And it isn’t Joe Biden
For many months former president Donald Trump’s henchmen pushed the candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as an agent of chaos and a boon to Trump’s latest bid for the presidency. Salon’s Amanda Marcotte presciently called out their strategy in a piece last May called “Of course Steve Bannon and Alex Jones love RFK Jr. — he’s a great weapon for their war on reality.” At that time Kennedy was running in the Democratic primary and it was easy to dismiss the right wing “support” from the likes of Bannon and Jones as well as former Trump admirer and QANON adherent Michael Flynn, Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk and Trump henchman Roger Stone as partisan mischief. But it was more than that. They touted Kennedy as a perfect Trump running mate — a “dream ticket” ostensibly to attract low information, liberal anti-vaxxers and environmentalists to the GOP.
Unfortunately for the Trumpers, their tactics appear to have backfired.
Bannon worked this idea hard, suggesting that a Trump Kennedy ticket would win in a landslide. In one of his podcasts last spring he told his audience that when MAGA crowds heard him say that Kennedy would be an excellent choice for Trump’s V.P., he would get a standing ovation. (Kennedy denies that they ever spoke about it.)
In the beginning, Trump was very complimentary, calling Kennedy a “very smart guy, and a good guy. He’s a common-sense guy, and so am I. So, whether you’re conservative or liberal, common sense is common sense.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, while he was still in the primary, said that he would appoint the conspiracy theorist, anti-vaxxer to run the FDA or the CDC. Even Tucker Carlson declared that Kennedy was not an extremist, extolling his character as “deeply insightful and above all honest.” The House Republicans called him to testify about censorship (because twitter had banned him for spewing dangerous vaccine disinformation.) They all just loved the guy.
When Kennedy dropped out of the Democratic primary to run as an independent, the assumption among the political pundits was that this was yet another disaster for the Biden campaign. He had been garnering around 15 to 20% in the primary polls and the glittering Kennedy name was considered a massive draw among Democratic voters. If he could hold that 15% in a general election Trump would win. Maybe that bizarre Trump-Kennedy ticket wasn’t going to happen but Bannon looked like a hero in that moment for drawing Kennedy into the race anyway.
But then a funny thing happened. Right after he announced his independent bid , NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist , conducted a poll that found Biden would beat Trump in by 49 to 46%, but when Kennedy entered the mix, Biden’s lead over Trump jumped to 7 points. (Biden lost 5 points, but Trump lost 10.) It turns out that the “common sense guy” who pushes a raft of conspiracy theories is more appealing to the right than the left. Who could have guessed?
In case you’re wondering, here’s a very small sample of his cracked beliefs. Setting aside his decades-long disinformation campaign against vaccines, he has also said that mass shootings are caused by antidepressents and that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was a neocon and CIA operation. He promises to seal the border permanently and thinks that kids are swimming through a soup of toxic chemicals that cause them to become transgender. And he thinks 5G cell towers are going to control our behavior and Bill Gates want to genetically modify humanity. That’s just for starters. This “common sense guy” is a full fledged conspiracy freak. It stands to reason that he would be popular among Republicans. They “do their own research” too.
That polling has not changed in the intervening months. A recent NBC poll showed that Trump leads Biden by two points but with Kennedy in the race, Biden leads by the same number. Trump’s favorite pollster, John McLaughlin, showed an even more alarming result among Independents in its new survey. In the head to head, Indies preferred Biden by 4. But with Kennedy on the ballot, it’s Biden 29%, Kennedy 23% and Trump 22%. All of this explains why Donald Trump has suddenly gone on the offensive against Kennedy in a big way.
He first tried to spin this on a Truth Social video by saying that Kennedy has “got some nice things about him” and “I happen to like him”, but he’s really “more in line with Democrats” and he believes that he “will do very well” and take a lot of votes from Biden. He offered that if he were a Democrat he would vote for him. That’s what passes for subtlety from Donald Trump.
But those numbers must be getting worse because now he’s taken off the gloves and poor junior isn’t a nice guy after all. In one of his most “up-is-down” rants ever, Trump filmed another Truth Social video claiming that RFK Jr is a “Democratic plant” and a “Radical Left Liberal who’s been put in place in order to help Crooked Joe Biden, the Worst President in the History of the United States, get Re-Elected.” As we’ve seen, if he’s a plant he’s a Republican plant, coaxed into the race by Steve Bannon and Roger Stone. And Trump actually had the audacity to issue one of the most ridiculous whoppers ever. He said that Kennedy isn’t a real anti-vaxxer:
You think he’s an anti-vaxxer, he’s not really an anti-vaxxer. That’s only his political moment. He said the other night he’s okay with a vaccine. RFK’s views on vaccines are fake, as is everything else about his candidacy.
Say what you will about RFK Jr, but he is the nation’s foremost anti-vaxxer and has been for many years. If that’s your jam, he’s the real deal. Trump, on the other hand, is the guy who is yearning to take credit for the COVID vaccines for green-lighting the sped up development, but he can’t because he gets booed by his cult followers. He’s the fake anti-vaxxer.
Over the weekend Trump sounded uncharacteristically desperate at the NRA convention on Saturday slamming Kennedy again, saying that he calls the NRA a terrorist group and comparing him to a fly that was driving him crazy.
There’s no way of knowing if Kennedy will get on the ballot in all the swing states or if people will actually vote for him or one of the other third party candidates in November. It would be better not to have them running when the stakes are so high. But it would be poetic justice if Steve Bannon putting an anti-vax conspiracy theorist into the mix proved to be Trump’s undoing. Live by the rat-f***k, die by the rat-f***k.
Salon