The past decade has been a remarkable demonstration of the extent to which celebrity and money can provide a platform for unfounded, dangerous theories about the world. These have always been with us, of course, but the advent of the internet or social media or both has allowed those theories to find pockets of support that snowball into movements when given just a little bit of push from fortune or fame.
On Friday afternoon, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — scion of the most famous name in American politics — withdrew his independent bid for the presidency and offered his support (and presumably votes) to Donald Trump. While doing so, having attracted a substantial number of cameras and reporters for one of only a handful of times during his campaign, he rained bizarre claims and false assertions down upon them, reinforcing indirectly the extent to which even the limited success of his campaign was rooted in his last name rather than his commitment to reality.
We will leave the fact-checking to the fact-checkers, in part because this generally thankless task has rarely been more so. In part, too, because a lot of what Kennedy said has been debunked before, including by this newspaper. There is one slight misrepresentation that’s already sneaked into this story, though, that should be addressed: Kennedy sort of withdrew and sort of endorsed Trump, but also told blue-state voters to vote for him and maybe he had some path to the presidency? It didn’t make sense, but that, at least, was in keeping with the rest of the speech.
There was one point Kennedy made, however, that deserves elevation. It was that he was willing to (sort of) offer his support to Trump because he believed that Trump was committed to Kennedy’s pet causes and that the Republican would, if elected, uphold his commitments to work with Kennedy to address them.
“President Trump has told me that he wants this” — fixing “chronic disease” primarily by getting kids to eat better, apparently — “to be his legacy,” Kennedy said. “I’m choosing to believe at this time he will follow through.”
There’s some self-awareness there, certainly; someone with full confidence in the reliability of someone else doesn’t couch that confidence with a tacit “we’ll see.” But even that limited awarding of trust in Donald Trump seems very obviously to be misplaced.
First of all, there’s the fact that Donald Trump has never once mentioned “chronic disease” in this context. To believe that Trump is concerned about the issue is one thing. To take at anything close to face value that Trump intends for “chronic disease” to be the defining characteristic of Trump’s time in the White House requires an unbelievable level of credulousness.
Granted, this is Robert Kennedy, whose embrace of other false claims suggests a general willingness to overlook the available evidence in favor of what he wants to see. But this is overlooking a U.S.-Mexico-border-height wall to view an entirely different Donald Trump.
Second, there’s little reason to grant Trump a generous presumption of reliability in general. Last month, video leaked showing Kennedy accepting a call from Trump. Kennedy is shown with Trump on speakerphone, allowing viewers to hear both sides of the conversation. It’s clear that Trump is angling for the outcome (mostly) manifested Friday, doing so by telling Kennedy very obviously what he wants Kennedy to hear. Reporters who have spoken with Trump on the phone (like myself) will be familiar with this iteration of Trump, alternately wheedling and cajoling.
Kennedy seems to have been convinced.
The sort-of-former-candidate claimed that he was backing Trump because of “free speech, the war in Ukraine and the war on our children.” Kennedy spent some time on that second point, rehashing a remarkably Russia-sympathetic view of the conflict, before offering another example of his faith in the former president’s forthrightness.
“President Trump says that he will reopen negotiations with President Putin and end the war overnight as soon as he becomes president,” Kennedy told reporters. “This alone would justify my support for his campaign.”
There’s not really much to say to that. If you think that Trump will actually be able to “end the war overnight” simply through sheer force of will, even accepting that this outcome would mean capitulation to Russia, you’re giving Donald Trump an awful lot of unearned credit. The pattern of Trump’s politics from the outset has been to making sweeping promises, particularly when he’s not in a position to act upon them. Should those promises (almost invariably) fall short, they are redefined and reshaped until Trump can claim victory. It doesn’t take much observation of the world to understand how this has worked but, again, Kennedy’s public profile is not that of someone who adjusts his position in the face of countervailing evidence.
There’s an existing question of the extent to which Kennedy’s endorsement of Trump actually helps the former president. Just on paper, it’s likely that it won’t do much; he was polling in the low single digits, and third-party voters are often people only loosely committed to casting a ballot in the first place.
But there’s another angle here worth considering. Donald Trump is now, to at least some extent, accountable for what Kennedy says and does. Voters who like Trump but are wary of a senior administration official who has a background of opposing vaccines might also be less eager to vote.
One more problem: If Kennedy starts to, say, haul roadkill around New York state, Trump will be asked to weigh in on his most prominent supporter’s actions. There may come moments in which Trump will be tempted to disavow Kennedy, as he has his allies who worked on Project 2025. Will he refrain from doing so? And if he doesn’t, will Kennedy realize that — as he seems to suspect could happen and as many might predict will happen — he’s been played?