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This week, an exclusive look at the connections between Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and the MAGA-verse.
RFK’S TRUMP PROBLEM
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Last Saturday, independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. appeared at an event that felt entirely on-brand for the anti-vaccine champion: a so-called “medical freedom conference” near Buffalo, New York.
But the group that hosted Kennedy isn’t just skeptical of vaccines. It’s also skeptical of the fact that Joe Biden won the 2020 election.
That group, Constitutional Coalition of New York State, has founders who not only have ties to Donald Trump but are also connected to the stop-the-steal movement through their activist network, which includes groups that had a presence at the Capitol on Jan. 6.
It’s yet another instance of Kennedy—who is mounting one of the most well-funded third-party presidential threats in decades—serving as a peculiar bridge between his own anti-establishment movement and Trump’s.
Kennedy was ostensibly there as an invited guest to help raise money for the group, which claimed that he was not engaging in a presidential campaign event and was merely helping to educate attendees on “First Amendment rights.”
Previously, the CCNYS posted calls to “Help The Trump Team!” on its Facebook page and its founders have links to two far-right groups whose members participated in the Jan. 6 riot and some key events leading up to it.
The Marching Patriots and Rolling Patriots—one protesting on foot, the other in automobile motorcades—got their start during the pandemic protesting lockdowns, and some of their members traveled to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Those groups got involved with the CCNYS founders at the same COVID protests where a local militia sometimes provided security.
Beyond that, CCNYS founders Nick and Nancie Orticelli are also affiliated with the Watchmen, a nearby militia who Nick has encouraged his social media followers to join. The Watchmen had several members at the Capitol on Jan. 6, and one member, Pete Harding, is still facing charges for violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds.
Nancie Orticelli has also hosted the Watchmen’s founder, Charles Pellien, on her weekly radio show on several occasions.
In a phone interview with The Daily Beast, Nancie Orticelli said that she and her husband are not members of the Watchmen, but they have friends who belonged to the group, which she said is now defunct.
“They didn’t go against anybody, they were a defensive group,” she said, recounting how if any of her group’s members “felt unsafe” during anti-lockdown protests during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Watchmen would be on scene to provide security.
She also denied ever having been a member of the Marching or Rolling Patriots, but the Investigative Post, a local investigative outlet, reported she was as of May 2022.
As for her relationship with Kennedy, Orticelli insisted she had never met him in person, despite attending a 2019 demonstration with him at the New York State Capitol in Albany.
“I didn’t meet him, never spoke to him, never had any conversation with him before or since. You just deal with the campaign team,” she told The Daily Beast, adding she remains a Trump supporter and encourages people to vote for the former president.
Kennedy, she said, was simply at the conference to narrowly address issues she agrees with him on, from the debunked conspiracy theory that vaccines cause autism to censorship of anti-vaccine speech on social media platforms.
However, she also said Trump could be more supportive of her cause.
“In fact,” Orticelli said later in the interview after distancing herself from Kennedy, “I wish that Trump and Bobby Kennedy would work together.”
The Kennedy campaign did not return a request for comment.
Kennedy’s appearance at the otherwise obscure conference once again highlights how his anti-establishment and conspiratorial politics mean he often shares space with those in the ultra-MAGA wing of the GOP—and less so the progressive wing of his former party.
Though President Joe Biden and Trump both increasingly regard Kennedy as a potential spoiler who could siphon off votes from around the political spectrum, his continued embrace of the anti-vaccine movement and free speech absolutism seem poised to endear him to Trump voters who are highly animated around those concerns.
From Trump donors filling the coffers of the main Kennedy-aligned PAC to the campaign hiring a GOP operative who called Jan. 6 “Democratic misdirection”—or the Georgia activist who organized Trump’s Atlanta Chick-fil-A visit showing up on the Kennedy team’s payroll—there are many indications of how Kennedy’s insurgent bid has substantial overlap with parts of the MAGAverse.
The CCNYS is one of five extremist groups in the Western New York region identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center, espousing a hard-right and anti-government ideology based around the belief that an illegitimate cabal of leftists is trying to impose a new world order.
Based on Facebook posts reviewed by The Daily Beast, this Trump-loving group was eager to land Kennedy for their event.
Shawn Lembke, the CCNYS vice president, credited Nancie Orticelli as being “the driving force behind [Kennedy’s] decision to come to the area” for the conference.
Orticelli denied having such influence, telling The Daily Beast, “Shawn has been a friend of mine for a long time, and he just thinks very highly of me, and sometimes he likes to give credit where it’s not really due.”
Lembke did not return a request for comment.
Orticelli, who said she and her husband continue to urge their friends to vote for Trump in the fall—including in a March 26 Facebook post on the CCNYS page calling for “people to help the Trump team!”—would not say whether Biden won the 2020 election.
“It’s above my pay grade,” she said.
Orticelli also tweeted in December 2022 that Federal Bureau of Investigation agents came to her home “to ask me about J6.”
“We weren’t there!” she said in the same tweet. “We were at work. I feel like the fbi could’ve easily found that out w/out wasting man power while a LITERAL known white supremacist was getting ready to massacre innocent people in Buffalo a year later.”
Orticelli has been highly defensive of CCNYS in the aftermath of the Tops grocery store mass shooting in 2022.
“Don't keep looking at me and thinking that I'm the racist,” Nancie Orticelli told NPR for a series on local extremism following the shooting. “Let’s go after the real racists. And let's go after government agencies, like the FBI, who knew about this 18-year-old kid, and the schools knew about him. Let's start holding those people accountable for their own red flag laws that they ignored. And let's hold those people accountable, not Nancie from West Seneca.”
In her interview with The Daily Beast, Orticelli said she fully cooperated with the agents and questioned whether the insurrection was all that bad.
“People wanna say that about January 6, that they were all there to stop the process and X, Y, and Z,” she said, referring to the peaceful transfer of power, before expressing skepticism over defendants who have since said in sworn testimony that they stormed the building to fight for Trump.
“That’s a cop-out,” she said. “It’s a plea deal that they all took.”
TRUMP’S RFK PROBLEM
There was a time not long ago when an earnest wish for “Trump and Bobby” to work together was not entirely out of the realm of possibility.
Since Kennedy launched his campaign last year, there had been rumors of a Trump-Kennedy ticket, with the ex-Democrat even going so far as to say he was approached by Trump “emissaries” to be his running mate. (Trump co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita called Kennedy a “leftie loonie” in response.)
That MAGA dalliance with Kennedy could be coming back to bite the Trump campaign, some Republicans close to the former president worry.
“They can only blame themselves,” a Trump-aligned strategist told The Daily Beast, requesting anonymity to speak candidly about private conversations about the risk Kennedy poses, “because they cozied up to him and thought it was funny.”
Unlike the Democrats, who started hitting Kennedy with a variety of ads over two months ago, there are no plans for paid attacks against Kennedy from the GOP side any time soon, according to Republicans close to the Trump campaign and outside organizations who spoke to The Daily Beast.
Instead, Trumpworld is taking a much more ad hoc approach, with groups like the MAGA Inc. PAC now hitting Kennedy on a daily basis on its X account. The goal is to remind undecided voters and conservatives intrigued by Kennedy’s anti-vaccine views about the candidate’s other more traditionally Democratic and left-wing positions.
Ideally, two Republicans familiar with discussions in Trumpworld said, they won’t have to deal with the prospect of Kennedy qualifying for any debates with Trump and Biden.
“We’re not letting up,” a Trump operative told The Daily Beast, describing the Trump campaign and broader GOP’s response to Kennedy as lagging behind Democrats.
“It’s more sort of snapping fingers—like, wake up, he’s not a conservative and he’s spent decades as a liberal in good standing,” the operative said, also requesting anonymity to speak candidly on Kennedy.
Kennedy’s anti-vaccine appeal is the biggest concern around Trumpworld, both Republicans said. There has also been some quiet alarm over more recent battleground state polling showing Biden leading in some surveys where Kennedy and other third-party candidates were included.
A late-April NBC News poll found Kennedy cut into Trump’s support more than Biden’s, though the president’s 2-point national lead in a poll that also included Green Party candidate Jill Stein and left-wing independent Cornel West was within the 3.1-point margin of error.
Polling earlier in the cycle “was showing it was just kind of hurting Biden,” the Trump-aligned strategist said. “Everybody thought that’s what the polling showed. Now, there was that NBC poll, and there’s been a couple other polls, and I’m guessing the Trump world's frantic freakout about RFK over the last few weeks is due to the fact that their internals are showing that he’s peeling away some Trump supporters in key states.”
The Trump campaign did not return a request for comment, and the 2024 regime has kept a lid on any leaks about internal numbers.
However, the fact that they can’t afford to spend against Kennedy is a sign of a broader problem, the strategist argued.
“You’re getting outspent 4-to-1 as it is right now,” the strategist said. “You need all the money. You have to be able to target those persuadable voters and say, OK, how do we identify what are their top issues? What message do they need to hear over and over again between now and the election so we can move them from the undecided bucket or the soft-Trump bucket to the hardcore Trump bucket, where they’re actually voting for him?”
For now, the Trump campaign hasn’t settled on a main message to knock Kennedy down a peg in the swing states where he could pose a threat.
“The biggest threat he poses, in my opinion, is to the DeSantis voter type who is still pissed off at Trump over the way he fileted DeSantis,” the strategist said. “They’re probably voters who don’t like COVID vaccines and don’t like shutdowns. Therefore, they like RFK because they see he’s better on the issue than Trump.”
STORM IN THE SUNSHINE STATE
The six-week abortion ban signed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis took effect on Wednesday, and Democrats are ready to kick their voter outreach and pro-abortion rights messaging into high gear.
Democrat Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, running against Republican Sen. Rick Scott, is putting the ban at the center of her campaign. The former congresswoman is on a “Florida Freedom Tour” focused on reproductive rights, and she released a Spanish-language ad on abortion Monday morning.
“On the day that Florida’s abortion ban went into effect and women had less rights in Florida than we have had in over 50 years, Rick Scott pledged to support any anti-abortion bill that came before him,” the candidate told The Daily Beast in a text message.
Scott, whose campaign did not return a request for comment, has said he would have signed the bill into law if he were governor, but he’s also said his preference for an abortion ban is after 15 weeks of pregnancy. (The new Florida law allows for exceptions for rape, incest and human trafficking, but only until 15 weeks.)
Mucarsel-Powell also hit her opponent by framing the new law as part of a creep toward authoritarianism, flipping the way Scott has tried to cast himself as a defender of freedom in appealing to voters who fled socialism in Cuba and Venezuela before arriving in Florida.
A first-generation immigrant from Ecuador, Mucarsel-Powell was the first South American-born member elected to Congress.
CAMPAIGN LIT
Noem doubt about it. Gov. Kristi Noem’s jaw-dropping recounting of the time she killed her own dog tanked any chances she had at being Trump’s VP, Jake Lahut and Reese Gorman report.
2024chan campaign. A paid staffer for Montana GOP Senate candidate Tim Sheehy had social media accounts filled with racist and far-right fringe content, Riley Rogerson scoops.
Stormy lawyerin’. Trump Organization accountant Allen Weisselberg may have had a different role than previously known in the hush money drama, Roger Sollenberger scoops.
Housebroken. Even the toughest GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill were aghast over the Noem dog-killing story, Riley reports.
