Adding a Loony RFK Jr. to the Team Won’t Help Donald Trump | Opinion

Last week Area Rich Man Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. ended his flailing presidential bid and endorsed GOP nominee, and former president, Donald Trump, in an act of craven opportunism that Republicans mistakenly believe they will benefit from. In doing so, Kennedy has not only sullied the family name and betrayed huge swathes of his own policy agenda, but also saddled the Trump campaign with yet another deeply weird surrogate that voters will have a hard time imagining in a position of public health authority. And contrary to conventional wisdom, he’s highly unlikely to help arrest Trump’s month-long slide in the polls against Vice President Kamala Harris.
Kennedy is what would happen if you crossed anti-vaxx crusader Jenny McCarthy with Connor Roy, the eldest failson on Max’s Succession. Like Roy, Kennedy just spent the better part of two years mounting a doomed presidential bid that will ultimately draw about as many votes as the 2016 write-in campaign for Deez Nuts. If the Kennedys were a monarchy, RFK, Jr. appears to be the kind of unhinged megalomaniac who would have caused other notables in a Dark Ages Royal Court to invoke the medieval version of the 25th Amendment by quietly executing him.
Nevertheless, earlier this year Kennedy was sporting double-digit polling and could have qualified for the June 27 presidential debate if his campaign wasn’t a hopeless disaster led by delusional grifters. Exuding unmistakable Caligula/George III vibes is how Kennedy managed, in a few short months, to turn the most electorally promising third-party presidential campaign in a full generation into a running joke punctuated by dead bears and brain worms. It was one of the most spectacular campaign implosions in modern history.
Kennedy started off with two huge advantages. The first was his name. The Kennedys, for reasons that are a completely unsolved mystery to me, are the most renowned dynasty in American politics, and simply being a second cousin in Camelot makes you a top contender in any Democratic primary that you choose to enter. The second was widespread and justifiable despair about the dispiriting prospect of a Trump-Biden rematch that we all seemed doomed to endure until the president dropped out of the race in July. Those two elderly candidates drove an asphalt paver of ennui and disgust down the middle of the country that created an enormous lane for someone like Kennedy to cruise down.
And by patching together a policy agenda that borrowed heavily from both sides (a government backed, low-interest mortgage loan system and incessant griping about cancel culture!), Kennedy was, if nothing else, materially different from both austerity-loving Third Way types and the ideologically rigid and fringe stunt candidacies of your average Libertarian or Green Party nominee. That policy agenda, to the extent that it ever meant anything at all, actually fills ideological space (economically liberal, socially conservative, especially on immigration) that has been quite successful in Europe but has no major party behind it in the United States.
The problem with the Kennedy campaign was not that there was no demand for a third-party alternative to a matchup between Trump and Biden—it was always Kennedy himself. Despite spending the first half of his life capably carrying on the family name as an effective environmental lawyer, over the course of the 21st century he descended into a morass of conspiratorial thinking, anti-vaccine “activism” and the kind of rich-scion-gone-mad behavior that we rightly associate with the idle children of the wealthy.
According to a diary acquired by the New York Post, he cheated on his then-wife Mary Richardson Kennedy with 37 different women in 2001 alone. In 2014, he photographed himself with a dead bear that he had initially planned to eat and then dumped in Central Park to the consternation of New York City authorities, part of what was apparently a lifelong love of screwing around with animal carcasses. He allegedly lived with an emu that routinely menaced his wife, Curb Your Enthusiasm star Cheryl Hinds. This is the kind of bizarre and inexplicable obsession with keeping exotic animals that he shared with people like former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
His strangeness went far beyond cruelty to animals. In the 2000s, he became one of the leading proponents of the destructive, evidence-free idea that childhood vaccines cause autism. He believes that mass shootings are caused by antidepressants like Zoloft. Unsurprisingly, during the pandemic, he joined the Alex Berenson “no worse than the flu” brigade and “wrote” books like The Wuhan Coverup. A lot of conservatives have convinced themselves that some excesses in blue state Covid policies mean that Americans think that we basically should never have taken any precautions at all about the virus, which would have led to millions more deaths.
That’s the Trump campaign’s new secret weapon—a credulous, off-his-rocker rich guy with fringe beliefs and a bigger treasure trove of weird statements and comments than even vice-presidential candidate Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH). By endorsing Trump, RFK. Jr. not only catapulted himself into the lead in the race for Most Embarrassing Kennedy, but he also sold out the only thing he has ever seemed to genuinely and consistently care about, which is the environment. Trump is, after all, the guy who appointed the three Supreme Court ideologues who just gutted the administrative state and made it impossible for the Environmental Protection Agency to, you know, protect the environment.
Trump backers are patting themselves on the back for this strategic coup when they really should be thinking about how Kennedy reinforces all the most damaging perceptions of the Trump-Vance ticket. While he might add roughly half a point to Trump’s polling today, as Nate Silver suggests, that doesn’t factor in what will happen when Kennedy opens his mouth in front of people who are suddenly paying attention to him as a MAGA media surrogate. Now he’s just another exotic animal in Donald Trump’s menagerie of opportunists who will ultimately be humiliated and discarded, just like everyone else who has ever gotten within a foot of the 45th president.
Good luck with all that.
David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It’s Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.