RFK, jr. and Trump's Achilles Heel
By
Douglas Schwartz
History provides examples of third-party presidential candidates swinging elections. Ross Perot denied George H.W. Bush a second term in 1992, running on the Reform Party ticket and garnering 18.9% of the popular vote. Bill Clinton won with only 43.0%. In 1980, Congressman John Anderson ran an incoherent candidacy yet captured 6.6% of votes. Reagan prevailed over Carter 50.7% to 41.0%. It is unclear if Anderson’s bid was engineered by Reagan’s campaign to split votes from Carter. Teddy Roosevelt's 1912 third-party run split Republican votes, yielding Woodrow Wilson, the first progressive leftist president.
Now comes RFK Jr. with a platform exhibiting substantial overlap with the MAGA agenda. Kennedy's
recent interview with James O'Keefe reveals his targeting of MAGA voters,
especially younger ones unfamiliar with his
family’s dark history.
Trump’s Achilles heel was allowing himself to be bamboozled into supporting the COVID narrative of the pharmaceutical-medical-globalist complex. Because of his congenital reluctance to issue a mea culpa and admit that he was conned, Kennedy could potentially appeal to this large segment of the electorate. Perhaps Trump is banking a mea culpa for an October 2024 surprise.
For solid realpolitik reasons Trump avoids attacking Kennedy and is modestly complimentary. Many assume a Kennedy independent run would pull more Democrat than MAGA votes. This could be a fatal error. Certain things are appealing about Kennedy and his late uncle and father. But to believe the Kennedy clan are saints is absurd. Exhibit A was Teddy Kennedy, with a seedy record including Chappaquiddick,
waitress sandwiches, and perfecting a career of
boozing, bonking, and
borking in collaboration with a senator named Biden. Or his
backdoor bromance with Yuri Andropov against Reagan. The morals of Teddy’s older brothers were not altogether different. Seymour Hersh, dean of investigative journalists and no conservative, assembled a
500-page tome of Kennedy family negatives. Their crimes and foibles were hardly confined to stealing the 1960 election from Nixon in Illinois and beyond. There is an extensive record of their payoffs and acceptance of bribes, collusion with mobsters and corrupt union bosses, womanizing, and promoting assassinations of foreign leaders. The posthumous sainthood of RFK, his brother’s consiglieri and enforcer, was the final plank in
Camelot mythology. Camelot was more than myth. Hersh described it as “years of lies and cover-ups.”
Kennedy previously maintained he has “
always been fiercely pro-vaccine” and supports “policies that encourage full vaccination for all Americans.” This obviously conflicts with his current stance. Kennedy is no conservative, supporting Hillary Clinton in her
senatorial and
presidential races. Kennedy’s schtick is a bipartisan fusion of anti-globalist rhetoric appealing to populists, combined with
climate change/
environmentalism. He inserts populist buzzwords at every opportunity. Right-leaning influencers now fawning over him need to explore his background and that of his ancestors, beginning with Joseph P. Kennedy’s organized crime roots. The family business morphed from crime to politics -- crime by other means. He is a skillfully repackaged Democrat, scheming over decades for this moment. A chameleon continuously reconfiguring in response to shifting political winds, appropriating MAGA issues which now possess currency. The same guy who supported Hillary Clinton
whined when mean Republicans stole the 2004 election from John Kerry.
History provides examples of third-party presidential candidates swinging elections. Ross Perot denied George H.W. Bush a second term in 1992, running on the Reform Party ticket and garnering 18.9% of the popular vote. Bill Clinton won wit...
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