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Bobby’s kid: the new champion of Trump’s vision of Republicanism

Despite Robert F Kennedy jnr withdrawing from the presidential race, his political career is not over yet as he hints at a future official role in Trump’s administration

Robert F Kennedy jnr has made peace with his previous assertions that Trump was a 'terrible president' and a 'threat to democracy'. Photograph: David Blakeman/EPA
Robert F Kennedy jnr has made peace with his previous assertions that Trump was a 'terrible president' and a 'threat to democracy'. Photograph: David Blakeman/EPA
Keith Duggan's picture
Keith Duggan Washington Correspondent
Thu Aug 29 2024 - 06:00

One of the abiding totems of Joe Biden’s four years in the White House is his treasured bust of Robert Francis Kennedy, which takes pride of place in the Oval Office.

Now, after what has been a disorienting and personally painful few months for the president, one of the inadvertent consequences of his decision to relinquish his Democratic nomination is that it hastened the demise of the maverick independent campaign run by Kennedy’s son, RFK jnr, bringing about the extraordinary sight on Friday of a Kennedy heir aligning himself with Donald Trump’s Republican Party.

Rumour of Kennedy’s official defection to the Republicans grew louder as last week’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago reached a crescendo and were confirmed as fact just a day after Kamala Harris’s exultant confirmation speech.

He [Trump] he is an affront to everything our father and uncle stood for

—  Kerry Kennedy, Robert F Kennedy jnr's sister

For Democrats of a certain vintage, it was a saddening sight: Bobby’s kid on stage and the new champion of Trump’s vision of Republicanism. And it was a devastating blow to his siblings and relatives, who have separated their enduring personal love for Kennedy from their collective abhorrence at where he now resides in the political spectrum.

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“Were he alive today, the real Robert Kennedy would have detested almost everything Donald Trump represents. His lying, racism, hatred, fascist sympathies, deliberate misinformation about vaccines. I’m frankly outraged and disgusted with Bobby’s, my brother’s embrace of Donald Trump,” Kerry Kennedy, the candidate’s sister, said on Tuesday.

“This is a campaign about our country and our world, and the stakes this November couldn’t be higher which is exactly why my entire family, with the exception of Bobby, will be fighting so hard to elect Kamala Harris and Coach Walz who have been champions of our values for years. Donald Trump is the polar opposite,” she said.

“He is a threat to our most basic freedoms that are core to who we are as Americans: the right of women to control their bodies, to live in communities safe from gun violence, to love who you love. He said he’d be a dictator on day one and is willing to suspend the constitution to take revenge against those who do not support him. And he is pledging to appeal the Affordable Care Act and cut social security and Medicare leaving millions without the programmes. So, he is an affront to everything our father and uncle stood for.”

RFK jnr has argued over the course of his campaign that the Democratic Party itself has also become an affront to the values his father and uncle represented. Kennedy has accused the Democrats of conducting a smear campaign against his candidacy and blocking his pathway to ballot papers.

But even when Kennedy was drawing phenomenal numbers as an independent, at one stage polling at 10 per cent, opinions were divided as to whether he would pull more votes from Trump or Joe Biden.

Within hours of Biden exiting the election race, it became clear that the president had been the thumb in the damn blocking a surge of Democratic energy and zeal and optimism.

Kamala Harris was transformed into a candidate of hope and optimism through formidable organisation but without saying or doing much of anything. Meanwhile Kennedy, whose campaigning had slowed over the summer, saw his once-impressive polling numbers dwindle to a mere afterthought.

Despite choosing billionaire Nicole Shanahan as his running mate, Kennedy’s campaign funds had dwindled to less than $4 million (€3.6 million) by the end of July. Despite furious petitioning, he had attained certified ballot access in just 22 states.

Apart from Trump, he was the clearest victim in the revived Democrat campaign over the past month. But that doesn’t mean he sees himself as finished.

In Kennedy’s first interview this week, with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, he hinted at a future official role in Trump’s administration. “I’ve been asked to go on the transition team, you know, and to help pick the people who will be running the government,” he said.

The development will cause alarm among the health and science community given that it means a pronounced vaccine sceptic might be among those choosing future directors for disease control and at the national institutes of health.

So, Kennedy has made peace with his previous assertions that Trump was a “terrible president” and a “threat to democracy” and chosen to highlight their common values in a bid to prolong what is his last chance to follow his father into a government administration.

A trait RFK jnr shares with Trump is a dizzying capacity for generating bizarre headlines. His endorsement of the Republican candidate has overshadowed a separate story in which a Louisiana district court found that Kennedy jnr was entitled to sue the Biden administration for allegedly censoring social media posts made on behalf of the Children’s Health Defence charity, an organisation which challenges the safety of vaccines.

Separately, environmentalists at the Centre for Biological Diversity Fund have called for an inquiry into a scarcely believable story which resurfaced on Tuesday in which his daughter Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy, in a 2012 interview, recalled a day in the 1990s when her father used a chainsaw to decapitate a washed-up whale and strapped its head to the roof of the family minivan for the five-hour drive back from Hyannis Port to New York.

And it’s not even a month since Kennedy, in a pre-emptive revelation, explained that he had dumped a dead bear cub’s carcass in Central Park as a prank whose origins are simply too convoluted to retell.

These are eccentricities that might, in normal circumstances, convince even Trump to shy away. But it was clear in Nevada on Friday that the New York businessman was pleased and perhaps slightly dazzled to have an actual Kennedy on stage with him, all the more so since he has scarcely been able to disguise his disappointment in his running mate, JD Vance.

With all due respect to Hulk Hogan, keeping company with a Kennedy, even one who is now regarded as the black sheep of his family, is the closest thing to celebrity Trump has encountered for a while.

There is no question that the surname still holds a powerful allure for some American voters

In the days since, even as the Harris campaign moved quickly to dismiss the suggestion that the Kennedy vote could tip the scales towards Republicanism in the key battleground states, the counterview is that Trump has acquired a useful and potentially disruptive ally as a turbulent, historic campaign reaches its apotheosis.

Because Kennedy’s campaign was such an off-radar phenomenon, there remains a degree of unknowability about where his loyalists will lean when the time to vote comes. Having endorsed Trump, RFK jnr announced he would remove his name from the ballots in the swing states – although election officials in Wisconsin and Michigan quickly announced that he will be unable to remove himself from ballots there.

“Millions upon millions of Americans feel totally disenfranchised by a system seemingly rigged to benefit the elites,” warned Douglas MacKinnon, who worked as a writer in the Reagan and Bush administrations, in an opinion piece published in The Hill this week.

“For a multitude of reasons, Kennedy may be the best person to grab their attention and convince a number to either cast their vote for Trump or switch their vote from Harris,” he wrote.

“Even a 1 per cent swing in Trump’s favour could make all the difference in states such as Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and North Carolina. By attacking Kennedy, Biden-Harris, the Democratic power brokers and much of the mainstream media foolishly awakened a sleeping giant – one who, because of his own exceptional body of work and his still-revered family name, has tremendous rapport with and respect from minority communities; blue collar workers; rust belt workers; union workers; parents of children with chronic diseases; communities dealing with polluted lands and waterways; young voters; independent voters; and the disenfranchised.”

It is not a view to which the Democratic mainstream will ever subscribe. The debate over the merits or otherwise of Kennedy’s “exceptional body of work” aside, there is no question that the surname still holds a powerful allure for some American voters.

Privately, his former Democratic Party colleagues will harbour a nagging unease at the possibility that while the latest Kennedy presidential campaign may be over, it isn’t quite finished.