What Is RFK Jr. After, Really?
By Eric Lutz
April 10, 2024
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. tapped California attorney Nicole Shanahan as his running mate for vice president during an event in Oakland, California on March 26, 2024.Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other potential spoiler candidates could play a decisive role in Donald Trump’s effort to beat Joe Biden this fall. “There is no question that in a close presidential race,” Trump strategist Roger Stone told the New York Times Wednesday, “independent or minor party candidates can have a disproportionately large impact.” But the Kennedy scion, a Democrat turned independent crank, may not mind being used as a pawn in Trump’s scheme to return to power. In fact, the Kennedy campaign has seemed, at times, to relish its part as a possible Biden saboteur.
CNN this week reported that an RFK Jr. campaign official, Rita Palma, told a meeting of Republicans in New York that ensuring Kennedy is on the state's ballot would open the door to Trump winning there and help them “get rid of Biden,” which she described as her “number one priority.” “If it’s Trump vs. Biden, Biden wins,” she told the crowd. “With Bobby in the mix, anything can happen.”
“We’re all on the same team right now,” she added, “and we’ll be on the same team later, as long as Trump or Kennedy wins.”
And, as CNN pointed out Tuesday, it gets worse: Palma had previously attended the “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6, 2021—the day an armed MAGA mob stormed the Capitol—and repeatedly praised Trump as her “favorite president” over social media, suggested he should serve more than two terms, and expressed support for his baseless “rigged election” claims. “Jan 6 was not a riot,” Palma tweeted the day after the insurrection. “A small group of people were trouble. It was 99.9 peaceful. I was there.”
The Kennedy campaign has downplayed her involvement, describing Palma as a mere “ballot access consultant responsible for scheduling volunteer shifts for our upcoming signature collection drive” in New York. “She is not involved in electoral strategy,” Kennedy spokesperson Stefanie Spear told CNN.
But Palma is not the only apparent Trump sympathizer in the orbit of the Kennedy campaign, which has enjoyed significant financial support from donors who contributed to the former president’s 2020 bid. For one, there's Timothy Mellon, the largest single donor to both RFK Jr.’s PAC and to Trump’s MAGA Inc. There’s also Del Bigtree—who was hired by the RFK Jr. campaign earlier this year, after he raised doubts about the integrity of voting machines during a January 6 rally—as well as the unnamed “marketing contractor” who in Kennedy fundraising mails last week described convicted insurrectionists as “J6 activists…stripped of their Constitutional liberties.”
Much like Palma, the campaign distanced from that contractor, claiming he'd been fired and that Kennedy believes that “anyone who violated the law on January 6 should be subject to appropriate criminal and/or civil penalties.” The only trouble is: In listening to the rhetoric of Kennedy himself, it's not completely clear what he believes. Amid last week's controversy over the email in question, RFK Jr. claimed that “reasonable people, including Trump opponents, tell me there is little evidence of a true insurrection” on that day rioters stormed the Capitol: “They observe that the protesters carried no weapons, had no plans or ability to seize the reins of government, and that Trump himself had urged them to protest ‘peacefully.’”
These so-called “reasonable people” in Kennedy’s ear are dead wrong, of course, and he followed it up a few hours later with another statement acknowledging that his “understanding that none of the January 6 rioters who invaded the Capitol were carrying firearms was incorrect.”
“This behavior is inexcusable,” he added.
And yet, Kennedy still seem to be excusing it, giving weight to the Trumpian implication that “prosecutorial discretion was abused for political ends” in cases against January 6 insurrectionists—while maintaining a degree of plausible deniability, as usual. “I would appoint a special counsel to look at that,” Kennedy told NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo on Monday. “My purpose, Chris, is not to exonerate those people, but rather just to restore peace.”
The big question here is whether Kennedy is knowingly playing into Trump narratives, or if he’s actually buying into some of this as a noted conspiracy theorist himself. “We’re all drinking from fire hoses,” he told Cuomo Monday, chalking up the January 6 “error” from last week as a legitimate mistake. But whether this is gullibility or bad faith, the effect in November could be the same: to create chaos in November that could ultimately help Trump, an aspiring authoritarian, reclaim the White House. “RFK Jr.’s campaign isn’t building a plan or a strategy to get 270 electoral votes,” Matt Corridoni, spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee, told CNN. “They’re building one to help Trump return to the Oval Office.”
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