The past decade has been a remarkable demonstration of the extent to which celebrity and money can provide a platform for unfounded, dangerous theories about the world. These have always been with us, of course, but the advent of the internet or social media or both has allowed those theories to find pockets of support that snowball into movements when given just a little bit of push from fortune or fame.<\/p>\n
On Friday afternoon, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. \u2014 scion of the most famous name in American politics \u2014 withdrew his independent bid for the presidency and offered his support (and presumably votes) to Donald Trump. While doing so, having attracted a substantial number of cameras and reporters for one of only a handful of times during his campaign, he rained bizarre claims and false assertions down upon them, reinforcing indirectly the extent to which even the limited success of his campaign was rooted in his last name rather than his commitment to reality.<\/p>\n
We will leave the fact-checking to the fact-checkers, in part because this generally thankless task has rarely been more so. In part, too, because a lot of what Kennedy said has been debunked before, including by this newspaper. There is one slight misrepresentation that\u2019s already sneaked into this story, though, that should be addressed: Kennedy sort of withdrew and sort of endorsed Trump, but also told blue-state voters to vote for him and maybe he had some path to the presidency? It didn\u2019t make sense, but that, at least, was in keeping with the rest of the speech.<\/p>\n
There was one point Kennedy made, however, that deserves elevation. It was that he was willing to (sort of) offer his support to Trump because he believed that Trump was committed to Kennedy\u2019s pet causes and that the Republican would, if elected, uphold his commitments to work with Kennedy to address them.<\/p>\n
\u201cPresident Trump has told me that he wants this\u201d \u2014 fixing \u201cchronic disease\u201d primarily by getting kids to eat better, apparently \u2014 \u201cto be his legacy,\u201d Kennedy said. \u201cI\u2019m choosing to believe at this time he will follow through.\u201d<\/p>\n
There\u2019s some self-awareness there, certainly; someone with full confidence in the reliability of someone else doesn\u2019t couch that confidence with a tacit \u201cwe\u2019ll see.\u201d But even that limited awarding of trust in Donald Trump seems very obviously to be misplaced.<\/p>\n
First of all, there\u2019s the fact that Donald Trump has never once mentioned \u201cchronic disease\u201d in this context. To believe that Trump is concerned about the issue is one thing. To take at anything close to face value that Trump intends for \u201cchronic disease\u201d to be the defining characteristic of Trump\u2019s time in the White House requires an unbelievable level of credulousness.<\/p>\n
Granted, this is Robert Kennedy, whose embrace of other false claims suggests a general willingness to overlook the available evidence in favor of what he wants to see. But this is overlooking a U.S.-Mexico-border-height wall to view an entirely different Donald Trump.<\/p>\n
Second, there\u2019s little reason to grant Trump a generous presumption of reliability in general. Last month, video leaked showing Kennedy accepting a call from Trump. Kennedy is shown with Trump on speakerphone, allowing viewers to hear both sides of the conversation. It\u2019s clear that Trump is angling for the outcome (mostly) manifested Friday, doing so by telling Kennedy very obviously what he wants Kennedy to hear. Reporters who have spoken with Trump on the phone (like myself) will be familiar with this iteration of Trump, alternately wheedling and cajoling.<\/p>\n
Kennedy seems to have been convinced.<\/p>\n
The sort-of-former-candidate claimed that he was backing Trump because of \u201cfree speech, the war in Ukraine and the war on our children.\u201d Kennedy spent some time on that second point, rehashing a remarkably Russia-sympathetic view of the conflict, before offering another example of his faith in the former president\u2019s forthrightness.<\/p>\n
\u201cPresident Trump says that he will reopen negotiations with President Putin and end the war overnight as soon as he becomes president,\u201d Kennedy told reporters. \u201cThis alone would justify my support for his campaign.\u201d<\/p>\n
There\u2019s not really much to say to that. If you think that Trump will actually be able to \u201cend the war overnight\u201d simply through sheer force of will, even accepting that this outcome would mean capitulation to Russia, you\u2019re giving Donald Trump an awful lot of unearned credit. The pattern of Trump\u2019s politics from the outset has been to making sweeping promises, particularly when he\u2019s not in a position to act upon them. Should those promises (almost invariably) fall short, they are redefined and reshaped until Trump can claim victory. It doesn\u2019t take much observation of the world to understand how this has worked but, again, Kennedy\u2019s public profile is not that of someone who adjusts his position in the face of countervailing evidence.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s an existing question of the extent to which Kennedy\u2019s endorsement of Trump actually helps the former president. Just on paper, it\u2019s likely that it won\u2019t do much; he was polling in the low single digits, and third-party voters are often people only loosely committed to casting a ballot in the first place.<\/p>\n
But there\u2019s another angle here worth considering. Donald Trump is now, to at least some extent, accountable for what Kennedy says and does. Voters who like Trump but are wary of a senior administration official who has a background of opposing vaccines might also be less eager to vote.<\/p>\n
One more problem: If Kennedy starts to, say, haul roadkill around New York state, Trump will be asked to weigh in on his most prominent supporter\u2019s actions. There may come moments in which Trump will be tempted to disavow Kennedy, as he has his allies who worked on Project 2025. Will he refrain from doing so? And if he doesn\u2019t, will Kennedy realize that \u2014 as he seems to suspect could happen and as many might predict will happen \u2014 he\u2019s been played?<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The past decade has been a remarkable demonstration of the extent to which celebrity and money can provide a platform for unfounded, dangerous theories about the world. These have always been with us, of course, but the advent of the internet or social media or both has allowed those theories to find pockets of support […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":8468,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8467"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8467\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}