RFK Jr. Embraces MAGA Ideals | Vanity Fair

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. used to call Donald Trump a “buffoon” and a “bully.” But, now, the eccentric independent has become a full-on toady. The transformation started last week when he dropped his quixotic candidacy for president, renounced the party of his revered uncle and father, and endorsed the Republican nominee. It continued this week when he told Tucker Carlson that he expects to serve on Trump’s transition team if Trump wins—making the prospect of a Trump victory in November somehow even more disturbing, as my colleague Bess Levin noted Tuesday.

But it was no accident that he ended up on the ex-president's rally stage Friday, where he insisted that the man who bungled the country's pandemic response would “make America healthy again.” Though he’d been somewhat tethered to the Democratic Party by his family name, RFK Jr. was always primed to cut loose into the MAGAsphere. Indeed, Trump may have cast him as a “liberal lunatic” in the past, but Kennedy's opportunism and conspiracism have made him a perfect fit for Trump's movement. In formally backing Trump, Kennedy seems to say he won't siphon off voters from the GOP candidate for president.

Then again, maybe not: After fighting to get his name on the ballot, Kennedy now can’t seem to get off the ballot in the key swing states of Michigan and Wisconsin. “Our polling consistently showed by staying on the ballot in battleground states, I would likely hand the election over to the Democrats, with whom I disagree on the most existential issues,” Kennedy said Friday, telling Trump supporters that he would “urge voters not to vote for me.” If enough Americans do vote for him, though, it could have a significant effect in states whose electoral votes could come down to a handful of ballots.

Kennedy's MAGA turn has also given Kamala Harris and Tim Walz even more material to work with in appraising their Republican opponents as “weird.” “This campaign of freaks is not going to do Republicans any favors,” as Matt Bennett, cofounder of the Democratic think tank Third Way, put it to the New York Times Tuesday. Trump and JD Vance were already struggling to shake off Democrats' initial brutal assessment. With the addition of a guy who apparently posed with a spit-roasted dog, staged a bear cub’s death, and chainsawed off a dead whale’s head, a “weirdo campaign just got weirder,” Bennett said.

In theory, the Trump campaign's addition of Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard—the former Democratic representative turned conservative media star—is supposed to symbolize the Democratic Party’s supposed abandonment of its previous values. Instead, it mostly just shows the inevitable unification of the extreme fringe. “It’s overall disappointing,” Kerry Kennedy said on CNN Tuesday of her brother’s addition to Trump’s team. Trump is an “affront to everything our father and uncle stood for.”