The Brooklyn Rail

Every time I see Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s face, I feel remorse, because it inevitably reminds me of his father, who I revered and whose assassination in 1968 is as vivid and present to me today as it was then, when I was 15 years old. A few minutes before he was shot, Bobby Kennedy spoke to a crowd about trying to address the country’s bitter divisions, “whether it’s between blacks and whites, between the poor and the more affluent, or between age groups, or over the war in Vietnam.” Before he was shot, Bobby Kennedy carried the mark of sacrifice, in the way he listened to and touched the people who crowded around him in a frenzy. He gladly took on the sorrows and burdens of ordinary people to expiate them in political struggle. He was a figure of such hope that it seemed like anything might be possible.

So to watch Bobby Kennedy’s son now bend his knee to Donald Trump, who has taken that legacy of reaching out to ordinary people and turned it into an authoritarian device for obtaining unlimited power, is both terrifying and galling. JD Vance called Trump “cultural heroin.” RFK Jr. adds an admixture of political-legacy cocaine to make a Trump/Kennedy speedball of democratic dysfunction.

For decades, RFK Jr. was a highly effective trial lawyer and advocate for environmental, energy, and human rights. He did more to help clean up the Hudson River than almost anyone, and spearheaded the battle to close the Indian Point nuclear power plant. He did incredible work helping indigenous people in Canada and Latin America to fight encroachments by oil companies and industrial logging companies, and he helped the Chipewyan First Nation and the Beaver Lake Cree to protect their land from tar sands development. He protested the Keystone XL Pipeline and the extension of the Dakota Access pipeline across the Sioux Indian Standing Rock Reservation’s water supply. He campaigned for Barack Obama in 2008 and after the election, the Obama administration reportedly considered Kennedy for the position of administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

So, what happened to this scion of greatness, to turn him into such a pathetic yet dangerous figure? Was it the inconsistencies in the explanations of his father’s assassination or was it the COVID-19 vaccine that drove him over the edge? Previously, he was on record as saying that Donald Trump was a “terrible human being,” a “discredit to democracy,” and “probably a sociopath.” Now RFK Jr. has become the latest super-spreader of the political disease infecting America, a virus so virulent it may yet overwhelm and overtake 250 years of democratic experiment and replace it with authoritarianism.

In image terms, having RFK Jr. bow down to Trump as he has is a tremendous symbolic victory for the MAGA movement. In electoral terms, it is difficult to measure the effect yet. Are RFK Jr.’s fan-boys under 30 actually going to vote? And if so, will they vote for Trump?

In 2008, Obama beat McCain by 34 points among voters under 30. In 2012, Obama’s margin over Romney slipped to +23 points. Hillary’s margin in 2016 dropped to +18, but Biden in 2020 went back up to +25. Right now, Harris/Walz is only up 8 points on Trump/Vance among young voters, so that category is going to be significant. Will the combo of Trump, RFK Jr., JD Vance, and Elon Musk turn 18-29-year-old tech-bros into a winning voting bloc in 2024?

Even though RFK Jr. has suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump, he apparently will still have to remain on the ballots in Wisconsin, Michigan, and North Carolina, and it is unclear what the effect of that will be. And Putin asset Jill Stein will be on many state ballots. In 2016, she got 1.4 million votes, which almost certainly helped put Trump in the White House the first time. Cornel West is polling above Stein, at 2% nationally, and the Libertarian candidate is at 1%, all of which may be constitutive in a close election.

Because of the Electoral College, 435,000 undecided voters in six states will determine who the next president is: 44,600 voters in Wisconsin, 98,600 voters in Georgia, 20,000 voters in Arizona, 135,600 voters in Pennsylvania, 16,900 voters in Nevada, and 115,000 voters in Michigan.

Bobby Kennedy appealed to the same part of American society that Trump purportedly does now: the left-behind part, the part that always gets the short end of the stick. I first glimpsed the similarity to the Kennedy mystique in Trump’s children, at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, in 2016, and it chilled me. They were the twisted mirror image of Bobby: Bobby without compassion, driven by greed, fear, and resentment.

Especially after Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot, Bobby Kennedy took on the pernicious evil of racism in America that was reaching a fever pitch then, as a backlash against the Civil Rights Movement. He stood up against the hate. Donald Trump has harnessed this hate, in the backlash against America's first Black president, and used it to fuel a White nationalist uprising, embracing a politics of grievance. So much has been lost. So much more is set to be lost, including everything that Bobby Kennedy stood for, in the end. And in a cruel twist of fate, his son could now have a hand in that debacle.