Latching onto RFK Jr. is Donald Trump’s way of edging back into the news cycle after weeks of being sidelined by the Democrats. Never mind that Kennedy is a fringe player whose polls cratered before he allegedly traded his endorsement for a Cabinet post should Trump win.
Now Trump has put him on his transition team “to help pick the people who will be running the government,” Kennedy said in an interview posted on X. He joins another presidential wannabe, former Democrat Tulsi Gabbard, as honorary co-chairs.
These odd bedfellows go back to at least 2016 when, according to RFK Jr., Trump promised to create a “vaccine commission” to study the safety and efficacy of vaccines and appoint him as the chair. This was long before COVID-19 when the animating concern was the link between childhood vaccines and autism, which has since been debunked while remaining core to anti-vaxxers like Kennedy.
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At the Friday rally celebrating RFK Jr.’s endorsement, the Kennedy sibling (he’s one of 11) led the crowd in a MAGA-style chant to “Make America Healthy Again” while Trump, a lover of fast food, looked on at what he’d created. Trump’s right-wing populism doesn’t align with Kennedy’s left-wing suspicion of corporate power, but Trump is so enamored of his new sycophant’s storied name and faux celebrity that there is talk of putting him on the campaign plane for joint appearances.
What could go wrong? “Kennedy will say something that is totally nutty, and Trump will be asked whether he agrees with it,” says Jack Pitney, a professor of American politics at Claremont McKenna College. “He could also be a tremendous liability. What he says about vaccines are not exaggerations, they’re flat-out lies.”
Relying on 70-year-old Kennedy to add youth and vigor to the GOP ticket seems fanciful, but Democratic pollster Celinda Lake finds that non-college Blacks and Latinos, particularly men, are voting their down-scale class rather than voting on race. That opens the door for Trump, but there’s no evidence RFK Jr adds to that downscale allure.
“Kennedy voters hate Trump,” Lake told the Daily Beast. Kamala Harris has already picked up half of his support. Endorsing Trump is “a fundamental violation of RFK Jr’s brand” to align with a billionaire right-wing populist. Voters perceive Kennedy as a populist on economic issues, taking on toxic polluters as an environmental lawyer in the tradition of JFK, his uncle, who as president stood up to “a tiny handful of steel executives whose pursuit of private power and profit exceeds their sense of public responsibility.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr speaks at Bitcoin 2024 in Nashville, Tennessee, U.S. July 26, 2024.
Kevin Wurm/File Photo/ReutersTrump and Kennedy are aligned on Ukraine, with Trump opposing more unconditional aid to Ukraine and RFK Jr. parroting Russian talking points about Putin wanting to “de-Nazify” Ukraine.
On vaccines, RFK Jr. is more openly anti-vaccine than Trump, having built a movement that predates COVID and that questions routine vaccinations for children. Trump put his presidential clout and money behind rapid development of the COVID vaccine, but many times in recent months, he has said he would cut off money to schools with vaccine mandates.
They are far apart on environmental issues, and earlier this year Trump posted on social media that RFK Jr. and his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, would be “indicted any day now, probably for Environmental Fraud.” Trump called him “the most Radical Liberal Candidate in the race, by far! He’s a big fan of the Green New Scam, and other economy killing disasters.”
There are big policy differences between Trump and RFK Jr., but when it comes to personality and character, they align well. “They are both prolific liars who appeal to kooks,” says Pitney, the professor of American politics. “He was crashing in the polls, and as long as Biden was in the race, he was a proxy for none of the above. Low-information voters would say, ‘I’m for him,’ but the numbers are so small, they’re almost negligible.”
Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at the Forum River Center in Rome, Georgia, U.S. March 9, 2024.
Alyssa Pointer/File Photo/Reuters“Not many Democrats will be fooled into voting for him,” says Elaine Kamarck with the Brookings Institution’s governing program. “He really had no place to go. These are two desperate people. Trump is going after anything that can get him momentum, and Kennedy is going nowhere fast.
“The swing states are not exactly hotbeds of health movements, that might go over well in California,” she adds. “He’s become a sideshow. I’m glad he fizzled.”
We politely refer to it as a “transactional” deal where RFK Jr.’s endorsement is implicit collateral for a Cabinet post, specifically HHS (Health and Human Services) should Trump win the election. “The whole business of him wanting a Cabinet job—my God, that’s illegal,” Kamarck exclaims, recalling that Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich went to jail for trying to sell a Senate seat.
“Sometimes transactional is highly illegal, and that’s what we could be dealing with here,” she says. Trump commuted Blagojevich’s sentence after he served eight years.
It’s hard to see what’s in it for Trump to have a Kennedy by his side other than the psychic victory of having won over one of the power names of his generation. There’s little that could go right and a lot that can go wrong when two self-centered narcissists are vying for attention on a crowded campaign trail.
