Is Trump Playing RFK Jr. for a Fool?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. may soon find that he, similar to Mitt Romney in 2016, is being played for a sucker by Donald Trump.
In ending his candidacy and endorsing Trump for the White House, Kennedy apparently believes that move will land him a job in a possible second Trump administration. At least according to news reports, that’s the quid pro quo Trump supposedly promised him.
Trump told Kennedy that perhaps he could be appointed head of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services or something along those lines overseeing the administration’s healthcare and medical issues. With Kennedy’s anti-vaccine campaign, AIDS denialist, and promoting other wacky conspiracy theories, giving him a top healthcare portfolio would be like having the fox guarding the henhouse.
Political observers say Kennedy intends to sell his endorsement to whoever would be the highest bidder. Reportedly, Kennedy was willing to endorse Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris in exchange for a role in her administration. But his offer was rejected, and he turned to Trump.
Kennedy’s endorsement comes after he once called Trump a “terrible human being” and said the former president was “probably a sociopath.” Meanwhile, Trump called Kennedy, among other choice descriptions, a “radical left lunatic.” In 2023, Kennedy said that “under no circumstances” would he join Trump’s administration because their positions on issues and philosophies “could not be further apart.”
Kennedy should be warned that all his recent buttering up to Trump could lead him to the same humiliation that happened to Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts and senator from Utah.
In 2016, Romney accepted Trump’s invitation to have a sit-down dinner with him at the president-elect’s Trump Tower in New York. This was after Romney had called Trump “a phony, a fraud” and was “playing the American public for suckers.”
Romney came away from the meeting thinking Trump would offer him a job in his new administration, possibly as U.S. Secretary of State.
Romney should have known how that would turn out in his quest for power and prestige. He literally ended up “eating crow.” It turned out the dinner was just a publicity stunt by Trump to make himself look powerful and superior. Meanwhile, Romney was never offered any job and he came across looking like a pitiful supplicant.
Trump’s former White House press secretary and communications director Stephanie Grisham wrote in her book, I’ll Take Your Questions Now, that Trump set up the dinner as a power play to “torture” Romney.
Grisham wrote that Trump wanted “all the press to see that Romney would come all the way to New York and sit down with a man he had called a ‘con artist’ and ‘a fake’ to sing for his supper. Donald Trump was many things, but even his critics had to admit that he was a master at TV spectacles. This was yet another, set to be one for the ages.”
At the recent Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Grisham said that even as a Republican, she was endorsing Democrat Harris for president. “Behind closed doors,” she said at the convention, Trump “mocks his supporters. He calls them ‘basement dwellers.’ He has no empathy, no morals, and no fidelity to the truth.”
Romney’s hardly the first person to be tricked by Trump. As reported by The Week, Trump’s personal chauffeur, Noel Cintron, who worked for him for 25 years, said Trump never paid him for working overtime--amounting to 3,300 hours. And in exchange for getting a slight raise, he had to give up his health benefits.
Then there was the toilet-maker in Atlantic City. Forest Jenkins won a $200,000 contract to install toilet partitions at Trump’s hotel/casino in Atlantic City. But the casino eventually went bankrupt and Jenkins never got paid for his work.
Even if Trump thinks he’s playing Kennedy, it might not work to his advantage. According to political pundits, given the growing negative public perceptions about Kennedy and his weird controversial ideas, the endorsement might in fact hurt Trump in November. Which makes one wonder if Kennedy secretly hates Trump. By giving Trump his endorsement and knowing how bad that looks, could he be reversing the tables: Kennedy doing a Machiavellian con job on Trump that ends with his defeat? That might be called a wild conspiracy theory.
The Democratic National Committee adviser Mary Beth Cahill said that “Donald Trump isn’t earning an endorsement that’s going to help him build support; he’s inheriting the baggage of a failed, fringe candidate. Good riddance.”
A number of RFK Jr.’s siblings and other Kennedy family members expressed “outrage” against RFK Jr. for endorsing Trump, and stand united in their support of Kamala Harris. “I’m outraged and disgusted by my brother’s gaudy and obscene embrace of Donald Trump. And I completely get out and separate and dissociate myself from Robert Kennedy Jr. in this flagrant and inexplicable effort to desecrate and trample and set fire to my father’s memory,” Kerry Kennedy said in an interview with MSNBC.
The Republicans say the opposite--Kennedy’s endorsement will enhance Trump’s chances of winning.
We’ll see who ends up being right.
Author Bio:
Eric Green, a Highbrow Magazine contributor, is a former newspaper reporter, U.S. congressional press aide, English-as-a-second-language teacher, and now a freelance writer in the Washington D.C. area. His articles have appeared in various newspapers and websites, including the Washington Post and Baltimore Sun.
For Highbrow Magazine
Photo Credits:
Gage Skidmore (Wikimedia Commons)
Gage Skidmore (Flickr, Creative Commons)
JFK/RFK: NARA (Wikipedia Commons)