To that, Kennedy replied: “Yeah.”
“We’re way ahead of the guy,” Trump added, apparently referring to President Biden.
It was not immediately clear what Trump meant by doing something big. His campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In the video — which Bobby Kennedy III shared on X before removing it — Trump said that “something’s wrong with that whole system” while speaking of vaccines.
“When you feed a baby, Bobby, a vaccination that is like 38 different vaccines, and it looks like it’s meant for a horse, not a, you know, 10 pound or 20 pound baby,” Trump said at one point. He suggested that babies can later “change radically.”
David Gorski, a Wayne State University professor of surgery and oncology and managing editor of Science-Based Medicine, which debunks misinformation in medicine, noted that vaccines are not as large as Trump is portraying, which is common anti-vaccine rhetoric, nor is there any evidence that the childhood vaccine schedule with multiple shots in succession causes autism.
In the now-deleted post in which he shared the footage, Bobby Kennedy III — who has said he supports his father’s presidential campaign — wrote that he is a “firm believer that these sorts of conversations should be had in public.”
“Here’s Trump giving his real opinion to my dad about vaccinating kids — this was the day after the assassination attempt,” Bobby Kennedy III wrote. “… This is not a cheapfake or somebody doing a Trump voice. This is the real deal.”
By Tuesday morning, the video had been taken down, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. issued an apology to Trump over it.
“When President Trump called me I was taping with an in-house videographer,” Kennedy wrote in a post shared on X. “I should have ordered the videographer to stop recording immediately. I am mortified that this was posted. I apologize to the president.”
In the call, Trump also described the conversation he had with Biden on Saturday after he survived an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Butler, Pa.
A gunman attempted to shoot Trump, killing one rally attendee and injuring two others. Trump was rushed to a hospital and later said that a bullet grazed his right ear. His campaign, however, has not released details about his injury.
Trump told Kennedy that Biden, in a call after the shooting, asked him how he felt, and Trump said he described his injury to Biden as being hit by “the world’s largest mosquito.”
Trump was hurt in the ear and has since been seen wearing a bandage. Trump, in his conversation with Kennedy, described the call with Biden as “very nice.” He also said the gun that authorities believe was used in the shooting, an AR-15, is “pretty tough.”
In his post, Bobby Kennedy III wrote that Trump “could have picked a unity ticket” that included his father.
Democratic critics of Kennedy seized on his conversation with Trump, suggesting it was further evidence that Kennedy entered the race to damage Biden.
In a statement to The Washington Post, Democratic National Committee spokeswoman Lis Smith said Kennedy “has no path to victory in this race and is nothing more than a spoiler for Trump.”
Trump’s comments to Kennedy on the phone call about vaccines echo his history of vaccine skepticism.
Trump previously said in a 2012 call into “Fox & Friends” that “they go in, they get this monster shot — you ever see the size of it? It’s like they’re pumping in, you know it’s terrible, the amount, and they pump this into this little body, and then all of a sudden the child is different a month later. And I strongly believe that’s it.”
He also has tweeted anti-vaccine rhetoric, claiming in 2012 that “massive combined inoculations to small children is the cause for big increase in autism.” There is no scientific proof that the childhood vaccine schedule causes autism.
In 2015 at a Republican primary debate, he argued against the childhood vaccination schedule, saying about some vaccines “it looks just like it’s meant for a horse, not for a child.”
During his presidency, Trump did not follow through on his anti-vaccine beliefs, said Gorski, the Wayne State University professor of surgery and oncology. In fact, Trump’s administration worked to speed the development of coronavirus vaccines.
But, “this time around, who knows?” Gorski said. “If he’s elected, he very well might appoint someone you know like that” to run the Food and Drug Administration or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “You could imagine the CDC starting to backtrack on the vaccines it recommends.”
Peter Hotez, a vaccine scientist and author of “The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science: A Scientist’s Warning,” said this is part of continued attacks on vaccines that have become canon for the Republican Party.
“We’ve seen a steady erosion of support for science,” he said in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
Meryl Kornfield and Amy B Wang contributed to this report.
