The vanity presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is now down to whether or not he can get Donald Trump to fake-promise him a job in exchange for a Kennedy endorsement.
Kennedy’s running mate/sugar mama, Nicole Shanahan, dropped that knowledge on us via the “Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu” podcast on Tuesday.
This was Shanahan:
“There’s two options that we’re looking at. One is staying in, forming that new party, but we run the risk of a Kamala Harris and (Tim) Walz presidency because we draw votes from Trump. We draw, somehow, more votes from Trump. Or we walk away right now and join forces with Donald Trump; and we walk away from that, and we explain to our base why we’re making this decision. Not an easy decision.”
It’s not as if this is anything new to the RFK Jr. calculus. Kennedy, who has never held elected office, but has the advantage of that political first family name, was at 15.5 percent nationally at the start of July in the Nate Silver polling average, but you’re not going to do more than be a spoiler at 15.5 percent.
And that 15.5 percent mark was before the litany of missteps from Kennedy that included the downright weird revelation that he had left the carcass of a bear cub in Central Park in New York City as a prank in 2014.
That story came out after it was revealed, by, of all people, Kennedy, that he had spoken with Trump about dropping out of the race in a quid pro quo that would involve him endorsing Trump in exchange for a job in a Trump administration.
The phone call was a month ago, when Kennedy was still polling relatively well for a third-party candidate; with Kennedy now at 4.2 percent, and sinking like a lead pipe, in the polling average, it would seem whatever leverage point there may have been is gone with the wind.
This, incidentally, is what almost always happens with third-party presidential campaigns. With the exception of Ross Perot’s surprise strong run in the 1992 cycle, what you see is, a candidate that is able to get polling numbers into the teens and near 20 percent in the spring and summer fades into obscurity by the fall, when most voters actually start paying attention to the candidates and their positions.
Even Perot, who received 18.9 percent of the vote in the 1992 election, and almost certainly helped throw the election to Democrat Bill Clinton over Republican incumbent George H.W. Bush, was only able to get 8 percent in his second run in 1996 as Clinton cruised to a re-election win.
Kennedy, with the cat out of the bag after the Shanahan podcast interview dropped earlier in the day on Tuesday, released this statement on his campaign on Twitter in the afternoon:
“As always, I am willing to talk with leaders of any political party to further the goals I have served for 40 years in my career and in this campaign. These are: reversing the chronic disease epidemic, ending the war machine, cleaning corporate influence out of government and toxic pollution out of the environment, protecting freedom of speech, and ending politicization of enforcement agencies.”
If you’re thinking, fat chance any of that happens in a second Trump administration, you’re onto what Kennedy is really aiming at here: he just wants a job.
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Chris Graham
