Now, after two animal-death scandals, sexual assault allegations, a brain parasite and plummeting poll numbers, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign is effectively over. Kennedy said Friday he was “pausing” his campaign, but interested fans could still vote for him outside of battleground states. And in one of the clearest examples of someone openly betraying his professed values to kowtow to the political establishment, Kennedy has decided to endorse Donald Trump for president.
In a sort of concession speech, Kennedy argued that he was mandated to support Trump because of their shared interests: “free speech, the war in Ukraine and the war on children,” as the candidate put it. “These are the principled causes that prompted me to leave the Democratic Party, to run as an independent, and now to support President Trump,” Kennedy said.
Certainly, both RFK and Trump have spoken at length about these issues, and objectively there is a record that they have expressed concern about them. But one could argue that the candidates’ interest in these issues is somewhat new, all things considered, and therefore not necessarily evidence of long-standing interests or values. As is often the case in politics, it may be politically expedient posturing to benefit a necessary constituency.
But during Friday’s speech, Kennedy also mused about issues that have undoubtedly been a longtime part of his brand and that he claims he still cares deeply about: health care, protecting the environment, reducing regulatory control over American corporations and providing healthy food to Americans. In his remarks, Kennedy seemed bold to suggest that Trump would do anything to advance these goals.
It can be said that an onlooker is left with only two ways to interpret Kennedy’s support for Trump. The first is to assume that Kennedy is extremely stupid; only someone with the intelligence of a tadpole would believe that Trump will achieve what Kennedy wants him to achieve. The other interpretation strategy is to assume that Kennedy is total bullshit; in other words, Kennedy doesn’t actually care about the values he claims to espouse (the environment, the health of Americans, etc.), or at least is not willing to completely betray those values in order to support Trump.
To bolster these two claims, here are some of the issues Kennedy claims to care about, and Trump’s record on those issues: The astute observer will notice the stark contrast.
Kennedy is a total liar (or an idiot) when it comes to protecting the environment.
The kindest thing that can be said about Kennedy’s support of Trump is that it is a betrayal of everything he built in his career as an environmental lawyer. Even if many of Kennedy’s grievances about the Democratic Party are true, it is indisputable that the Democratic Party is light years ahead of the Republican Party when it comes to environmental protection. Therefore, from the perspective of anyone who truly cares about the natural world, supporting Trump is unforgivable. Trump has notably rolled back more than 100 environmental rules and regulations and appointed a man with close ties to the Koch brothers and the oil lobby to head the EPA. Project 2025, a policy blueprint created by the Heritage Foundation and a small group of former Trump administration officials, has plans to do a variety of terrible things to environmental protection, including gutting the EPA, defunding several weather agencies, and banning the official use of the term “climate change.” Trump has proposed privatizing protected federal lands and using them to build “cities of the future.”
Kennedy is a liar (or an idiot) about health care.
Kennedy also frequently speaks about health care, saying he feels the U.S. health care system needs to be improved. Not only has Trump tried multiple times to repeal Obamacare (the only government program that made health care affordable for tens of millions of Americans), but Project 2025 is seeking to roll back consumer health benefits such as drug price negotiations put in place by the Biden administration. As Rolling Stone reports, this same project is backed by lobbying groups representing the pharmaceutical industry. Project 2025 also seeks to strengthen Medicare Advantage, a privately run version of Medicare. As American Progress put it, the move would be a “billion-dollar gift to corporations” that would “limit health care options for older Americans while also jeopardizing the future of Medicare.”
Kennedy is a liar (or an idiot) about health foods.
In his terribly long concession speech on Friday, Kennedy rambled on at length about “chronic disease” and obesity. In a statement that would have made most bystanders spit out their lunches from laughing so hard, he further implied that Donald Trump, who is reportedly obese himself, would solve these two problems. If Trump’s past policies are any indication, Kennedy is wrong here. In 2018, a lobbyist for snack foods and corn syrup was reportedly appointed head of food policy at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). Again, I don’t understand why Kennedy thinks the man who filled the White House with Big Macs will help low-income Americans kick their fast-food addiction.
Kennedy is lying (or is an idiot) about “regulatory capture”
Perhaps the most puzzling thing Kennedy said on Friday is that he supports an end to corporate “regulatory captivity” and expects Donald Trump to do something about it. On Friday, Kennedy said he wanted a leader who would “clean corporate influence out of government,” and Trump “took up” the issue. Here, too, the idiocy is stark. In his first administration, Trump tried to turn the federal government into a corporate brothel, effectively allowing various industries to write the rules that would regulate themselves. A 2019 investigation by ProPublica found that a “staggering” percentage of Trump’s political appointees, about 281 of them, or 1 in 14, were former corporate lobbyists. Fittingly, Project 2025 presents a vision of a future president that’s like Trump’s first administration on steroids. Precisely, why would Kennedy expect to “clean corporate influence” out of government when Trump’s number one priority is to maximize corporate influence?
