RFK Jr.’s Key Role to Play
Besides his possible role in a Trump administration, his absence (or presence) on state ballots could prove pivotal in the election.
ROBERT F. KENNEY JR. IS NOTHING if not delusional. He doubts the effectiveness and safety of vaccines that have been proven effective and safe. He has claimed wifi causes cancer, blamed antidepressants for school shootings, and warned that chemicals in the water supply could be making children gay or transgender, among other conspiracy theories. (Cathy Young, in a recent Bulwark article, has identified several more.)
And when Kennedy dropped out of the race for president, having run first as a Democrat and then as an independent, the scion of one of the nation’s most storied political families declared, “In a fair system, I believe I would have won the election.” He blamed his poor showing on the Democratic National Committee and, of course, the media. Yeah, right.
Kennedy has also shown that he is politically unprincipled. Exhibit A: He first tried to meet with Kamala Harris, who wouldn’t talk to him, about a possible job in her administration if she wins, before throwing his support behind Donald Trump, presumably for the same consideration. Several of Kennedy’s siblings, who opposed his candidacy from the start, called his decision to endorse Trump “a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear.”
On top of all that, Kennedy is a world-class weirdo. He claims that a worm ate part of his brain before doctors found it dead in his head. He once left a dead baby bear in New York’s Central Park, posing it to look like it was hit by a bicycle. (He originally planned to skin it and eat the meat “but the day got away from him,” reported the Associated Press.) He also used a chainsaw to cut off the head of a dead whale that washed up on Squaw Island in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, then strapped it to the roof of the family minivan for a five-hour drive, with his family inside.
“Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” his daughter, Kick Kennedy, recalled in a 2012 interview with Town & Country magazine. “We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.”
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a federal agency, is now investigating. Brett Hartl, political director of the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund, told Axios it is illegal to possess “any part of an animal” protected by the Marine Mammal Protection and Endangered Species acts. Groused Kennedy, “This is all about the weaponization of our government against political opponents of the party in power.”
Despite all this craziness, or perhaps because of it, Kennedy is now in a position to play a huge role in abetting Trump’s re-election (or re-coup) attempt. Trump has said he “probably would” appoint Kennedy to some position in his administration, and the one that has been bandied about is that of secretary of health and human services, a job for which he is uniquely unqualified. Under a Trump 2.0, cabinet picks will be key, especially if a Senate switch to GOP control allows Trump to make the ones he wants, given the former president’s lack of his own vision of how to run the country.
But even before the election and in spite of dropping out, Kennedy is playing an outsized role in the process. That’s because his name remains on the ballots in several swing states, despite his efforts to have it taken off. The extent to which he is able to do so in litigation that is still ongoing could be a significant if not deciding factor in the race.
AFTER DOING EVERYTHING HE COULD to get on ballots as an independent, Kennedy now wants his name taken off in the states most likely to sway the election. That’s because polls show his inclusion would likely draw more votes away from Trump than from Kamala Harris. Kennedy’s evident assumption in continuing to fight these cases is that anybody intending to vote for him is likely too dumb or disconnected to know he has withdrawn from the race.
In North Carolina, the state’s conservative supreme court ruled on September 9 that Kennedy’s name had to be removed from the ballot, even though millions of ballots had already been printed and some election-related deadlines could no longer be met. The state’s 100 counties are now scrambling to replace millions of ballots that will need to be printed in 2,348 different arrangements to reflect local contests and ballot measures; the estimated cost comes out to more than $1 million. Absentee ballots are expected to arrive about two weeks late.
“The ruling by the state Supreme Court that mandated his last-minute removal from the ballot was a victory for Mr. Kennedy,” wrote Michael Wines in the New York Times. “And it may achieve his goal of aiding the candidacy of former President Donald J. Trump, who was endorsed by Mr. Kennedy and could pick up much of his support.”
Karen Brinson Bell, executive director of North Carolina’s elections board, said the court order “imposes a tremendous hardship on our county boards, at an extremely busy time.” But, she added, “our election officials are professionals, and I have no doubt we will rise to the challenge.”
On the same day that North Carolina removed Kennedy from its ballots, the Democratic-leaning Michigan Supreme Court refused to do so in that state, saying Kennedy was seeking an “extraordinary remedy” that the law did not allow.
But Kennedy’s name won’t be on ballots in Arizona, where he made his request for removal the day after he qualified for it. He was disqualified from being on the ballot in New York for having falsely claimed to be a state resident on his nominating petition; a false New York address in his ballot access petitions in Georgia led to his disqualification in that state, as well. In Nevada, he was able to get off the ballot because the state Democratic party had sued to have him kicked off. And Kennedy was also able to avoid appearing on ballots in Pennsylvania, Florida, Maine, New Hampshire, Ohio, Texas, and South Carolina.
In Wisconsin on September 16, a circuit court judge in Dane County, which includes Madison, ruled against Kennedy’s effort to either be stricken from ballots or have a sticker placed over his name if it has been printed. Judge Stephen Ehlke cited a state law that explicitly bars the removal of candidates once they qualify for the ballot unless they die. “It would be unfair both to Wisconsin voters and to the other candidates on the general election ballot to interfere in an election that, for all intents and purposes, has already begun,” the judge said, noting that some absentee ballots in the race have already been sent.
Ehlke also noted that Kennedy was simultaneously contending that “he will be irreparably harmed if his name is left on the ballot in Wisconsin” and also “irreparably harmed in other states—New York, for example—if his name isn’t on the ballot.” The judge called this “quite obviously contradictory,” saying, “Both things cannot reasonably be true.”
Kennedy appealed Ehlke’s ruling, and last Wednesday, a Wisconsin appeals court agreed to take the case. On Thursday, the state justice department asked to skip this level and have the case be taken up directly by the state supreme court. On Friday, the high court agreed, saying it “will endeavor to issue a written decision as expeditiously as possible.” Two court conservatives dissented, complaining that the court’s liberal majority is inconsistent in when it agrees to such bypasses, which “sends a message to litigants that judicial process will be invoked or ignored based on the majority’s desired outcome in a politically-charged case.” Oh, boohoo.
An attorney for the state justice department, which is representing the Wisconsin Elections Commission, has said that requiring clerks to place stickers over Kennedy’s name on every Wisconsin ballot would require “tens of thousands of hours” of effort and create a “logistical nightmare.”
How significant is all of this to the outcome of the election? Writes reporter Mitchell Schmidt in the Wisconsin State Journal, “The push to remove Kennedy from the ballot comes after polling by the Marquette Law School found more Republicans than Democrats were considering voting for Kennedy—an outcome that could sink Trump’s hopes in the battleground state.”
IF TRUMP WERE TO WIN THE ELECTION and Democrats lose control of the Senate, which approves the appointment of cabinet officials, Kennedy could find himself at the helm of a sprawling $1.8 trillion department overseeing 13 agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health. Former HHS Secretary Alex Azar said the job makes available “a shocking amount of power by the stroke of a pen.”
Kennedy has falsely claimed “vaccines have probably caused more deaths than they’ve averted” and talked about how the government should stop prioritizing their use and instead start “finding treatments that work and building people’s immune systems.” During the COVID-19 pandemic, he talked up fake cures including ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.
In accepting an award last November from Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccination group he happens to head, then-candidate Kennedy said he would stop the National Institutes of Health from studying infectious diseases and turn its attention to chronic diseases, like diabetes and obesity. “I’m going to say to NIH scientists, God bless you all,” Kennedy told the gathering. “Thank you for public service. We’re going to give infectious disease a break for about eight years.”
Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a defender of vaccines that have saved millions of lives, has warned that Kennedy, if allowed to take the helm at HHS, would “no doubt will try to perform studies that prove his views and thus further weaken America’s trust in vaccines and, no doubt, try to eliminate all mandates.”
Kennedy, Offit said, “would eliminate studies around real problems and gear them toward what he thinks the problems are, independent of what good data show. It doesn’t matter whether the data show that he’s wrong; he’s still going to be convinced that he’s right.”
Sound familiar?
IN JANUARY 2017, JUST BEFORE HE became president, Trump met with Kennedy and purportedly asked him to head a commission on vaccine safety that, like so many Trump projects, never came to pass. But after Kennedy entered the presidential race, he ended up on Trump’s voluminous shitlist. In April, Trump blasted Kennedy as a “Democrat ‘Plant,’ a Radical Left Liberal who’s been put in place in order to help Crooked Joe Biden, the Worst President in the History of the United States, get Re-Elected.”
On August 20, three days before Kennedy dropped out of the race, Trump told CNN he would “certainly” be open to giving Kennedy a role in his administration if he were to drop out and endorse the former president. “I like him, and I respect him,” Trump said. “He’s a brilliant guy. He’s a very smart guy.”
For an example of the deep thoughts that might flow more freely if Trump is able to install Kennedy as his top health cabinet member, one need look no further than the July 13 video taken of a phone call between the two men that was posted briefly online. (RFK Jr. said he was “mortified” to see that the video had been posted—his son, Bobby Kennedy III, was responsible for the mishap—and he apologized to Trump.)
In the video, taken the day after Trump was shot at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, the former president ruminates on the high doses of vaccines given to children. “You see the baby all of a sudden starting to change radically,” Trump said. “When you feed a baby, Bobby, a vaccination that is, like, 38 different vaccines and it looks like it’s been for a horse. Not a, you know, 10-pound or 20-pound baby.”
By age 6, U.S. children receive vaccinations against sixteen different diseases, including measles, chickenpox, diphtheria, polio, and whooping cough. Trump, on the campaign trail, has said, “I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate.”
I reached out to former Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson, a Trump supporter who teared up over JD Vance’s convention speech, to ask what he thought about the idea of Kennedy taking over as health and human services secretary, a position Thompson held with honor under president George W. Bush from 2001 to 2005. In a follow-up request, I noted that Trump has said he will likely tap Kennedy for some role in his administration and amended my question to ask what Thompson thought about Trump hiring Kennedy to do anything. I was told that “two voicemails and a text” were left for Thompson regarding my questions, but there was no response.
Those who know better stay silent. That’s what makes Trump—and RFK Jr.—so dangerous.
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