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:
The Republican National Committee began circulating a new one-page talk sheet, targeting allies and conservative media, that labels Kennedy a “Radical DEMOCRAT” and emphasizes his environmental record, his opposition to fossil fuels and fracking, his calling the NRA a “terror group,” his votes for Biden and Hillary Clinton, his support for raising taxes on the very wealthy, his criticism of the U.S. Supreme Court for banning affirmative action in higher education, and his backing of abortion rights that align with the Democratic party’s position.
One Republican group active on social media tells The Bulwark it’s making plans to launch a campaign called “Radical Fucking Kennedy” to spread the word of RFK’s liberal past. Republican research has shown that, when voters are informed of Kennedy’s record on environmental issues, taxes, and abortion, his Republican support appreciably drops as his Democratic support rises. So every Republican attack on Kennedy could hurt Biden as well.
Conservative media, which once lavished uncritical attention on Kennedy, has turned on him. On his eponymous Fox News show, Sean Hannity devoted a segment Thursday to blasting Kennedy as a “devout, radical environmentalist.” In June, Hannity held a friendly town hall with Kennedy when he was running against Biden in the Democratic primary. After Kennedy in October announced he would run as an independent against both Trump and Biden, he fell out of favor with Hannity as well as Trump advisers like Roger Stone and Steve Bannon.
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.”
Half of the American electorate has lost their collective minds. Neither Trump nor RFK Jr are qualified to manage a convenience store, yet collectively they will garner over 50 million votes in November.
May god have mercy on our souls.
If I've said it once, I'll say it again: the Democratic consultants that look at RFK and go 'he's a Democrat and a liberal' are the same ones that thought Bloomberg would be a great presidential candidate to run against Trump. It's absurd on its face if you step outside of the bubble and actually, you know, look at the state of play.
The idea that RFK is 'more of a Bernie guy' is insane. Bernie Sanders is, if nothing else, a die hard true believer in what he preaches and has been for decades. He's a figure almost tailor made for a certain segment of millennials; a perennially uncool figure who was doing public access shows and awkward memes that translated seamlessly into the 'uncool is cool' vibe that plenty of us understood circa 2008-2016.
RFK is not that. The Kennedy name means nothing to anyone under forty, except as the name of a president who's biggest accomplishment in the minds of school children was that he was assassinated. Obviously, that's not true, Kennedy was a great president that got us through the Missile Crisis, but the reality is that the Kennedy name means nothing personal to anyone who would be in the Bernie cohort. The Bernie bro stereotype is specific, not vague; it's younger, professional, disillusioned people who dislike things like political dynasties. It's why he made a challenge to Clinton, after all. To give you an idea of how little the name really means, I had to look up the name of Ted Kennedy, because he died a year after I gained the ability to vote, and despite being the second longest serving man in congress in history, I can't tell you a single thing he did.
The logic behind the idea that RFK is a liberal spoiler goes like this: 'he's a disruptive force to an electorate looking for change.' Except, I cannot think of a single thing that signals change less than to run on name recognition of one of the country's former most prominent dynasties. If you're older, then the Kennedy name is most certainly not a change, and if you're young, the Kennedy name is relegated to history books and events long before you were born. It is not, in any way, the kind of change that the electorate wants, anymore than a Hillary Clinton run would be.
And all of this is without talking about the fact that he's drinking out of the same well as Candice Owens and every other conspiracy theorist. The reality is that in modern America, on the internet, all the worst people find each other because all of them are trying to recruit each other into whatever thing they're most into. As a result, there are no out there liberals that are separate from out their conservatives; the people who think that there are jewish space lasers are drinking from the same pool of info and listening to the same people as the people who think aliens built pyramids, who are right there with the weirdo anti-vax people, who are right there with the people who think that reptilians live among us.
The truth is, if you're into any conspiracy content, you're drinking from the same koolaid as all the others, in the same way that if you join Amway, you'll very quickly be pitched every other MLM. If you join on crypto project, you'll be pitched a thousand others, because all of these spheres are filled with people who understand that the best people to recruit to their cause are the people who basically believe what they do but are somewhere else.
RFK is not someone who is going to steal lots of votes from Biden, at least not his core. His share among liberals are the low information, low likelihood to vote people who have that single trait in common with Bernie bros. Running against the system sounds good until you need to use the system to put you into power. Meanwhile, RFK's information ecosystem is filled with much more diehard GOP types, from Ben Shapiro to Candice Owens, who are happy to promote everything from vaccines being microchip plots to the idea that the government is going to steal your guns and trade your wife for a blue haired single trans blm member.
In other words, his biggest threat to Trump is that he'll come off as more 'real' than Trump, more of a 'true believer' than Trump. Trump's whole pitch is that he's 'real' and that he 'tells it like it is' and that he 'says things other people don't want you to hear.' And that all evaporates when someone even crazier shows up that says even crazier things and posits that maybe Trump isn't actually the truth teller you think he is.
Sure, RFK was a Democrat at one point. But he has nothing in common with Democratic voters or the current party. All the people who might have been Democrats in his vein, the ones afraid of things like DEI and BLM and a million other acronyms, have already become Republicans, because the GOP isn't so much 'conservative' in the old vein as it is a set of grievances about how it's not 1950 anymore. In that vein, RFK fits right in as an old guy past his prime who wants to talk about the good old days to people who miss seeing children with polio.