Trump/Kennedy '24?

The cross-partisan, populist-conspiracist presidential campaign that could upend American politics

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks on stage during Bitcoin Conference 2023 at Miami Beach Convention Center on May 19, 2023. (Photo by Jason Koerner/Getty Images for Bitcoin Magazine)

Regular readers know that I don’t think much of theories of the multiverse—the idea that every possible event that could happen actually does happen in some alternative universe/timeline.

But if we treat these theories less as descriptions of reality than as heuristics to help us visualize the contours of a probabilistic universe, they have some value. In this view, there are many possible paths forward from every step in our own timeline, each of them more or less likely. With that in mind, I’d like to suggest that in one possible future—one much less likely than others but also far more likely than many people presume—Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr team up in a cross-partisan, populist-conspiracist presidential campaign that defeats the party of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in a landslide next year.  

Down the Kennedy Rabbit Hole

That thought first occurred to me in late April as I worked my way through a long, almost hallucinogenic Q&A in Tablet between RFK, Jr and David Samuels, an accomplished journalist who in recent years appears to have plunged quite far down the rabbit hole in which alarmingly large numbers of Americans reside these days.

The Q&A begins with a substantial essay from Samuels about the Kennedy mythos and its place in relatively recent American history. Then the questioning begins, and very soon the two men are roaming widely, from conspiracy to conspiracy, each of them setting out from the presumption that the authoritative-sounding assertions of public authorities in our country are due exactly zero deference.

Samuels and Kennedy talk about how changes in the childhood vaccine schedule at the end of the 1980s led to a massive increase in the number of kids with autism; the role of the “military-pharmaceutical complex” in the creation of the COVID-19 virus; how RFK’s uncle (President John F. Kennedy) was assassinated by the mafia with help from the CIA (or maybe it was the CIA with help from the mafia); how his own father (Robert F. Kennedy) was gunned down, not by Sirhan Sirhan, but by some other mysterious figure in the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles; how American foreign policy is controlled by various nefarious forces; how business and government collude to despoil the environment; and so forth.

(For more on RFK, allow me to do something for the very first time in my career as a pundit, which is to suggest you read an extremely informative essay by leftist Naomi Klein. “Ignoring Robert Kennedy Jr is Not an Option” is chock full of valuable information and helpful links, and her criticism of some of his stances, especially on vaccines and autism, is cogent.)

Conspiracies are often dismissed as irrational, but they are the opposite: Hyperrational. Attempting to disprove any one of the conspiracies advanced in that Tablet interview would take me months of research, and even then, Kennedy (or Samuels) would be able to poke countless skeptical holes in my counter-narrative, casting doubt on my efforts that would leave their web of confidently asserted and maniacally informed conjectures intact.

In a world that often seems to be melting into a chaotic swirl of confusing events, loudly blaring alarms, toxic animosity, and transparent bullshit eagerly ingested by millions, the conspiracist offers coherence—a story that brings it all into focus by using great exertions of reason to connect otherwise disconnected dots. It all makes sense now! That’s what the conspiracy-peddler is selling—a key that unlocks otherwise hidden order amidst apparent disorder. America in our era is filled with people anxiously groping around for just such a skeleton key. And we don’t lack for conspiracists hocking them in the public square (which now largely resides in a digital universe online).

An Unlikely Democrat

Donald Trump’s improbable and conspiracy-fueled rise to the presidency demonstrated this. But so did the response to him from many on the center-left, who should have known better than to buy into elaborate, fanciful stories of Russian President Vladimir Putin manipulating American politics from behind the scenes. (For many, the shock of Trump’s 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton was so disturbing that it cried out for a comprehensive explanation featuring a powerful, hidden antagonist, and the Russiagate conspiracy did the trick.)

Though the latter doesn’t at all mean the Democratic Party is likely to dump Joe Biden for RFK in 2024. A CNN poll from May showed Kennedy at 20 percent in the Democratic primaries, 40 points behind Biden. That’s a stronger showing than I might have expected from RFK, but I suspect he came in that high because of a combination of apprehension about Biden’s advanced age and the familiar Kennedy name. Over the past month, RFK has been getting somewhat more press attention, including attention to his penchant for conspiracies, and three more recent polls show him somewhat lower, at 12, 15, and 17 percent, or 56, 43, and 53 points behind Biden, respectively. That’s still potentially high enough for him to be a nuisance to the Biden campaign, but nothing more than that. (I also note, however, that no Republican rival to President Trump in 2020 polled anywhere near as strongly as RFK already has against Biden.)

Given the shape of the Democratic Party’s electoral coalition, RFK’s real but limited appeal makes sense. In recent election cycles, the Dems have become a party of college graduates, the segment of the population that holds the lion’s share of jobs in the professional-managerial class, earning solid incomes in the country’s leading businesses as well as in its premier private and public institutions. This gives Democrats a stake in these institutions, exposes them to how they work behind the scenes, and thus also makes them less likely to distrust what these institutions do and say—all on top of their party’s longstanding commitment to using government power to solve practical problems in peoples’ lives. None of this makes Democrats immune to conspiracy theories, as Russiagate demonstrates. But it does make them somewhat less likely than the average American to be tempted by them.

All of this is increasingly less true of Republicans. In addition to the deep skepticism about government that’s been embedded in the GOP since Reagan, if not back to Barry Goldwater and Herbert Hoover before him, the Republican Party is increasingly comprised of voters who didn’t graduate college. This makes them sociological outsiders even when they are economically successful as small-business owners or independent contractors. And as outsiders, they are more likely to view members of the professional-managerial class that runs and thrives within the country’s leading public and private institutions with skepticism. And that skepticism can and increasingly does make these Americans prone to conspiracy theorizing. This is even more true of those further down the economic and educational ladder.  

All of which seems to imply that RFK is quite poorly matched with the Democratic Party, despite his family’s long and deep association with it.

So … why not run, instead, as—or rather, with—a Republican?

The Rise of Anti-Ideology on the Right

I’m not at all suggesting RFK should or might switch parties and challenge Trump, DeSantis, and the others scrambling for the Republican nomination. But I am suggesting that if RFK continues to poll in the mid-to-high teens between now and the start of the primaries, that could point to something important: a broad-based hunger in the American electorate for what might be called a cross-partisan, anti-ideological form of conspiratorial populism.

This links up to a point I made in a pair of posts a few weeks ago, and that I more recently raised for discussion with my fellow panelists on the “Beg to Differ” podcast at The Bulwark. The post-2016 GOP, I’ve suggested, is divided between two groups of voters. There are, first, those who want the party’s libertarian-minded Reaganite ideology to be exchanged for a highly combative form of reactionary cultural warfare, with the party’s prior stances on economics and foreign policy adjusted to comport with that priority. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is leading this effort, and the 20-something percent of the party that supports his candidacy for president favors his ideological approach, combined with the message that he would be a highly competent force in office for enacting policies that advance it.

The irony is that DeSantis has staked out this position in response to Donald Trump’s great popularity with the party’s voters. DeSantis’ message is: I would be a more effective Trump. Yet well over twice as many voters, in most polls, appear to prefer sticking with Trump instead. My claim is that this points to a little-noted difference separating the two candidates. Trump himself is an anti-ideological politician. Unlike DeSantis, his message isn’t: These are the ideas I stand for; and here are the policies I will enact to advance them. On the contrary, Trump’s message is: I alone can fix it. My judgment. My will. Put me in charge, and I’ll figure out the best course of action, which will often involve punching your enemies as hard as I can. In certain situations, I’ll take what sound like principled stands, but more often I’ll be extremely flexible, looking to make deals to advance your interests and entertaining you by driving the people you hate to the brink of madness. Trust me. I’ve got your back. I’ll decide what’s best for you.

Part of this highly personalized form of leadership is the construction of a story to make sense of a confusing world—a story that explains why this kind of highly personalized leadership is necessary. The people in positions of power who see themselves as your betters, who look down on you, are actually out to advance their interests over and above yours. What you need, then, is a strongman defender and protector to inflict pain on your antagonists. The point isn’t really to enact this or that policy but to humiliate and enrage your enemies. Let me be your retribution!

That’s Trumpist populism in a nutshell, and DeSantis’ routinized, managerial-ideological form of it doesn’t appeal to Republican voters in the same way or with the same intensity as Trump’s highly personalized-charismatic version.

Linking Up with RFK

RFK’s way of talking about politics has little overlap at all with DeSantis’ woke-obsessed ideology. There are conflicts with Trump, too¹; many of RFK’s obsessions have their roots on the far left, after all. But there are also important overlaps, as Trump stalwarts and professional bullshit artists Roger Stone and Steve Bannon both recognize, along with the conservative pundits (two at National Review, plus Tucker Carlson) who’ve written and spoken quite positively about RFK’s presidential bid. Of course much of this is probably just opportunistic good cheer about President Biden’s political struggles. But there is also a real kinship between the anti-establishment fervor that currently animates the right and RFK’s recklessly sweeping dissent from the institutional deference that prevails among so many Democrats these days.

That opens up the possibility of a cross-spectrum, populist-conspiracist politics united in its hostility to any and all institutional establishments—and support, in its place, for post-ideological, charismatic-strongman leadership. Add 10 or so percentage points from the Democrats to the 47 percent Trump won in 2020 and it just might leave the ideological-institutionalists of both parties in the dust.

To be clear, no part of me wants to see this happen. I’m an institutionalist through and through. I was a Biden voter in 2020, and I will be again in 2024. Neither do I think such a cross-spectrum populist-conspiracist alliance is especially likely. But it is much less absurd than it first sounds—and for that reason, I think it’s well worth pondering. There is a possible American future in which the contradictions of our moment prompt one of our two parties to go full populist (uniting the anti-establishment wings of the far right and far left), leaving the institutionalists of the center-left and center-right behind in the other party.

And a Trump/Kennedy ticket in 2024 would be one way to make it happen.  

1. After first seeming to hold out the possibility of serving as Trump’s running mate, on May 10 RFK tweeted that “UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES” would he do so. To which, after observing politics for a few decades now, I can only respond: So, we’ll see!