Watch: Trump and RFK Jr. Give Away Game in Explosive Phone Call

A segment of a phone call between independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Donald Trump was leaked on social media early Tuesday, revealing just how much the two men support each other, despite Kennedy’s repeated insistence that he wants to offer voters a different option.

In one section, Trump can be heard tying vaccines to autism.

“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 on the call. “And then you see the baby all of a sudden starting to change radically. I’ve seen it too many times. And then you hear that it doesn’t have an impact, right? But you and I talked about that a long time ago.”

Trump appeared to suggest to Kennedy that the two should combine their efforts in some way, telling Kennedy that doing so would be “so good” and “so big” for the independent candidate. At one point, Trump said, “We’re gonna win.”

“Yeah,” Kennedy agreed.

Trump can also be heard describing the moment he was struck by a bullet on Friday at his Pennsylvania rally.

“I just turned my head to show the chart,” Trump said on the call. “And something rapped me. It felt like a giant … like the world’s largest mosquito. And it was. It was a bullet going around. You know, what do they call that, an AR-15 or something? That was a big gun. That was a pretty tough gun, right?”

In a since-deleted post, the apparent originator of the leak—Kennedy’s son, Bobby Kennedy III—wrote 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,” the younger Kennedy wrote. “This is not a cheapfake or somebody doing a Trump voice. This is the real deal.”

Kennedy’s campaign has since come out and apologized for the leak, claiming that he had erred by failing to stop a “videographer” from filming him after Trump rang.

“I should have ordered the videographer to stop recording immediately,” Kennedy wrote on X (formerly Twitter.) “I am mortified that this was posted. I apologize to the president.”

Watch the full clip of the call below:

A Fox News analyst said people would question why exactly Donald Trump had picked J.D. Vance as his running mate, considering his lack of experience and former status as a Never Trump Republican. 

Vance has talked his fair share of smack about the former president, saying Trump could be “America’s Hitler,” accused him of committing serial sexual assault, and calling him “one of USA’s most hated, villainous, douchey celebs.” But as Trump has amassed more power in the run-up to November, it seems that Vance has finally changed his tune. To many, though, it’s unclear why Trump would want to work with Vance at all. 

Brit Hume, a chief political analyst for Fox, said Monday night that many voters would be asking that question, and offered up a possible theory for Trump’s choice. 

“Some people may look at this and remember what J.D. Vance used to say about Donald Trump,” said Hume. “He was a hard-core Never Trumper not very many years ago, and he reversed himself completely not that long ago.

“And one of the things you worry about is, when somebody’s making a pick for a potential president—potential president if something happens to him—then you think, well, is this person; how did he get the job?

“Did he get it because he was really the best qualified to be president? Or did he get it because he sucked up effectively to the nominee?” said Hume. “People will have questions about that.”

Although Vance reportedly divided Trump’s donors, he was the “little pet” of one of Trump’s campaign managers, Susie Wiles, according to one anonymous GOP strategist. He  also had a number of powerful backers in Trump’s inner circle, including Trump’s sons, Don Jr. and Eric, as well as Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk. 

A top Republican is blaming his divisive, hate-fueled speech at the Republican National Convention on a teleprompter loading error.

Senator Ron Johnson told PBS NewsHour Monday night that he had intended to hop on the “unity convention” bandwagon in the aftermath of the attempted assassination on Donald Trump’s life. But instead, he read a version of the script that was practically the opposite, allegedly because of a teleprompter mishap.

“That speech was written last week. They literally loaded the wrong speech,” Johnson told the news outlet.

“I had taken that out. Instead I’d loaded about that we needed a somber moment in history. We should heed President Trump’s call to unite,” he said. “We must heal and unify this nation. I didn’t know how to take that out without screwing up the teleprompter.”

But those statements being there in error apparently didn’t stop Johnson from saying them anyway. In a four-minute speech on Monday, Johnson told the crowd of conservatives that Democratic policies pose “a clear and present danger to America, to our institutions, our values, and our people.”

He further derided Democrats as the party of “open borders, reckless spending, weaponized government, and weakness on the world stage,” and promised that Republicans would repair “the damage done by Democrats” once again.

“Vice President Harris and President Biden,” Johnson said, “have made our lives less safe and more expensive.”

The solution to all this, according to Johnson, was another four years of Trump. In closing out his speech, Johnson referred back to Trump’s slogan: “Make America Great Again.”

Johnson’s aides reportedly washed their hands of the incident, telling the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that if anyone was going to take the fall for the teleprompter loading error, it would be “not us.”

An apparent teleprompter malfunction, which sent House Speaker Mike Johnson scurrying off-stage at the Republican National Convention Monday afternoon, launched the high-stakes political event into a welcome new phase: cover band concert.

“It is now my honor to introduce the attorney general,” Johnson began haltingly. “And there goes the teleprompter.”

Johnson awkwardly made his exit. Meanwhile, Sixwire, a country-rock band based out of Nashville, Tennessee, performed a rendition of Steely Dan’s “Reelin’ In the Years.” A livestream of the main room showed clumps of blonde women dressed in bright red and waving their Trump signs, and white guys nodding their heads to the beat.

After the song ended, the band just kept going, and going, and going, riffing on the song’s iconic guitar melody.… Some say they’re still vamping to this day.

What could’ve transformed into a rocking evening was tragically cut short, as Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird appeared onstage to welcome vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance. He walked around the floor to Merle Haggard’s “America First.” Not nearly as fun of a song, but it was also repeated over and over again as Vance glad-handed delegates.

Days after getting shot at a political rally, Donald Trump claimed he wanted a “unity” convention. But his pick for vice president—Ohio Senator J.D. Vance—immediately used the moment to deride liberals and President Joe Biden.

Despite having privately described the former president as “America’s Hitler,” Vance has become a “genuine convert” to the MAGA cause, according to Trump. And on Monday, Trump positioned the Ohio lawmaker as an heir apparent for his brand of far-right politics.

In the immediate aftermath of the Pennsylvania shooting that clipped Trump’s ear and killed two people, Vance took to X (formerly Twitter) to accuse Democrats—as opposed to Republicans—of stoking the violent rhetoric that led a registered Republican to attack the GOP leader.

“Today is not just some isolated incident,” Vance wrote on Friday. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

Vance has also been more than sympathetic toward convicted January 6 rioters: In 2022, he spread misinformation by falsely claiming that dozens of jailed Capitol protesters hadn’t yet been charged with crimes. He’s jumped onto the Trumpian bandwagon of calling for the Department of Justice to criminally investigate critics of the MAGA regime, and, perhaps most importantly for Trump, Vance has sworn complete loyalty, even if doing so flies in the face of the U.S. Constitution.

During an interview with ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos in February, Vance promised that had he been vice president in place of Mike Pence in 2020, he would have continued to carry out the fake elector scheme to overturn the election results.

“If I had been vice president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there,” Vance said at the time. “That is the legitimate way to deal with an election that a lot of folks, including me, think had a lot of problems in 2020.”

Biden’s campaign, meanwhile, is reportedly poised to label the Trump-Vance ticket as “extreme” and a doubling down on Trump’s aggressive far-right positioning, according to NBC News.

“Donald Trump picked J.D. Vance as his running mate because Vance will do what Mike Pence wouldn’t on January 6: bend over backwards to enable Trump and his extreme MAGA agenda, even if it means breaking the law and no matter the harm to the American people,” Biden campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a statement obtained by the news outlet.