The Coming Kennedy Endorsement

Catturd is angry.

Catturd is always angry, really, but especially so today. And if you cover politics in 2024, that’s news.

“Catturd” is the nom de tweet of a Trump-worshipping right-wing social media “personality” with a following of 2.7 million people. He’s big enough to have scored an interview with the most popular postliberal broadcaster in the country. His content has been promoted by the once and maybe future president of the United States. He wields more influence over populist Republican opinion than most members of Congress, it’s safe to say.

If you’re still looking for reasons to snuff this era in right-wing politics by defeating Donald Trump this fall, there’s another.

The reason the litter box is fuller than usual today is this:

Joe Rogan was a Bernie Sanders voter four years ago but his contrarian instincts have driven him to the right, as tends to happen with counterculturalists nowadays. By 2023 he was sufficiently in sync with MAGA to have wondered if Kari Lake really was cheated out of a rightful victory when she ran for governor of Arizona.

He’s conspiratorial, he disdains Joe Biden, and he has a passion for traditional macho stuff that’s made him popular with young men, all traits he shares with the Republican nominee. (The two met last year at a UFC event.) The stars seemed aligned for an Elon-esque Trump endorsement cementing Rogan’s alliance with the cult.

Instead, on Thursday, he turned around and announced that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is “the only one that makes sense to me.” That technically wasn’t an endorsement but it was close enough. And so Catturd is angry. Boy, is he ever.

Joe Rogan is about to discover what Ron DeSantis, Kyle Rittenhouse, and the staff of Project 2025 already know. No matter how much you do to advance the populist causes that Trump and his fans claim to care about, their affection for you will last as long as you’re useful to Donald Trump and not a second longer.

I wonder if Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a popular figure among MAGA fans in his own right, understands that yet.

If not, I’m guessing he will soon. It can’t be long before he quits the race and endorses Trump, I think.

From relevance to irrelevance and back.

Kennedy’s campaign polled north of 10 percent earlier in the race but it’s been in decline for months. Normie voters who were intrigued by his pedigree took a hard look and … slowly backed away. And some fringier voters who are open in principle to supporting a loose-cannon independent got sucked back into “binary choice” partisanship as the campaign between Biden and Trump picked up.

Even so, one could understand why RFK would grit his teeth and press on. With two unpopular candidates topping the ballot, he could talk himself into believing there’d be a late break toward him among undecided voters. And since both of those candidates were also freakishly old, Kennedy was potentially one eleventh-hour Biden or Trump “health event” away from becoming a fallback option for a huge bloc of Democratic or Republican voters.

One could also understand why Team Trump felt no urgent need to try to lure him out of the race. As a candidate, Kennedy was doing them more good than harm. The final RealClearPolitics national polling average had Trump leading Biden by 3.1 points head-to-head but by 4.2 points when RFK and other third-party candidates were included.

That feels counterintuitive, as Kennedy’s gonzo persona seems more likely to attract Trumpy populists than Biden voters. But it makes sense given the enthusiasm gap between Democrats and Republicans for their respective nominees as of mid-July. I’ve always thought ambivalent liberals were more likely to ditch an enfeebled Joe Biden for RFK than Trump admirers were to ditch the cult leader.

Everything is different now.

The new Democratic nominee isn’t feeble. Enthusiasm for her within her party is sky high. There simply aren’t as many Kennedy-curious Democrats and independents now as there were before Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden on the ballot. To prove it, Aaron Blake ran the numbers from six recent national polls and found that her lead over Trump is larger in a multi-candidate field than it is in head-to-head polling.

The RealClearPolitics national average bears that out. When it’s just the two of them pitted against each other, Harris leads Trump by 0.5 points. Throw Kennedy and the other third-party candidates into the mix and her lead ticks up to 0.8.

Left-leaning voters who felt disaffected by Biden are coming home, it seems, which means RFK’s presence in the race now really is doing Trump more harm than good. Blake notes one arresting bit of data from the recent Marquette Law School national survey: Kennedy is winning 8 percent of Democratic-tilting independents but 23 percent of Republican-leaning ones.

Irony of ironies, Trumpworld’s efforts early in the campaign to promote Kennedy in right-wing media have boomeranged on them. They thought they were raising the profile of a leftist who’d capitalize on Biden’s unpopularity among progressives and ultimately tilt the election to Trump, a la Ralph Nader in 2000. Instead they created a populist monster by finding one of the few people in politics with the sort of name ID and issue set who might plausibly appeal to Trump-leaning kooks.

The result: According to the latest New York Times national poll, RFK’s favorability among Democrats is a measly 24-60. Among Republicans it’s 47-31.

There will be no late break toward Kennedy among left-leaning undecideds in October with Kamala Harris on the ballot instead of Joe Biden. Realistically, all hope for a “health event” (or another “health event”) on the Democratic side that upends the race is gone. The only thing RFK can achieve by remaining in the race is weakening the cause of populists by splitting the right-wing vote with the Republican nominee and ensuring a Harris victory.

Which would be awfully foolish for a politician whose dwindling constituency lies mostly on the right. If you think Catturd and the gang are mad at Joe Rogan, imagine Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, and Florida turning blue by a point or two this year thanks to Kennedy taking 3 or 4 percent of the vote in those states from Trump.

News came just yesterday, in fact, that RFK has qualified for the ballot in Texas. He’s pulling 8 percent in polling there. Trump won Texas four years ago by less than 6 percentage points.

And so, a mystery: What on earth is this man still doing in the race? 

Harris’ usurpation of Biden and the resulting narrowing in the polls has made Kennedy hugely relevant again. He’s been gifted a great deal of leverage over an increasingly desperate Donald Trump by the Democrats’ switcheroo. Why doesn’t he use that leverage to get something for himself or his cause, whatever that cause might be?

The obvious move.

Trump and his toadies have been courting Kennedy for ages.

At one point last year when MAGA media was hyping RFK in hopes that he’d spoil Biden’s reelection, Steve Bannon got high enough on his own supply to even tout Kennedy as a potential running mate for Trump.

That’s not as crazy as it sounds, but as long as Trump was reliably ahead in the polls he had no strong incentive to consider it. Having now seen his lead evaporate overnight, I wonder what he’d do if he could turn the clock back a month. Would he stick with J.D. Vance, who’s been nothing but trouble for him so far? Or would he choose RFK and make a play for the stubborn 5.5 percent of voters in his column, knowing that they might be the difference between victory and defeat?

It’s too late to replace Vance. But it’s certainly not too late for Trump to ask Kennedy to name his price for withdrawing from the race and endorsing the Republican ticket.

They’ve already chatted about it. Last month, during the Republican convention, the two met in Milwaukee “to discuss the possibility of the independent candidate endorsing the Republican nominee,” according to Politico. Days earlier, Trump phoned Kennedy and was caught on tape pandering to him aggressively on his pet issue, the supposed danger of vaccines:

“I would love for you to serve,” Trump told him at one point, which isn’t the first time this cycle that a Republican presidential candidate mused about handing some sort of official power over government scientists to the country’s most prominent vaccine skeptic.

Trump’s grotesque campaign against school vaccine mandates is almost certainly a response to Kennedy being in the race, in fact. Right-wing anti-vaxxers may dislike that his administration spearheaded the COVID vaccines but that’s not going to make them abandon him for a normie liberal like Kamala Harris. Give them RFK as an option on the ballot, though, and some might abandon Trump afterall. There’s a lot of paranoid neo-Bircher kookery about vaccination out there on the right for RFK to exploit potentially, and Trump knows it.

In a race where 5.5 percent is the difference between winning and losing—and, for the Republican nominee, potentially the difference between freedom and prison—Trump will be willing to say and do anything to boost his chances. If that means bringing back measles by demagoguing the merits of mandatory vaccination, fine. If that means giving Robert F. Kennedy Jr. a position in his Cabinet, also fine.

According to The New Yorker, that too has been discussed:

At the Convention, [RFK spokesman Amaryllis] Fox Kennedy said, Trump alluded to the possibility of Kennedy ending his run. “They said, ‘You know, we know that you take more from us than you take from Biden,’” she recalled. Trump and his team, she went on, had asked Kennedy, “‘Is there something that you would want to do?’” Kennedy is not opposed to serving in a Trump Administration. Secretary of Health and Human Services, Fox Kennedy said, “is an incredibly interesting one.”

An anti-vaxxer as HHS secretary. Don’t doubt for a moment that Trump will agree to that if he believes RFK’s endorsement will meaningfully improve his chances of winning—which, given the polling, it would. Or that cowardly Republicans in a GOP-controlled Senate would rubber-stamp the nomination knowing how their base of cranks would react if they didn’t, whatever doing so might mean for America’s public health.

And so, at this point, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has everything to gain and nothing to lose by accepting Trump’s offer and endorsing him. Staying in the race means ending up a nonfactor at best or a spoiler for the Republican’s candidacy at worst. And that could be dangerous—literally. RFK might be willing to kiss off all of the new fans he’s made in Fox Nation for the sake of continuing his no-hope campaign, but is he willing to be inundated with death threats from them for years to come after Trump loses narrowly and scapegoats him for the defeat?

He’s not going to be president and he’s not going to spoil Kamala Harris’ chances of being president. The only move left for Kennedy to make that will build him a durable political constituency is supporting Trump. He’ll have the eternal gratitude of the worst people in American politics for doing so. And he’ll be given a role on the trail and on television as an important surrogate, someone who might be able to pick off just enough left-leaning voters for it to matter somewhere for Republicans.

Then, if Trump wins, he’ll land in the Cabinet and wield vastly more influence over American policy than he ever would have if he had continued his campaign. And vastly more than any sensible person would dream of giving him. 

Nothing to lose, everything to gain. Endorsing Trump is a no-brainer for him. Which … might be a problem in this case.

Rational vs. irrational.

When I ran the prospect of Kennedy endorsing Trump by one of our editors this morning, he scoffed. “I don’t think RFK can really be swayed by the normal offers politicians make in this kind of scenario,” he told me. “Like David S. Pumpkins, he’s kind of his own thing.”

Is Kennedy simply too irrational to do something as eminently rational (for him) as backing Trump?

Remember, we’re talking about a guy whose instinct upon finding a dead bear cub by the side of the road was to load it into his trunk in hopes of harvesting it for meat. And then to pose for photos with his hand in the mouth of its bloody corpse.

And then, when he couldn’t find time to skin it and butcher it, to dump the body in Central Park and stage the scene to make it look like a cyclist had run over it.

“I’ve been picking up roadkill my whole life. I have a freezer full of it,” Kennedy said a few days ago about the bear incident, drawing laughter from reporters. He isn’t joking, his spokesman quickly clarified. (He uses the meat to feed his falcons, supposedly.)

Every few weeks or so we get a new scoop about him that causes one to think, “It can’t get weirder than this.” And then it gets weirder. J.D. Vance’s weirdness is pedestrian, almost charming, by comparison.

It won’t surprise me if Kennedy is indeed too much of “his own thing” to sensibly leverage his chance to play kingmaker in the presidential race, instead trudging on to finish with a gentlemanly 3 percent. But there must be a reason he keeps taking calls from Trump, and that his spokesman is dangling federal agencies to reporters that he might be interested in leading.

Some moves are so rational that even the weirdest of weirdos can’t resist making them. Donald Trump is very much “his own thing” too, and he made a rational choice by naming Mike Pence as his running mate in 2016 to shore up evangelical support, didn’t he?

But maybe I’m selling RFK short here. Maybe his reluctance to endorse thus far is less a matter of irrationality than of morality.

According to The New Yorker, Kennedy recently told someone in a text exchange that Trump is “a terrible human being. The worse president ever and barely human. He is probably a sociopath.” (Probably?) Somewhere underneath all that weirdness is a man normal enough to see Trump for what he is and to be properly repulsed by it.

But underneath that layer, it seems there’s more weirdness. In the same text exchange, Kennedy claimed that Biden was “more dangerous to the Republic and the planet.” That sounds like a man who’s talking himself into believing that Trump, for all his faults, is preferable to an underwhelming Democratic opponent—the same fateful first step that millions of Republicans took in 2016 en route to becoming the Trump enthusiasts they are today. Kennedy will get there too, I think. The endorsement is coming.