Blue MAGA: How RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard Became Rockstars in Trump World
No other surrogates bring the crowd adoration like the two ex-Democrats. But their eccentricities come with complications.
FROM THE ABUNDANCE OF RED HATS in the crowd to the title of the “Reclaim America Tour,” the Trump campaign stop on a recent rainy Saturday looked like a fairly standard Republican event.
But the message delivered to the thousand people who showed up at a local Detroit area theater that day was hardly typical GOP fare.
Speakers issued dire warnings about the dangers of illiberalism, corporate power, “poison food,” state surveillance, and the military industrial complex. Former Vice President Dick Cheney and past Ambassador John Bolton were name-dropped and booed as war pigs. Mentions of illegal immigration were scant. Dystopian rhetoric about big city crime was absent.
This is Blue MAGA.
The Trump campaign is making a concerted effort to reach swing and disaffected voters not by espousing more centrist policies, but with messaging that sounds like it has been ripped from a progressive playbook circa 2004, 2008, or 2012.
It’s a different formula for trying to build bipartisan coalitions—less a play for the middle and more an attempt to connect the ends of an ideological horseshoe. And, in this universe, Blue MAGA’s messengers double as the message itself: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard is the first pair of former Democratic presidential candidates to tour multiple swing states with each other on behalf of the Republican nominee they both endorsed.
“We’re hitting every stop before Election Day,” Gabbard told The Bulwark two Saturdays ago at the Ford Community & Performing Arts Center in Dearborn, Michigan. She said she and Kennedy are livestreaming the events on their social media platforms to reach those who are not “blind conformists for any political party.”
The Kennedy-Gabbard tour comes at a crucial time for Trump as polls show him marginally trailing Vice President Kamala Harris, who generally pulls more crossover support from Republicans than he does from Democrats.
Compared to the Democrats backing Trump, Harris has a bigger list of high-profile Republican supporters—including former Trump White House staffers and former Rep. Liz Cheney, daughter of the former vice president, who held her own event with Harris Thursday in Wisconsin. But whereas Cheney is presented as a bipartisan validator for Harris (bound not by ideological agreement but by a mutual fear of a second-term Trump), Kennedy and Gabbard are viewed in MAGA world as movement leaders in their own right.
ACCORDING TO GABBARD AND THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN, both she and Kennedy are given no talking points or guidance. “This is their show, their tour, their words,” said a Trump adviser who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The two have become the most electric surrogates for the campaign, drawing crowds, inspiring internet memes, and eliciting favorable coverage on aligned podcasts. It is now assumed that each will get a consequential post in a future Trump administration (something Cheney almost assuredly won’t get or request from Harris).
“Blue MAGA is real,” a Trump insider involved with the events insisted. “We’re witnessing a shift.”
Kennedy, in particular, has become a MAGA icon in short order, perhaps owing to the glow of Democratic nostalgia his name emanates. Within weeks of dropping his independent presidential campaign and endorsing Trump, he quickly hit the campaign trail with Gabbard, drawing large crowds at the three “Reclaim America” events attested to so far in Arizona, Nevada, and Michigan. At those events, he began exacting a measure of revenge on the Democratic party, which tried to block him from the ballot and attacked him regularly as an anti-vaxx, pro-Putin stooge over Ukraine, and as a serial purveyor of misinformation.
“RFK Jr. is not bringing converts into the tent. He is a failed fringe candidate, and the more voters learned about him, the less they liked him,” said Adrienne Watson, a DNC spokeswoman. “Trump now owns his baggage—including the dangerous rhetoric, harmful policies, and debunked conspiracy theories that RFK Jr. is highlighting on this media tour.”
That Kennedy is regarded by Democrats as a kook who dangerously flouts experts and conformity is precisely why the Trump campaign regards him as an attractive surrogate who can help them attract voters they need. Kennedy occupies a unique role in politics for his anti-vaxx activism, alt-nutrition advocacy, and anti-corporate populism, issues increasingly embraced by the right.
Kennedy’s political value is not in the typical Democrats he can bring to Trump but in the unconventional voters and audiences he can reach. He has received positive attention on influential podcasts, most notably the Joe Rogan Experience, whose host praised Kennedy as “the only [presidential candidate] who makes sense to me” before he quit his campaign in August. (Facing backlash from Trump, Rogan clarified that he did not intend his comment as an endorsement.) For more than a year, Trump’s team tried to book the ex-president on Rogan’s show as part of his strategy to reach legions of anti-establishment young men the campaign needs to help overcome a historic gender gap with women voters.
As for this gender gap, that’s where Gabbard comes in. Gabbard has become the top woman surrogate for the Trump campaign at a time when he has had relatively few. She helped Trump prepare for his only debate with Harris, earning that spot due to her 2019 Democratic primary debate performance when she savaged Harris’s prosecutorial record.
And she’s become a fan favorite among the MAGA faithful not just for her antagonistic history towards the Democratic nominee, but for prosecuting the case that Democrats are now the party of foreign policy belligerence.
Gabbard first ran afoul of her party in 2013 when she opposed the Obama administration’s request to use force against Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad for using chemical weapons on his people. In 2017, she met with Assad and declined to call him an enemy of the United States, further outraging members of her own party and foreign policy hawks. A Hawaii congresswoman at the time, she decided not to run for re-election two years later and mounted her presidential campaign instead. As that campaign ended and she was leaving the House, she voted “present” in 2019 on Trump’s first impeachment.
An Iraq War vet, Gabbard said she wants to avoid foreign wars, a major topic for her and Kennedy at the “Reclaim America” tour stop in Dearborn the Saturday before last. Her presidential campaign was fresh in people’s minds.
“I’m hooked on Tulsi. I got hooked on Tulsi when she first ran for president,” said Terri Twellman, a 68-year-old Belleville, Michigan resident. She said Gabbard and Kennedy are the perfect one-two punch for Trump because “they’re both former Democrats and they’ve come to see the suppression of truth in the Democratic party.”
THE THEME OF SALVATION WAS A recurring one among the crowd of attendees who had come to see Gabbard and Kennedy. It wasn’t enough for them to have been won over by Trump. What mattered to the crowd was that they validated their perceptions about the Democratic party’s supposed ills.
“The Democratic party I grew up with was the party of civil rights, of constitutional rights, of freedom of speech—particularly the First Amendment. Today, it’s the party of censorship and surveillance,” Kennedy said at one point.
The Reclaim America events are billed as a conversation with the 43-year-old Gabbard and 70-year-old Kennedy, who sit side-by-side onstage as a microcelebrity or influencer interviews them. In Dearborn, Shazam! actor Zachary Levi led the discussion. Racecar-driver-turned-podcaster Danica Patrick interviewed the two in Las Vegas the Saturday before. And a week earlier, it was “Mommy Blogger” Jessica Reed Krause.
There is an informality in the setting, as if Kennedy and Gabbard are two strangers gingerly getting to know one another. But the content is hardly modest. Kennedy rails against the conspiracy of the Democratic elites while Gabbard plays the role of re-interpreter, repackaging Trump’s position to make them sound more palatable than the candidate.
“She gives that extra little bit that sometimes you wish Trump would say,” said one Republican attendee from Detroit who didn’t want to give her name.
While Gabbard and Kennedy have given the Trump campaign a jolt, it has not been without drama. The downside of leaning on political eccentrics for help is that—well, they’re eccentric.
Kennedy in particular has boarded the MAGA train with some skeletons from his closet in tow. He has become embroiled in alleged sex scandals involving women other than his wife, according to Mediaite, which reported Wednesday that it could jeopardize his standing in Trump’s orbit. Kennedy, who couldn’t be reached through the Trump campaign, has denied the charges.
Top Trump advisers say any reports of Trump distancing himself from Kennedy are false, and that they anticipated some drama would naturally result from the decision to align themselves with a candidate who went viral for recounting how he once dropped off a roadkill bear in Central Park, and then went viral again for his daughter telling an interviewer about how he cut off a dead whale’s head with a chainsaw.
“We didn’t get in bed with a Kennedy expecting chastity,” quipped one confidant of Trump’s who spoke on condition of anonymity.
How big a boost Kennedy and Gabbard provide Trump is ultimately the million-dollar question. A Trump campaign adviser, speaking anonymously, said the campaign’s internal data indicates about 30 percent of the Reclaim America Tour’s audiences are people who “are not in our system.”
“We have nine years of data about who we come into contact with, and these people we haven’t come into contact with before,” the adviser said. “They’re independents, soft Democrats, or Republicans who weren’t active supporters.”
A Republican consultant familiar with internal party research into Kennedy said the former candidate was polling at just five percent before he dropped out, and his base was largely composed of middle-aged men who were infrequent voters and anti-vaxx women who couldn’t stomach Trump.
“Almost all of his voters would go to Trump if they showed [up]. But that’s the big if: they might not show,” said the Republican. “The Tulsi-Kennedy thing is more of a permission-structure message for voters who just need a reason to vote for Trump. They’re not really transferring any significant base [of support].”
Gabbard, however, disagrees. She believes the idea of Blue MAGA has broad appeal. On a recent plane flight, she said, she overheard a man who was in his early to mid-fifties talking to his seatmate about how he had never been in politics before, became engaged because of Kennedy, and now he’s voting for Trump. She said people have also thanked her for “making it okay for me to look at President Trump as an option.”
“It raises the choice the voters have to go beyond partisanship,” she said, “beyond Democrat versus Republican, and actually look at the issues.”
About the only thing they are missing is the “end times” Christianity. Otherwise it’s a good overlap. And both have decent claims that they’ve been anointed as Trumps successor. The post Trump battle with the remaining “chamber of commerce” wing of the GOP will be entertaining.
It is scary in the way that it takes the heat away from Trump who is becoming more incoherent by the minute.
Trump is so insane and dangerous that voters start to worry about him.
The GOP wants to muddy the waters because the only goal is to defeat Harris by all means possible. Harris should focus on climate change, we are in a crisis and Trump has promised to make it much worse by selling drilling contracts to the oil companies and destroying more public land. (logging and drilling in our National parks). Trump wants to stop the clean energy business, remove windmills etc.
Hurricane Helene is child play compared to what is to come, because the rising temperatures and ever warming oceans will cause hurricanes to gain more strength. 2024 is the hottest year ever recorded, it is costing billions of our tax money to fix .
We have a responsibility to our children and next generations to clean up our mess. The Biden administration has created more clean energy jobs than any other president and Harris is our last hope. Trump will not invest in science and new technology.
If Trump had the record of the Biden administration (best economy in years, 16 million new jobs etc), he would be bragging about it every day, and he would be far ahead in the polls.
Harris talks about guns, fracking and getting tough on immigrants/building a wall (all losing topics). she had a great debate but she is not moving up enough to win an election.