Given my role as a writer in the Kennedy campaign and my support of him among friends and family, I’ve received messages asking how I feel about the new Trump-Kennedy alignment. Some messages have been excited about the alignment, some bewildered, some censorious. It’s a valuable question, and one with which I’ve wrestled mightily.
To understand the alignment one ought, I believe, to first understand how Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been presented to us. To do that, one could do worse than referring to an article in Vanity Fair published a few months back. Written by Brian Stelter, the article is titled “The Democratic War Room Against RFK Jr.” The opening of that article shows the mainstream’s hand:
“Nobody likes a spoiler. For that reason, Lis Smith, a well-known Democratic operative, is on a mission to make sure nobody likes Robert F. Kennedy Jr.”
Here are a few more telling snippets from these last many months:
“The Democratic National Committee has…mobilized against Kennedy and other third-party candidates, hiring veteran operative Lis Smith to run an aggressive opposition research and messaging campaign.”
(from “This should not be dismissed: Kennedy scares both sides of abortion debate,” Politico, Alice Miranda Ollstein, May 3, 2024)
“The Democratic National Committee is building its first team to…prepare for a potential all-out war on candidates they view as spoilers.”
(from “Democrats prepare to go to war against third-party candidates,” NBC News, Alex Seitz-Wald, March 14, 2024)
“This week, we go inside the covert efforts to derail Robert F. Kennedy Jr., before it’s too late for the Democrats.”
(from “How Dems Are Already Quashing a Nightmare RFK Jr. Scenario,” The Daily Beast, Jake Lahut, February 17, 2024)
“Team Biden is taking no chances: The Democratic National Committee has a war room up and running aimed at handling third-party threats such as Mr. Kennedy…Ms. Smith is handling the public-facing effort to take down Mr. Kennedy…It is the first time that any effort like this has ever existed.”
(from “The Drive to Tell Voters What They Don’t Know About R.F.K. Jr.,” The New York Times, Michelle Cottle, May 2, 2024)
And the following two remarks, also published in mainstream outlets, were made by spokespeople from Democratic PACs (the first quote is from an “operative” within American Bridge; the second from the founder of Clear Choice):
“We’ll explore just about every tactic that’s feasible and is gonna make sense…we just want to make sure this person doesn’t get a free pass to campaign for several months.”
“It’s clear that this election is a clear choice between President Biden and Donald Trump. No third-party or independent candidate has any chance of winning a state in November…They are spoilers, plain and simple. We’re here to work with allies to ensure those candidates are held accountable, and everything is on the table.”
Whatever your leanings, and no matter how much you might resist Kennedy, I don’t see how it’s possible to remain unconcerned about the state of our national politics after reading the above. It’s my hunch that if we Americans took a few minutes to contemplate the foregoing—the titles of the articles; the existence of the inaugural out-in-the-open DNC-funded “war room”; the eerily blithe baseness of the admissions of the so-called Democratic PACs (we just want to make sure this person doesn’t get a free pass to campaign for several months); the fact that powerful people are paying other powerful people to inspire us to dislike each other—our nation would be quite different.
And bearing the above snippets in mind, one wonders how such a war room has shaped—radically, indelibly—the way many Americans view Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a man who—despite months and months of salvos—currently wields considerable influence in our country, and who will possibly wield greater influence in years to come. One wonders how such a war room has affected Kennedy’s meteoric political journey, which now involves what The New York Times recently dubbed “one of the strangest” alignments “in modern political history.” One wonders why the DNC persisted with its warfare. If Kennedy was indeed siphoning votes from Trump, wouldn’t it have been wiser—much wiser—to just leave him alone? Or was the DNC not simply worried Kennedy would be a spoiler but actually win? (Can you imagine Kennedy debating Trump/Biden/Harris? Dare I say it, such competition would’ve made Kennedy look like Patrick Henry.) And one wonders if the single-minded, battle-savvy, fat-pursed, extravagantly armed DNC brigade might’ve actually bolstered their enemy instead of burying him. Did all this partisan treachery backfire? Is Kennedy—despite the attempts to blow him to smithereens (via the “opposition research and messaging campaign”; via the use of “every tactic that’s feasible”)—in truth haler than ever?
Finally, can we see what’s perhaps hidden in plain sight? Under the pretext of defending democracy, some appear to be enthusiastically dismantling it. Further, such a dirty politics is choking the vital political debates we need to be having. Recently in these pages, Jon D. Schaff relevantly and hauntingly wrote, “We cannot give into the temptation of thinking that our times are so different that basic civility must be cast aside. Once we have done that, we are lost.”
(And as you may know, such uncivility hasn’t been reserved for Kennedy alone. The DNC has also targeted candidates Cornel West and Jill Stein, ensnarling them in legal battles to prevent them from getting on ballots. And one of the striking articles of this election was written by Ja’han Jones of MSNBC, published in June of 2023. The article’s title is “Cornel West’s ‘leftist’ presidential bid has right-wing DNA.” Among other eerie distortions, Mr. Jones states that the “people framing newly announced presidential candidate Cornel West as a leftist seem to be lazily sanitizing his recent history.”)
But I am not here solely to hector you with outrage.
Nor am I here to pretend Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has no shadow, to whitewash his mistakes big and small.
Nor am I here to wrest you from your love of Trump or Harris (or West or Stein). Or wrest you from your understandable agnosticism or your understandable withdrawal from American politics (“The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity”).
And many of you are likely sick of this presidential contest—sick of people confusing their fixation on the White House for meaningful civic engagement (Stop fulminating against Trump/Harris and go clean a creek or spend time with a depressed teen!). And many of you, I bet, believe that whichever way we go, we proceed in gloom.
And I am not here to condone the RNC or Donald Trump. No. I’ve spent many years resisting various values, policies, actions, and members of the GOP. Regarding Donald Trump, I think Wendell Berry said it best: “He affronts and endangers much to which my heart belongs.”
That said, I am here to ask you this: If after spending decades of defending the least among us (“Kennedy has enjoyed legal victories,” our congressional record tells us, “in many milestone environmental battles over the past four decades in Latin America, Canada, and the United States”), your own party works barefacedly and diligently to destroy you; to smear your character for month upon month (“to make sure nobody likes Robert F. Kennedy Jr.”); to openly prevent you from getting on ballots (draining your finances and energies); to censor you (refer to Judge Doughty, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, and Mark Zuckerberg for details); to withhold from you Secret Service protection (even as your father and uncle were assassinated); to grease poor people to protest you at your events (I talked to some of these folks—waifs of American history—at a rally in Union Station in Los Angeles); and to thwart debate access (despite Perot-like polling and, for a stretch, the highest favorability and lowest unfavorability ratings of all the candidates), wouldn’t you feel a trifle alienated?
Now add this to the mix: while your own party—a party your uncle and father helped shape—attempts to rub you out, the other party (reportedly full of Jesus-freaky homophobic racist weirdos) thinks you’re swell, has you on all their shows, and cottons to many of your crazy notions: winding down American militarism, reversing the chronic disease epidemic, protecting free speech, ending the surveillance state, purging corporate-government corruption, and even caring for the environment.
Finally, consider the following. After all of this—after more than a year of the DNC’s war room and the RNC’s red carpet—you try, however quixotically, to meet with Kamala Harris on the off chance you can make common cause with the old crew. As you’re 70 years old, you reckon you have ten or so years left to do your work. It’s time to fish or cut bait. But Harris declines to even speak with you.
So from one angle, the question is not, “Why did Robert F. Kennedy Jr. align with Donald Trump?” but: “How the hell did he hold out for so long?”
(And now the DNC shouts Judas, failing to notice that the thirty pieces of silver are in their hands.)
Now please know that I’m not unambivalent about this new alignment.
Like others, I’ve wondered fearfully about what will happen if Trump is elected again.
And if Trump is elected will he renounce his declared commitment to Kennedy? Or will he empower Kennedy and then fire him shortly afterwards? Or will Harris win, thereby ending this sudden curious union?
And if Harris wins, what then? Like others, I’ve wondered fearfully about what will happen if Harris is elected. For it’s hard to tell these days, as writer Patrick Lawrence says, where the Democratic Machine ends and the national security state/Big Brother begins. Just as we must acknowledge Trump’s dishonesty and habit of cruelty, we must—lest our eye for political nuance becomes rheumy—acknowledge that “the progressive practitioners of piety politics” (Lee Siegel’s memorable phrase) have a rather unnerving fondness for blood-shedding neocon militarism (“As commander-in-chief,” Harris declaimed during her address at the DNC and during the recent presidential debate, “I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world”) and authoritarian censorship. Since I started this essay, “the United States and its allies,” says The New York Times, “are once again considering expanding the capabilities they provide to Ukraine in its fight against Russia’s invasion” by letting Ukraine fire missiles – that rely on our satellite data and technology – deeper into Russia. If such a greenlighting occurs, a Russian spokesman said, “NATO would become a direct party in a war against a nuclear power. I think there is no need to explain what kind of consequences that would lead up to.” The current administration, in other words, seems to be sponsoring a game of chicken when the possible outcome is death without precedent. As someone recently quipped on the Internet, “Today’s Democrats are a bunch of Dick Cheneys wearing a Pride shirt and BLM button.” (And now it seems Dick Cheney has endorsed Harris, rendering that quip prophetic.)
Or will Donald Trump win the election, de-escalate geopolitical tensions as he claims he will (you can call Trump many things but you can’t call him a war hawk), and honor the new alignment by empowering Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to help pick Trump’s cabinet and then grapple with our rampant ill health and corporate influence in our government? And will the Grand Old Party become—as some predict—the anti-establishment party, the party of peace, civil liberties, and the common man? Is Donald Trump, in other words, a Trojan Horse, smuggling in Odysseus and his warriors to make this alignment a realignment? Will the Republican party soon start to resemble the Democratic party of yore?
Speaking of Odysseus, I was in touch recently with a friend who is a diehard Kennedy supporter. This friend is a renowned writer and has a biracial son. And he told me that he’d been disturbed by the Trump-Kennedy alliance; and, in his distress, wrote to a friend, seeking counsel. And my friend received this response from his friend:
Kennedy could be likened to “a modern-day Odysseus,” his friend wrote, “an epic hero who has finally found his way home, embraced a late-in-life-revealed, unfolding destiny. The House he has ‘returned’ to is corrupt, devouring its own substance. As Schumpeter, the great economist, warned: ‘Capitalism will eventually devour the Moral Capital on which it depends.’ We’re there. Norman O. Brown ended his Love’s Body, if I remember rightly, with ‘there’s only poetry,’ which means, perhaps, it’s only a poetic-mythic eye that can make sense of the very real, potentially apocalyptic mess we’re in. To ‘clean house,’ Bobby needs a bow. Whomever is willing to hand him one will happily get my vote…if Trump is to be the instrument for that—well, the Gods love a good joke. Laughter at the head-spinning irony of it all is good and cleansing for the soul.”
Is this foolishly farfetched or brazenly astute?
You decide.
Contemplating this turn of events in our politics reminds me that we human beings have a strong desire for tidy coherence. Sometimes this desire can be a kind of sickness. In our desire for coherence we pretend away various inconvenient wrinkles of reality. For example, we pretend away harmful traits and policies of the political candidates we like. And we pretend away the positive qualities of the candidates we dislike. In our desire for coherence we sometimes fail to see that there are humane and insightful people on both “sides.” Indeed, we might convince ourselves that the people on the other side have nothing to teach us and are terribly, stupidly, thoroughly wrong.
And knives get sharpened.
America, don’t you feel we’re perhaps driving ourselves closer to some kind of internecine showdown?
Don’t you worry the tight, dualistic, blinkered entity we call the American mind might be rendering our children and grandchildren vulnerable to animosities they did nothing to create?
“And I am not a demigod,” Ezra Pound famously wrote, “I cannot make it cohere.”
But then he followed up that statement—a signal cry of modern despair—with one of the great lines of American literature, a line that delivers us from all incoherence: “If love be not in the house there is nothing.”
America, when we will end the human war?
America, when will we be angelic?
America, what is the use of our ridiculous politics? What is the use?
It is this, it is this, no matter what, and no matter how pious and hollow it may now sound: We are not enemies but friends, we must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection…
Image via Flickr
For anyone who still doubted it, the polling data from the Teamsters released yesterday proves pretty clearly why the Democrat Party was determined not to allow an open primary this year, because Kennedy would have decisively crushed Harris (and Biden of course wouldn’t have been able to run a campaign, though incumbency would have carried him through, but they were never, ever, ever going to put him on the ballot again). The powers that run the party have learned from their own history and from the recent GOP experience that they have to maintain an iron grip and not allow a “populist” movement to take over.
Kennedy is not a “conservative” in any remote sense. The only way you can perhaps argue so is by saying what even a few years ago was called “classical liberal”, i.e., toleration of differences and valuing individual liberty, is now deeply conservative. He held some pretty wacky positions until quite recently, such as saying that “climate deniers” should be imprisoned, but it appears that his eyes were opened up by the evils perpetuated by the system during covid, and the complete embrace of the surveillance state by the Democrats, who are now the party of, by, and for, the bureaucratic state, the PMC that has taken over the world.
It’s pretty amazing to see him and his running mate speak up far more for individual rights and freedoms than 90% of “conservative” or GOP figures. The system is completely corrupt, the real important distinction now isn’t “conservative” vs “liberal” or GOP vs Dem or anything else, it’s those who see that against those who don’t.
Thanks for this article. I’ve appreciated your perspective shared to Porchers throughout this campaign.
This re-alignment is very hard to think about. I remain ambivalent about Kennedy’s moves because, while I applaud very many of his positions, I remain disappointed that his position on abortion has become largely pro-choice (I remember a 2006ish article where Kennedy had described himself as ‘pro-life’.) And Trump’s public shift on the matter has coincided somewhat with Kennedy’s new support. Not that I ever doubted Trump’s real thoughts, or that his shift has surprised me.
One thing this new ‘anti-establishment,’ greenish, pro-holistic health, anti-imperialism, pro-civil liberty coalition is going to have to deal with is abortion. I should note that the godfather Wendell Berry himself has struggled on this issue. Personally, I find it hard *not* to apply the same admirable principles of peace and ecology, which well apply to the land and marginalized peoples, to the child in the womb.
Until this coalition deals with that, there’s going to be another, smaller coalition distinct from it, largely belonging to the American Solidarity Party and voting Sonski 2024.
Let me join Brian and Casey in praising you for writing this thoughtful piece, Teddy. Leftist that I am, I find it wholly unconvincing–using your own term, I would suggest that your presentation of Kennedy as a leader of the cause of environmental health or Trump as an agent of geopolitical peace is “foolishly farfetched”–but I admire it nonetheless because it’s a coherent, as well respectful, case, of the sort which far too few advocates of either of the major party candidates seem interested or even capable of making. (I’ll freely admit I’ve frequently failed in that regard as well.) Perhaps that’s because of Kennedy’s own inherited aristocratic presumptions, as warped as I think they’ve become due to his own fever dreams? At a time when the desperate rhetoric employed by many opposed to Trump’s return to the White House has inspired sick and foolish men to attempt violence against him, and while Trump himself trolls in hysterical falsehoods that have inspired bomb threats and civic fear in Springfield and elsewhere, Kennedy’s own words, despite his near-apocalyptic worldview, have tended to have a certain kind of serenity to them, an open-ended confidence that hearkens back to Obama and Reagan. It’s too bad he’s nuts, because the man did apparently learn, perhaps from watching his father, how in theory a person is supposed to lead.