle immigration so that it’s beneficial to the country as opposed to being an issue of economic stress.
In many ways, if polls are to be believed, Harris is paying the price for Biden and her lax policies early in their term. Yes, stimulus spending quickly rebuilt the job market, but at the cost of higher inflation. Loosen border policies at a time when anti-immigrant sentiment was increasing was a gross miscalculation, much like Trudeau’s immigration quota increase, and Biden indulging himself in running for re-election should never have happened.
If Trump wins, Democrats will proclaim that everyone is sexist, racist and misogynous, not to mention a likely White Supremacist, and for good measure, they’ll beat the “voter suppression” button. If Harris wins, Trump supporters will repeat voter fraud—since July, Elon Musk has tweeted on Twitter at least 22 times about voters being “imported” from abroad—being widespread.
Regardless of who wins tomorrow, Americans need to cool down; and give the divisive rhetoric a long overdue break. The right to an opinion belongs to everyone. Someone whose opinion differs from yours is not by default sexist, racist, a fascist or anything else; they simply disagree with you. Americans adopting the respectful mindset to agree to disagree would be the best thing they could do for the United States of America.
PHOENIX (AP) — Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent proponent of debunked public health claims whom Donald Trump has promised to put in charge of health initiatives, said Saturday that Trump would push to remove fluoride from drinking water on his first day in office if elected president.
Fluoride strengthens teeth and reduces cavities by replacing minerals lost during normal wear and tear, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The addition of low levels of fluoride to drinking water has long been considered one of the greatest public health achievements of the last century.
Kennedy made the declaration Saturday on the social media platform X alongside a variety of claims about the heath effects of fluoride.
“On January 20, the Trump White House will advise all U.S. water systems to remove fluoride from public water,” Kennedy wrote. Trump and his wife, Melania Trump, “want to Make America Healthy Again,” he added, repeating a phrase Trump often uses and links to Kennedy.
Trump told NBC News on Sunday that he had not spoken to Kennedy about fluoride yet, “but it sounds OK to me. You know it’s possible.”
The former president declined to say whether he would seek a Cabinet role for Kennedy, a job that would require Senate confirmation, but added, “He’s going to have a big role in the administration.”
Asked whether banning certain vaccines would be on the table, Trump said he would talk to Kennedy and others about that. Trump described Kennedy as “a very talented guy and has strong views.”
The sudden and unexpected weekend social media post evoked the chaotic policymaking that defined Trump’s White House tenure, when he would issue policy declarations on Twitter at virtually all hours. It also underscored the concerns many experts have about Kennedy, who has long promoted debunked theories about vaccine safety, having influence over U.S. public health.
In 1950, federal officials endorsed water fluoridation to prevent tooth decay, and continued to promote it even after fluoride toothpaste brands hit the market several years later. Though fluoride can come from a number of sources, drinking water is the main source for Americans, researchers say.
Officials lowered their recommendation for drinking water fluoride levels in 2015 to address a tooth condition called fluorosis, that can cause splotches on teeth and was becoming more common in U.S. kids.
In August, a federal agency determined “with moderate confidence” that there is a link between higher levels of fluoride exposure and lower IQ in kids. The National Toxicology Program based its conclusion on studies involving fluoride levels at about twice the recommended limit for drinking water.
A federal judge later cited that study in ordering the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to further regulate fluoride in drinking water. U.S. District Judge Edward Chen cautioned that it’s not certain that the amount of fluoride typically added to water is causing lower IQ in kids, but he concluded that mounting research points to an unreasonable risk that it could be. He ordered the EPA to take steps to lower that risk, but didn’t say what those measures should be.
In his X post Saturday, Kennedy tagged Michael Connett, the lead attorney representing the plaintiff in that lawsuit, the environmental advocacy group Food & Water Watch.
Kennedy’s anti-vaccine organization has a lawsuit pending against news organizations including The Associated Press, accusing them of violating antitrust laws by taking action to identify misinformation, including about COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines. Kennedy is on leave from the group but is listed as one of its attorneys in the lawsuit.
What role Kennedy might hold if Trump wins on Tuesday remains unclear. Kennedy recently told NewsNation that Trump asked him to “reorganize” agencies including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration and some agencies under the Department of Agriculture.
But for now, the former independent presidential candidate has become one of Trump’s top surrogates. Trump frequently mentions having the support of Kennedy, a scion of a Democratic dynasty and the son of former Attorney General Robert Kennedy and nephew of President John F. Kennedy.
Kennedy traveled with Trump Friday and spoke at his rallies in Michigan and Wisconsin.
Trump said Saturday that he told Kennedy: “You can work on food, you can work on anything you want” except oil policy.
“He wants health, he wants women’s health, he wants men’s health, he wants kids, he wants everything,” Trump added.
