Imagine having RFK Jr. as Health Secretary?!

In the final days of a campaign, candidates try to deliver a “closing message” that they believe will persuade any remaining undecided voters. Kamala Harris gave a speech on Tuesday in which she offered her version of this message, which went something like this: Donald Trump wants to be president so he can order the military to lock up his enemies, while I want to be president so he can do the normal Democratic presidential stuff.

As always, the Trump campaign is doing things more creatively.

• Howard Lutnick, financial industry CEO and co-chair of Trump's White House transition planning team, appeared on CNN on Wednesday and said that if Trump wins, anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will have access to government data he could use it to “take vaccines off the market”. Kennedy has claimed for years, based on discredited evidence, that vaccines cause autism and was involved in an anti-vaccination campaign in American Samoa in which 83 people, “most of them young children,” died of measles.

• Trump, who held an event with Tucker Carlson on Thursday, said he would appoint Kennedy to “work on health and women's health.” That's, frankly, an ominous promise: Among the stories about RFK Jr. and women that circulated during the campaign were decades-old accounts of diaries in which he recorded how he married his then-wife in a year (to date) of 37 years Mal cheated on allegations that he helped break off the engagement of a journalist who was covering him by “sexting” her, and a Vanity Fair article in which a woman who worked for him as a nanny said he repeatedly sexually harassed and touched her without her consent. (Kennedy Jr. appears not to have commented on the diaries and denied an inappropriate relationship with the journalist. He responded to Vanity Fair's report by saying that the behavior was typical of his “wild youth,” albeit for … The alleged one When the incidents occurred, he was a married 45-year-old with five children. He later apologized via text message to the woman involved and said he had “no recollection” of behaving inappropriately toward her.) On Wednesday, Trump also said that as president he would “protect” the women of the United States, ” whether women like it.” or not.”

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

She is a radical war hawk. Let's have her with a nine-barreled gun shooting at her, okay? Let's see how she feels with the guns pointed at her face.

The comment was supposedly about Cheney's support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which Trump said he supported (and called a “tremendous success”) before it became unpopular and he began claiming he was against it. The idea seems to have been that Cheney is a “chickenhawk” because she supports wars in which she doesn't take part – but it pretty quickly turned into a kind of firing squad fantasy scenario, didn't it?

The Harris campaign reportedly believes that undecided, moderate women are the group where it has the best chance of making gains in the final days of the campaign. The Trump campaign apparently doesn't believe this, or at least believes some strange things about what undecided moderate women want hear.