Donald Trump is pushing the longtime vaccine opponent and current health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr to be more aggressive on cutting vaccines in the US, according to reporting from the Wall Street Journal.

Trump has a long record of anti-vaccine statements, but the White House recently put a hold on vaccine changes after polling indicated they were a losing issue in the midterm elections.

Kennedy, the secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, recently slashed the routine childhood immunization schedule in an unprecedented move.

Trump reportedly asked Kennedy at his northern Virginia golf course in May if the health secretary had the “yips”, according to the Journal.

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Trump wasn’t talking about a sudden inability to make putts. Kennedy wasn’t making enough cuts to the US vaccination schedule, Trump reportedly said.

The US president hopes to make “alleviating autism” a component of his legacy, the Journal reported – and he has taken issue with Kennedy’s less aggressive changes to vaccination recommendations in recent months.

“Donald Trump has been anti-vaccine at least since 2015,” said Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and an infectious diseases physician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. At the Republican primary debate that year, Trump said that autism had gotten “totally out of control” and vaccines should be in “smaller doses over a longer period of time”.

Trump regularly posted on social media about debunked links between vaccination and autism as early as 2014, and his posts on Truth Social have recently advocated for breaking up shots into individual components and delaying some childhood vaccines for more than a decade.

Tony Fabrizio, a top pollster for Trump, found that anti-vaccine moves are unpopular with voters in key districts, concluding in a December memo that “skepticism toward vaccine requirements is politically risky for both parties”.