MAGA Takes Aim at RFK Jr.: ‘Radical F—ing Kennedy’They turned on him overnight once they realized he’d be a threat to Trump and not only to Biden.
VACCINE MANDATES ARE A FORM of Nazism. Joe Biden is a threat to democracy. The January 6th prosecutions might be politically motivated. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s beliefs and campaign-trail rhetoric have so much appeal to MAGA voters that Donald Trump and his top political supporters are starting to take steps to ensure that the Democrat-turned-independent presidential candidate doesn’t stray too far into the Republican’s lane. For months, the conventional wisdom has held that Kennedy was more of a problem for Democrats—that he would siphon votes from President Biden. The Biden campaign launched a full-scale assault on Kennedy, defining the scion of Democratic royalty as a “stalking horse” for Trump, filing election complaints against the independent’s campaign, and trying in some states to block him from qualifying for the ballot. In a close election that could be decided at the margins, the candidate who loses fewer votes to Kennedy in six swing states looks likeliest to win the White House. Kennedy’s decision to choose a California billionaire tech progressive, Nicole Shanahan, as a running mate could have tipped the scales a little more to the left, and that delights Trump. “RFK Jr. is the most Radical Left Candidate in the race, by far,” Trump posted on Truth Social, predicting that the Kennedy-Shanahan ticket would take more votes from Biden because Kennedy’s “a Radical Left Democrat, and always will be!!! … I love that he is running!” Trump’s message, which he repeated in conservative media interviews last week, is just one of several prongs in the Republican effort to Make Kennedy Liberal Again:
Last year, Stone said Trump-Kennedy would be a “dream ticket.” Last week, Stone authored a web article titled “RFK Jr.’s VP Pick Ends All Delusions He is Worth Supporting for President.” Trump himself had at times mused about Kennedy as a running mate, according to the New York Times, but never seriously. “Trump-Kennedy: I like the way that looks on a bumper sticker,” Trump had told others who relayed the conversations to The Bulwark. “A year ago, everyone thought Kennedy was a good thing. Not everyone thinks it’s a good idea now,” said one Republican who has advised Trump. This adviser compared Kennedy to democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, whom RFK Jr. has said he admires. “The challenge today with Kennedy is he is appealing to the ‘go-fuck-the-world’ voter, which is a portion of the Trump coalition. And that’s the challenge. The Kennedy base of support is still closer to a Bernie-type voter, but Trump won some of them in 2016.” TRUMP ADVISERS QUIETLY acknowledge they and the right helped build up RFK Jr., especially after the pandemic when Kennedy’s anti-vaccine activism gained broader attention and support among conservatives. “For more than two years, Kennedy was on more conservative media than any of the Republicans who ran for president, so he’s partly a monster of our own making,” said one adviser in Trump’s orbit. “But the same conservative media apparatus that built him up is starting to tear him down. It’s easy. He’s a liberal.” That cocksure sentiment pervades Trump’s campaign, where they view Kennedy more as an opportunity than a danger. “There’s a reason Democrats are hyperventilating. They’re not doing it quietly,” another Trump adviser said. A senior Democrat told NBC News in more colorful language last week that Democrats are “freaked out” by the threat of Kennedy. His American Values super PAC shares a top donor, Tim Mellon, with Trump’s MAGA Inc. super PAC, and Kennedy’s state director for New York, Rita Palma, recently said in caught-on-video remarks that “our mutual enemy is Biden” and defeating him was the campaign’s “number one priority,” even if it helped Trump win. When reached Sunday night via email, Palma didn’t elaborate on her remarks, telling The Bulwark that social media video clips “don’t tell the whole story. . . . Bobby is by far the superior candidate and stands on his own merits.” The RFK Jr. campaign later said she was speaking in her private capacity. KENNEDY HIMSELF HAS HAD different messages at different times. “Our campaign is a spoiler, all right,” Kennedy said when he announced Shanahan as his running mate two weeks ago. “It is a spoiler for President Biden and for President Trump.” Back in October, though, Kennedy had another message: “I take more votes from President Trump than I do from President Biden.” But Kennedy is winning a sizable share of Hispanic voters in swing states Arizona and Nevada, which would be catastrophic for Biden. A Franklin & Marshall College poll in swing-state Pennsylvania released last week served as another warning sign for Democrats. It showed Biden beating Trump by 10 percentage points in a head-to-head race. But Biden’s advantage over Trump shrunk to a statistically insignificant 2 points in a multi-candidate primary that included Kennedy, leftist philosopher Cornel West, and Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Kennedy had the highest vote share of the three also-rans, 8 percent. “You want as many third-party candidates on the ballot as possible if you’re Donald Trump. It’s not just Kennedy,” said Franklin & Marshall pollster Berwood Yost. “And that’s because, if you’re Donald Trump, your voters are more solidly behind you and Biden’s support is more soft.” Democrats and groups allied with Biden’s campaign have largely been working with the same assumption—that Trump’s base is smaller but more solid than Biden’s. Trump’s ceiling is scarcely higher than his floor. Biden has more room to grow, but if Kennedy is on the ballot, his floor could fall through. For that reason, Democrats have waged a two-front war on both Trump and third-party candidates. Now that the group No Labels has quit its effort to recruit a presidential candidate, the Democratic National Committee, two Biden super PACs, and the group Third Way are planning to focus more negative attention on Kennedy. Kennedy, his campaign, and the super PAC supporting him have ducked for whatever cover they can find. Last week, Kennedy’s campaign had to disavow a fundraising email that called January 6th defendants “activists” who have been “stripped of their Constitutional liberties.” Last year, he had to clarify his position on abortion after telling a reporter he supported a ban on the procedure after three months. (He claimed to have misunderstood the question.) He also had to disavow his past praise for notorious antisemite Louis Farrakhan, founder of the Nation of Islam, who shares his anti-vaccine views. Consultants on both the right and the left have ample stockpiles of controversial, crazed, and false statements Kennedy has made that they can use to attack him: saying herbicides are making kids transgender; getting kicked off Instagram in 2021 for vaccine misinformation; suggesting COVID-19 was ethnically “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people” while sparing “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese”; or claiming seven months after 9/11 that pig farmers were a greater threat to democracy than Osama bin Laden. Matt Bennett, executive vice president of Third Way, said Kennedy has benefited from his famous last name, his savvy social media use, and his lack of a political record. Bennett doesn’t think the candidate will be able to withstand the scrutiny that’s coming now that the threat he represents has become clearer. “Kennedy is in for a rough ride. We need to make sure lower-information voters don’t somehow think, ‘Oh, it’s his dad.’ Or that he’s a safe pair of hands,” Bennett said. “He’s a lunatic. He lies. He’s a bad person.” The constant barrage on Kennedy from the left is starting to have an effect online, said Phil Snape, director of the research firm Impact Social, which monitors 40,000 swing voters’ social media accounts. “We’re seeing more people on the left going at RFK. . . . He’s antivaxx. They’re talking him down,” Snape told The Bulwark. For now, Snape said his most recent analysis shows that Kennedy appears to be taking more votes from Biden, but Impact Social’s research indicates Biden’s standing among the swing voters they track has improved since his State of the Union speech last month. “RFK taps into that sense of voter disenchantment that Trump used to own,” Snape said. “If Trump doesn’t take him seriously, Kennedy could well be the king-maker for Biden. Either way, he’s a force to be reckoned with.” You’re a free subscriber to Bulwark+. For unfettered access to all our newsletters and ad-free and member-only podcasts, become a paying subscriber. Did you know? You can update your newsletter preferences as often as you like. To update the list of newsletter or alerts you received from The Bulwark, click here.
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