Lucas Ropek
Well, after two dead animal scandals, some sexual assault allegations, a brain worm, and plummeting polling numbers, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s political campaign is effectively over. Kennedy said Friday that he is “suspending” his campaign but that interested stans will still be able to vote for him in non-swing states. And, in what has to be one of the most explicit displays of a person openly betraying their own purported values to suck up to political power, Kennedy has decided to endorse Donald Trump in the presidential race.
During a concession speech of sorts, Kennedy claimed that he felt called to endorse Trump because they shared common interests. Those interests, as far as can be discerned, are “free speech, the war in Ukraine, and the war on our children,” as the candidate put it. “These are the principled causes that persuaded me to leave the Democratic Party and run as an independent, and now to throw my support to President Trump,” Kennedy said.
It’s true that both RFK and Trump have spent a lot of time yammering about these issues and that, objectively, there is a record of them expressing concern about them. But one could also make the case that the candidates’ interest in said topics are, all things considered, somewhat new and, therefore, not necessarily evidence of longstanding interest or values. They could be—as is so often the case in politics—politically convenient postures that play favorably to necessary voter blocs.
Yet during his speech Friday, Kennedy also ruminated on issues that have inarguably been longstanding parts of his brand, issues he claimed he still cares deeply about: healthcare, protecting the environment, abating America’s corporate regulatory capture, and providing Americans with healthy food. In his remarks, Kennedy wildly seemed to imply that Trump would do something to advance these goals.
Onlookers are arguably left with only two ways to interpret Kennedy’s Trump endorsement. The first is to presume that Kennedy is very, very stupid. Only someone with the mental faculties of a tadpole would believe that Donald Trump is going to accomplish the things that Kennedy apparently hopes Trump will accomplish. The other interpretive strategy is to assume that Kennedy is totally full of it. In other words, Kennedy isn’t really invested in the values (the environment, Americans’ health, etc) that he says he is—or, at the very least, is willing to completely and utterly betray those values to support Trump.
To bolster both of these arguments, here are some of the issues that Kennedy claims he cares about, alongside Trump’s record relative to those issues. Astute observers will note that the contrasts are stark.
Kennedy is full of shit (or an idiot) on protecting the environment
The kindest thing you can say about Kennedy’s endorsement of Trump is that it is a betrayal of everything he worked for during his career as an environmental lawyer. Even if many of Kennedy’s complaints about the Democratic Party are true, one thing that is inarguable is that the Democrats are light-years ahead of the GOP when it comes to protecting the environment. As such, endorsing Trump is unforgivable from the perspective of someone who authentically cares about the natural world. Trump notably rolled back more than 100 environmental rules and regulations and nominated a guy with dense ties to the Koch brothers and the oil lobby to head the EPA. Project 2025, the policy blueprint authored by the Heritage Foundation and a small army of former Trump officials, has plans to gut the EPA, defund multiple weather agencies, ban official use of the term “climate change,” and do a whole assortment of other terrible things when it comes to environmental protection. Trump has even proposed privatizing protected federal lands so that they can be used to build “futuristic cities.”
Kennedy is full of shit (or an idiot) on healthcare
Kennedy also mentions healthcare a lot and says he feels that America’s healthcare system needs to be fixed. Not only did Trump try to kill Obamacare (the only government program making healthcare affordable for tens of millions of Americans) multiple times, but Project 2025 would seek to roll back consumer health benefits that the Biden administration instituted, like negotiated drug prices. That same project has been supported by lobbying groups that represent the pharmaceutical industry, Rolling Stone has reported. Project 2025 would also seek to bolster Medicare Advantage, the privatized version of Medicare—a move that, as American Progress has put it, would represent a “multibillion-dollar giveaway to corporations” that would also “limit older Americans’ health care choices while putting Medicare’s future at risk.”
Kennedy is full of shit (or an idiot) on healthy food
During his horribly long concession speech Friday, Kennedy spent an on-godly amount of time rambling about “chronic disease” and obesity. In a move that should have made most onlookers upchuck their lunch from laughter, he went on to imply that Donald Trump—a guy who is, himself, reported to be obese—is going to fix both of these problems. If Trump’s past policies are any indication, Kennedy is wrong here. In 2018, it was reported that snack food and corn syrup lobbyists had been put in charge of food policy at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Again, why Kennedy thinks the guy who filled the White House with Big Macs is going to help low-income Americans break their addiction to fast food is beyond me.
Kennedy is full of shit (or an idiot) on “regulatory capture”
Probably the most mystifying thing that Kennedy said on Friday is that he supports the end of corporate “regulatory capture” and that he expects Donald Trump to do something about this. On Friday, Kennedy said that he wanted a leader who would “clean corporate influence out of the government,” and that Trump had “adopted” this issue. Again, the stupidity here is rank. During Trump’s first administration, he effectively tried to turn the federal government into a corporate whorehouse, allowing an assortment of industries to effectively write the rules by which they are regulated. A 2019 investigation by ProPublica found a “staggering” level of Trump political appointees were former corporate lobbyists, some 281 appointees—or one out of every 14. Appropriately, Project 2025 offers a vision of a future presidency that is like Trump’s first administration on steroids. Why, exactly, would Kennedy expect Trump to “clean corporate influence” out of the government when his main priority seems to be maximizing it?