Former Ambassador to the United Nations and 2024 GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley criticized President-elect Donald Trump’s decision to give high-profile posts in his administration to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, both candidates whose prospective nominations have received some pushback about their backgrounds.
On Kennedy’s selection to lead the Health and Human Services Department, Haley criticized his lack of expertise in health care and his previous party affiliation as a Democrat.
“Who is RFK Jr? He’s not a health guy, he has raised questions about what’s in our food, and I am right there with him,” Haley said. She added, however, “That’s not his background. He is not educated, trained or practiced in healthcare at all.” She also called him a “liberal Democrat,” multiple times.
Kennedy has a long record of criticizing vaccines, though he recently claimed he is not anti-vaccine. But public health experts have objected to his long record of misleading statements questioning vaccine safety and worry he could upend decades’ worth of hard-fought wins in improving vaccination rates against deadly diseases.
Haley, who challenged Trump in the GOP primaries and later endorsed him, also criticized Gabbard, a former congresswoman who represented Hawaii and Trump’s pick to be director of national intelligence, for her “disgusting” past statements on human rights violations in Syria, which Haley says echo Russian propaganda.
“This is a job for an honest broker without any pronounced policy biases,” Haley said. “She went to Syria in 2017 for a photo-op with [Syrian President Bashir] al-Assad while he was massacring his own people … this to me was disgusting.” Haley added, “Everything she said about that was Russian talking points, Russian propaganda.”
Gabbard defended her 2017 meeting with Assad at the time as a “fact-finding mission,” although later she described him a “brutal dictator.” In 2019, she also expressed opposition to U.S. involvement in Syria’s civil war and said Assad “is not the enemy of the United States because Syria does not pose a direct threat to the United States.” The Trump transition team did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Gabbard does not have experience in the field of intelligence and opposes the United States’ intervention in the war in Ukraine.
The Senate is expected to provide advice and consent during the confirmation process once Trump formalizes their nominations. Former Rep. Matt Gaetz, who Trump planned to nominate to be attorney general, withdrew his name from consideration Thursday amid a House Ethics Committee investigation into sexual misconduct and illegal drug use allegations against him.