In his first public statements since winning the election, the president-elect Donald Trump thanked his allies and rejoiced at winning “the most important election” on a Thursday night speaking at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

“So we swept all the swing states. I won the popular vote. Oh, I love that, you know,” Trump said at a gala for the America First Policy Institute. “In my first term, they said, ‘He won the election,’ but they always followed with ‘but he didn’t win the popular vote.’ … No one can say that about us anymore.”

He used the roughly 20-minute speech to thank various allies and Cabinet picks, including Newt and Callista Gingrich, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. Trump tapped the latter two to lead a new “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE.

He also offered what was probably intended as a glowing endorsement Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

“He wants to make people healthy. It’s made him pretty wild in recent years,” he said. “And today I nominated him for, I think — if you like health and if you like people living a long time — it’s the most important position.”

It’s not the first time Trump has associated the word “savage” with Kennedy — a prominent anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist who has promised to overhaul the department responsible for the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“I’m going to let him run because of his health. I’ll let him run wild with the food. I’m going to let him run wild with the medication,” Trump said at a campaign rally last month.

Trump also thanked Linda McMahon, co-chair of the America First Policy Institute, which is a think tank founded to promote Trump’s political agenda.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost.