In early August, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., then an Independent candidate for President, posted a video of himself, on X, telling a story to Roseanne Barr about the time he picked up a dead bear on the road about ten years ago. Planning on skinning it and putting it in the refrigerator, he said, he placed it in the trunk of his car and kept it there during a dinner at Peter Luger Steak House, in Brooklyn. Afterward, he had to go to the airport, so he decided to take a detour to Manhattan’s Central Park to deposit the carcass alongside an old bicycle. The video only made sense as an attempt by Kennedy to get ahead of my Profile of him, which was scheduled to run the following day, and which included an admittedly less detailed version of Kennedy’s ursine antics.
At the time, Vice-President Kamala Harris had officially secured the Democratic Presidential nomination, and polls were beginning to show that support for Kennedy, which, earlier in the summer, had hovered around ten per cent, was slipping into the single digits. Kennedy had originally positioned himself as an alternative to two historically disliked candidates, Joe Biden and Donald Trump, and he spoke of breaking through the issues that polarized Americans—immigration, abortion, trans rights—to focus on the “existential” threats such as the country’s chronic-disease crisis. But what had drawn him into electoral politics in the first place was his role as a prominent vaccine skeptic. For more than a decade, he has promoted the belief that common childhood vaccines can cause autism and other developmental disabilities. More recently, he had directed his ire toward various media outlets and social-media platforms, alleging that they were “censoring” him after one of his accounts and the accounts of his anti-vaccine organization were deactivated for spreading misinformation. (His Instagram account was reinstated after he announced his candidacy.)
This past Friday, Kennedy, wearing a dark suit and a skinny tie, walked to a podium wedged between two American flags and announced that he was suspending his campaign. “In an honest system, I believe I would have won the election,” he said. Instead, he had decided to “throw my support to President Trump.” He would be removing his name from the ballots in ten states so as not to harm Trump’s chances, though his name would remain on the ballots elsewhere. In return, Kennedy said, Trump “has asked to enlist me in his Administration.” A few hours later, he joined Trump at an Arizona rally, walking onto a red-carpeted stage lit with sparklers, where Trump had told the crowd that in a second Trump Administration Kennedy would be working on a panel investigating “the decades-long increase in chronic-health problems, including autoimmune disorders, autism, obesity, infertility, and many more.” Trump would also, he said, release “all of the remaining documents pertaining to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.”
Kennedy originally entered the race in April of 2023 as a Democrat, but, after it became clear he wouldn’t perform well in the primary, he launched an Independent bid, instead, which required him to gather signatures for petitions to get his name on the ballot in each state. That proved to be an expensive mission, particularly given that the campaign faced multiple legal challenges filed by Democratic groups. A few months ago, the Kennedy campaign’s financial filings showed an operation struggling with debt.
Days after his bear reveal, Kennedy was in court in New York State, dealing with a challenge to his residency that would endanger his place on the state’s ballot. Kennedy, who moved to California a decade ago, when he married his third wife, the actor Cheryl Hines, had claimed that he maintained a New York State residence—a room he rented in a friend’s home. Kennedy had lived in New York for years, and his father was a senator from the state, so his reasons for claiming it as his official home were perhaps nostalgic. But there may also have been a more practical consideration: the Twelfth Amendment prohibits a President and Vice-President from the same state to receive that state’s electoral votes. Nicole Shanahan, Kennedy’s billionaire running mate and the ex-wife of the Google co-founder Sergey Brin, lives in California. The judge ruled against Kennedy, calling it “a ‘sham’ address that he assumed for the purpose of maintaining his voter registration and furthering his own political aspirations in this State.”
As the residency case unfolded, the Washington Post reported that Kennedy’s team had made overtures to the Harris campaign to discuss the possibility of his serving as a member of her Cabinet. According to the article, the Hollywood mogul Ari Emanuel and the director Rob Reiner both made entreaties to Democrats on Kennedy’s behalf, though nothing ever came of their efforts. (Emanuel is the agent of Hines’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm” co-star Larry David, and Hines once worked as a personal assistant to Reiner.) Kennedy’s team had already entertained talks with the Trump campaign about a similar deal during the week of the Republican National Convention, in July—despite the fact that Kennedy had told one person in a text message that Trump is “a terrible human being. The worse president ever and barely human. He is probably a sociopath.”
Some in Kennedy’s base were rattled by the news that he had sought out a meeting with Harris. The Substack blogger Jessica Reed Kraus, who generally writes favorably about Trump and Kennedy, bemoaned the move in a post titled “WTF Is Bobby Thinking?” But the idea that Kennedy could endorse Trump was met with considerably less trepidation. Speaking this week on a video podcast, Shanahan, who appeared to be sitting in a gamer’s swivel chair against a background of blue-laser lights, said that there were “two options that we’re looking at, and one is staying in, forming that new party, but we run the risk of a Kamala Harris and Walz Presidency because we draw votes from Trump. . . . Or we walk away right now and join forces with Donald Trump.” Kraus’s popular Instagram feed teemed with anticipatory excitement at the news, though not every Kennedy supporter was so chuffed; NBC’s Brandy Zadrozny reported that, during a Kennedy-volunteer meeting on Zoom, there was discussion about sending a “ ‘money bomb’ to the campaign to try and convince him to stay in the race.”
Hines was against the Trump endorsement, a position she had made clear in at least one joint appearance with Kennedy. “You had been asked whether you would accept a position on the ticket if Trump asked you and I think your response was ‘Um, that would be devastating to my marriage,’ ” TMZ’s Harvey Levin said to Kennedy, in an interview with him and Hines, in February. Kennedy laughed and shifted in his seat. Hines chimed in: “I think Bobby knows me very well.” On Friday, after his campaign-suspension announcement, Kennedy reposted a statement on X from Hines, who had thanked her husband’s campaign supporters and conspicuously avoided any mention of Trump. “I am so grateful to my amazing wife Cheryl for her unconditional love, as I made a political decision with which she is very uncomfortable,” Kennedy wrote. Five of Kennedy’s siblings signed a joint statement calling the endorsement “a sad ending to a sad story.”
Speaking on Fox Business, on Wednesday, Kennedy’s former campaign manager, Dennis Kucinich, argued that Kennedy might help Trump on the margins in certain key swing states. “What I saw happening at the very beginning of Kennedy’s campaign was that the people who were attracted to his campaign seemed to be coming from the Trump Republican camp,” he said. On Thursday, Kennedy moved to withdraw his name from the ballot in Arizona, one such swing state, and soon did the same in Pennsylvania. But, according to an A.P. report, officials in Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin have said that he will likely remain on the ballot in November.
Kennedy’s mercenary quest to extract value from his withdrawal has been a fascinating subplot in this Presidential race, particularly considering his slide in the polls, which has only undercut his negotiating power. Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, his campaign manager and daughter-in-law, told me that the campaign was particularly interested in a Health and Human Services Cabinet appointment, given Kennedy’s prominent vaccine skepticism. It’s perhaps unwise for Kennedy to trust Trump to follow through on a quid pro quo, however. In January, 2017, Kennedy met with Trump, who was then President-elect, in Trump Tower, and, after the sit-down, told reporters that Trump had asked him to chair a commission on vaccine safety. The Trump campaign soon told the press that no such promise had been made.
This past week, Trump played coy, as rumors about the Kennedy endorsement swirled, seeming to want to skirt the topic of a Cabinet post. On Tuesday, he told CNN that he had known Kennedy for years and that he would “love that endorsement.” Trump said he “probably would” consider Kennedy for a role in his Administration if he pulled out of the race and backed him. At a Thursday press gaggle, Trump called Kennedy “very smart, a little bit different,” but said that he hadn’t spoken to him in recent days (perhaps true, though he and Kennedy had a recent meeting in Florida, according to Kennedy). An endorsement “would be a great honor for me,” Trump said. He gave a similar line on Fox News that same day: “I would be honored by it. He really has his heart in the right place.”
Kennedy, for his part, seemed self-conscious about the decent likelihood of a Trump betrayal. If Trump “honors his word,” Kennedy said at one point during his press conference, Kennedy would be able to do important work. “I’m choosing to believe that this time he will follow through.” ♦
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Publish date : 2024-08-24 09:47:00
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