This right here is why I’m not worried about RFK Jr.
The thing about odd numbered years in the United States is that nothing much relevant happens with regard to elections. Instead, years like 2023 are an empty vacuum which ends up getting filled by non-stories. And since there’s nothing real for the political media to cover, the media goes along with hyping these non-stories as if the election is going to hinge on them. Then a funny thing happens: the year changes.
We spent all of 2023 having to hear about how a fringe group called No Labels was going to magically swing the 2024 election to Donald Trump. I tried to point out that groups like that exist solely to generate hype in order to raise money, and they’re generally out of the picture entirely by the time the election rolls around (sure enough, No Labels recently admitted it won’t even run a 2024 presidential candidate).
Then we had to spend late 2023 hearing about how Dean Phillips was going to single handedly destroy the 2024 Democratic primary race. But I pointed out that he was polling near zero, and that he’d therefore have no impact. Sure enough, he only got a rounding error of the primary votes, and then quietly dropped out and endorsed President Biden.
But there’s still one 2023 gremlin in the machine who hasn’t yet fallen by the wayside, and that is of course Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The same people who told us No Labels and Dean Phillips would destroy us are now insisting RFK Jr is going to destroy us. But all along I haven’t particularly worried about this guy, because he’s never going to be able to survive stepping up to the plate.
What do I mean by that? If No Labels was in it for the money, and Phillips was in it for the narcissism, then RFK Jr is in it because he’s a complete nutjob. It’s not just that he has insane views on the issues. It’s that he’s an insane person. I don’t say that glibly. He is, objectively speaking, insane.
As a political analyst, I’ve had to watch RFK Jr at work for nearly a decade now. He’s never been right in the head during any of that time, and he’s been on a steep and jarring downward trajectory the entire time. All that any sane person has to do is listen to him speak for more than a minute or two, and they’ll conclude that he is indeed not sane.
The only reason RFK Jr is still technically in the conversation is that most people out there haven’t heard him speak yet. He is a “Brand B” candidate that no one out among the general public knows anything about, beyond his “Grade A” name.
At this early stage of the game, pollsters are biasing their own results by including his name. People who are generally dissatisfied with the state of the country, and don’t love either party’s candidate, are going to be inclined to pick the name “Robert F. Kennedy” when they see it listed as a third option in polling. But that’s now. It’s not November.
Between now and the election, RFK Jr is going to be inclined to put himself out there more. The media will give him big name interview slots. And he will come across horribly in those interviews. You think Kristi Noem or Ben Carson self destructed quickly? Wait until RFK Jr puts himself out there.
More to the point, the media is finally starting to treat RFK Jr like a real candidate instead of an empty name they can hype – and that’s not a good thing for him. That means digging into his ugly, disturbing, alarming, mentally incompetent past.
For instance CNN is now reporting that awhile back RFK Jr admitted in a deposition that a worm ate part of his brain. No really, this is what he said. It sounds too on the nose even for The Onion, yet here it is being reported by CNN.
So either RFK Jr has been brain damaged by a worm, which is very alarming for a presidential candidate, or he’s so mentally unhinged that he falsely believes his brain was eaten by a worm. Either way, it’s easily disqualifying – and it’s the first of a dozen or a hundred such stories that’ll surely surface about this profoundly mentally incompetent individual.
By the time we get to November, the only people who will still be considering voting for RFK Jr will be people who are as far off the deep end as he is. And these are the types who were never going to vote for a major party nominee to begin with.
So I expect that RFK Jr. will end up having zero impact on the 2024 election. Nor do I think we’re being “vigilant” by sitting around panicking and fretting over him. What does that even accomplish? Our messaging should be based on all the ways in which Biden is objectively better than Trump, and why the Democrats are objectively better than the Republicans. In the meantime, let RFK Jr take himself down.
