If you believe a small, mostly-Trump worshipping part of social media, dead bear-planting antivaxxer and brain worm guardian Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dropping out of the presidential race and endorsing Donald Trump represents a massive blow to the Democrat [sic] Party establishment that will propel Trump to victory as part of a historical unity ticket when all of Kennedy’s voters embrace Trump and vote for him.
If you believe pretty much everyone else who knows anything about polling, elections, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump, or brain worms; then Kennedy dropping out will have almost no effect on the race. It might even hurt Trump in the long term by saddling him with Kennedy’s considerable baggage.
I’m certainly not an expert on presidential polling, but I am something of an expert on brain worms and antivaxxers. So I can safely say that the real effect of RFK Jr. dropping out is almost certainly going to be closer to zero than the 50 STATE LANDSLIDE being predicted on MAGA social media. Numerous polling firms have already given pretty good reasons why Kennedy’s departure won’t boost Trump much, if it all.
Trying to apply trends in niche social media groups to the population as a whole is always tricky. Most people, Democrats and Republicans alike, think Kennedy is an irrelevant weirdo, to the point where the Harris campaign wanted nothing to do with him. There might be some crossover between the two in the health freedom/Tucker Carlson community, full of people who think vaccines are poison, seed oils are worse than Hitler, an all meat diet will keep you alive forever, skin cancer isn’t real, and the medical establishment’s job is to keep you fat and sick. Some might even believe Trump is going to declassify all the files about the assassinations of both JFK and RFK – though, of course, Trump could have blown the doors off the “deep state” conspiracy any time while he was already president, and never did.
The “Make America Healthy Again” crowd is loud, but small – and while they might like both Trump and RFK, they were already overwhelmingly going for Trump. And again, most other people think these folks are creepy weirdos who are obsessed with meat, genitals, seed oils, and assassinations.
So I wanted to focus specifically on the conspiracist community’s reaction to Kennedy’s endorsement of Trump, and why a Trump/Kennedy marriage is much more likely to end in disaster than in triumph. Putting the two together might seem like a thumb in the eye of the Democratic Party establishment, but in reality, Trump and Kennedy are a poor fit, with fan bases that want different things and don’t especially like or trust each other. And Trump and Kennedy themselves were sniping at one another on social media as recently as a few weeks ago. So here’s why a Trump/Kennedy match is more likely to be a disunity ticket than a magical rocket ride for Team Humanity:
Kennedy’s campaign was already toast: Joe Biden dropping out and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris had already taken almost all the wind out of Kennedy’s sailboat, picking up scores of disaffected Democrats who mistakenly believed Robert F. Kennedy’s son was the next great Democratic standard bearer. Kennedy’s polling cratered, and Harris’s rose almost exactly as much. Beyond that, Kennedy’s campaign was broke, and had struggled to attract anything but negative attention for his bizarre antics. There’s just simply not many people in his camp to actually flip from him to Trump, and as we’re about to see, most aren’t going to do it anyway.
Most RFK Jr. voters supported him because he WASN’T Trump: the biggest reason so many people got behind Kennedy in the first place is that he was supposedly fighting back against the idea of the “uniparty” – a Democratic and Republican establishment that had total control over elections, politics, and governing. While he was nominally a Democrat and was trying to get into Democratic primaries, he was much more anti-establishment (or as least as anti-establishment as a Kennedy can be) in general, not conforming to the rigid doctrine of either party and making no secret of his displeasure with what used to be the part of his father and uncle.
And his supporters have acted accordingly – RFK Facebook groups and Reddit threads have been full of Kennedy voters declaring how they feel betrayed, lied to, used, and incredibly confused. Many are already saying they’ll still vote for him (which he had asked voters to do in states where the winner is all but assured), while others are declaring they’ll vote for other third-party candidates, or just not vote. And every single influencer who has proclaimed Trump/Kennedy to be a “unity ticket” was already a Trump supporter, and is basically wishcasting. A few are saying they’ll go over to Trump, but it’s hard to tell if they weren’t already going to vote for Trump anyway, they just liked what RFK had to say about vaccines. Speaking of which…
Operation Warp Speed should be a red line: This, at least to me as someone who follows the “health freedom” community, should be the ultimate deal breaker. Donald Trump has claimed he is the “father of the COVID vaccine,” and has taken credit for the speedy development and availability of COVID vaccines just a year into the pandemic. Truth be told, it’s the only thing he got right about COVID, and it’s probably just because it had a cool name.
Kennedy, on the other hand, has made a career out of selling false and dangerous claims about inoculations, and called the COVID shot “the deadliest vaccine ever created,” among other insane conspiracy theories about the virus being “engineered” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people. Kennedy-funded activist groups were taking vaccine challenges to the Supreme Court as recently as June. The vaccine was becoming a sticking point for Trump supporters who ALSO believe it’s a poison death shot, as evidenced by the many times people like Alex Jones twisted themselves into knots defending Trump while “being concerned” about the shot.
Kennedy is already touting Trump as the candidate who can “make America healthy again.” Given that Trump is one of the most physically unhealthy presidents in American history, that seems unlikely. But ultimately, this should strangle any sort of Trump/Kennedy union. If you back Operation Warp Speed, you can’t support Kennedy, and if you support Kennedy, you can’t back Operation Warp Speed. We all know conspiracy theorists excel at finding space in these sorts of logical nightmares, but if Trump is behind a genocide jab, and Kennedy endorses Trump, what does that say about Kennedy? Nothing good, I’d imagine.
Kennedy has nothing to offer Trump except baggage: given that Kennedy has no real base of supporters other than people who mostly already hate both parties and won’t vote, what value add does he represent? It gets him a little bit of media coverage, and maybe a fraction of his voters, but the cost is going to be high: Trump is now saddled with a ton of baggage he’s not going to want, related to Kennedy’s past drug use, erratic behavior, insane statement, and conspiracy theories. Any major right-wing influencer who had expressed support for Kennedy, most notably Joe Rogan, has already been batted down by angry MAGA believers and browbeaten into submission.
And Trump endorsing Kennedy on social media is raising some really uncomfortable questions about the Vice Presidential candidate he already picked, who has a massive train of weird baggage himself. There’s pretty much no chance Trump admits the Vance pick is a disaster and drops him, and Kennedy would be a massive drag as a VP for Trump anyway, putting an unstable weirdo front and center in a race where there already too many unstable weirdos. So what are we even doing here?
Ultimately, listen to what Kennedy supporters are telling us – they almost entirely hate both parties, hate Big Pharma, hate the vaccine, and hate how a few groups control the media and politics. There’s nothing antiestablishment about Trump at all, other than the fact that Trump supporters think everyone hates them. Maybe Kennedy brings a few people over with his new message of “Make America Healthy Again,” though even that’s as cynical and see-through as it gets. And any Kennedy supporter who believes that Trump would “pay back” Kennedy for his support with a cabinet post is kidding themselves.
So no, there won’t be a “unity ticket” running on making seed oils illegal and nut-sunning mandatory. Trump will trot Kennedy out as a prop a few times, then the uncomfortable questions will start coming, and Trump will pretend he’s never met Kennedy. And the final act of a long, strange, and increasingly tragic story will have been written.
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Mike Rothschild 