Trump Is Trying to Win Over Undecided Voters by Making One of His Most Horrifying Promises Yet

In the final few days of a campaign, candidates try to project a “closing message” that they believe will win over any remaining undecided voters. Kamala Harris gave a speech outlining her version of this message on Tuesday, which went something like this: Donald Trump wants to be president so that he can order the military to imprison his enemies, whereas I want to be president to do normal Democratic president stuff.

The Trump campaign, as always, is approaching things more creatively.

• Howard Lutnick, a finance industry CEO who is the co-chair of Trump’s White House transition planning team, appeared on CNN on Wednesday and said that if Trump wins, anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will be given access to government data that he could use to “yank” vaccines “off of the market.” Kennedy has for years claimed on the basis of discredited evidence that vaccinations cause autism and was involved in an anti-vaccination campaign in American Samoa which resulted in the deaths of 83 individuals, “most of them young children,” from measles.

• Trump, holding a Thursday event with Tucker Carlson, said that he would assign Kennedy “to work on health and women’s health.” This is, frankly, an ominous promise: Among the stories about RFK Jr. and women that circulated during the campaign were decade-old reports about diaries in which he recorded having cheated on his then-wife 37 times in one year, present-day accusations that he helped break up the engagement of a journalist who covered him by “sexting” with her, and a Vanity Fair piece in which a woman who worked for him as a nanny said he had repeatedly harassed and touched her sexually without her consent. (Kennedy Jr. does not appear to have commented on the diaries and denied having an inappropriate relationship with the journalist. He responded to Vanity Fair’s report by saying that the behavior was typical of his “rambunctious youth,” although at the time the alleged incidents occurred he was a married 45-year-old with five children. He later apologized to the woman involved via a text that said he has “no memory” of behaving inappropriately toward her.) On Wednesday, Trump also said that as president he would “protect” the women of the U.S. “whether the women like it or not.”

• At another point during the Carlson event, Trump said the following about former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney, who renounced her support for the former president after the Jan. 6 Capitol riots and has campaigned with Harris:

She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.

The comment was ostensibly about Cheney’s support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which Trump said he supported (and referred to as a “tremendous success”) before it became unpopular and he began claiming that he had been against it. The idea seems to have been that Cheney is a “chickenhawk” because she advocates for wars she herself doesn’t serve in—but it did veer pretty quickly into a sort of firing squad fantasy scenario, didn’t it?

The Harris campaign, reportedly, believes that undecided moderate women are the group with which it has the best chance of making gains in the closing days of the campaign. The Trump campaign, apparently, does not believe this, or at least believes some strange things about what undecided moderate women want to hear.