It doesn’t surprise me at all that a Trumpian candidate would emerge inside the Democratic Party, someone trying to run for president with the same cynical mix of star power and misinformation that fueled a nationalist uprising in 2016. It was inevitable from the moment Donald Trump showed us how easy it was to unmake a party in the age of social media.
What I would not have predicted is that the Trumpian challenge on the left would be waged by someone named Kennedy.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — Bobby to all who know him — would no doubt object to the comparison. He’s an environmental lawyer, a Hollywood fixture, a man who I’m sure harbors not a speck of white-nationalist sentiment.
Kennedy even tweeted this past week that “UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES” — his capital letters, not mine — would he agree to become Trump’s running mate, because their governing philosophies “could not be further apart.” That he felt compelled to make such a statement, however, tells you that they could be at least a little further apart. Maybe a lot.
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The similarities have little to do with policy, though there is some overlap there. Rather, what makes Kennedy profoundly Trumpian is a dark strand of populism mixed with self-grandeur and self-created reality.
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Like Trump, Kennedy burst onto the cable-TV scene with not a day of actual governing experience but loads of celebrity. He’s a Kennedy, after all, and the one who has always most physically resembled his father — an asset among the octogenarian Democratic set that is hard to overstate, even all these decades later.
He registered nearly one-fifth of the Democratic vote in public polling before anyone had heard him speak. Which says a lot about the enduring Kennedy mystique, but even more about the unease with President Biden’s reelection.
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Like Trump, Kennedy is given to skillful demagoguery, casually misleading with the conviction of a truth-teller. In a Fox News interview with a sympathetic Sean Hannity, Kennedy explained how the covid vaccine — which he seems to regard as a vast societal evil, like opioids, or the War on Christmas — utterly failed to stop transmission of the coronavirus, just as the government secretly knew it would.
Of course, the main point of the vaccine wasn’t to stop us from catching variants of the virus — it was to stop those variants from killing us at intolerable rates. Which it did.
What makes Kennedy most like Trump, though, is the overlay of conspiracy and contempt that tinges nearly everything he says, the destructive distrust in the electorate he seeks to channel. During the rambling, nearly two-hour, Trump-like monologue in which he launched his campaign in Boston, Kennedy sketched the bleak tableau of a government wholly owned and controlled by corporations, of nefarious powers in both parties hellbent on enslaving people with bureaucratic mandates.
Kennedy made light of the schisms in his own famous family; several Kennedys have publicly criticized him for opposing vaccines and don’t support his campaign. But that rift hints at a deeper truth, which is that Kennedy has a lot more in common with Trump than with the famous relatives to whom he connects himself.
By constantly invoking his father and his uncle — President John F. Kennedy — Kennedy holds himself out as a bridge back to the golden age of American liberalism. But instead of “ask not what your country can do for you,” he offers a variation on the Trumpian theme of trashing government and science, while stoking fear and resentment.
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Instead of, in his uncle’s famous words, paying any price and bearing any burden for liberty around the world, Kennedy bizarrely accuses his government of killing hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians by helping them fend off Russian barbarism. He decries the $100 billion cost of keeping Vladimir Putin’s army out of Europe — a fraction of the nation’s military budget. This sounds awfully much like “America First” and nothing at all like the New Frontier.
I met Bobby decades ago, when many Democrats were pushing him to run for Senate in New York. He seemed to me then more grounded and more thoughtful. I liked him and thought he could win.
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But that was before Kennedy began to see conspiracies in every corner, railing against the corporate media’s secret agenda, even lobbying for the release of his father’s killer, Sirhan Sirhan, on the grounds that he was somehow framed. It was before Trump came along and established a new paradigm in American politics: the entertainer who replaces party loyalty with populist grievance, at the cost of truth.
I don’t think Kennedy will get very far testing that paradigm — not in this party, not at this moment. But I’ve been wrong before, and he won’t be the last to try.
What I would not have predicted is that the Trumpian challenge on the left would be waged by someone named Kennedy.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — Bobby to all who know him — would no doubt object to the comparison. He’s an environmental lawyer, a Hollywood fixture, a man who I’m sure harbors not a speck of white-nationalist sentiment.
Kennedy even tweeted this past week that “UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES” — his capital letters, not mine — would he agree to become Trump’s running mate, because their governing philosophies “could not be further apart.” That he felt compelled to make such a statement, however, tells you that they could be at least a little further apart. Maybe a lot.
ADVERTISING
The similarities have little to do with policy, though there is some overlap there. Rather, what makes Kennedy profoundly Trumpian is a dark strand of populism mixed with self-grandeur and self-created reality.
Press Enter to skip to end of carousel
Like Trump, Kennedy burst onto the cable-TV scene with not a day of actual governing experience but loads of celebrity. He’s a Kennedy, after all, and the one who has always most physically resembled his father — an asset among the octogenarian Democratic set that is hard to overstate, even all these decades later.
He registered nearly one-fifth of the Democratic vote in public polling before anyone had heard him speak. Which says a lot about the enduring Kennedy mystique, but even more about the unease with President Biden’s reelection.
Follow Matt Bai's opinionsFollow
Like Trump, Kennedy is given to skillful demagoguery, casually misleading with the conviction of a truth-teller. In a Fox News interview with a sympathetic Sean Hannity, Kennedy explained how the covid vaccine — which he seems to regard as a vast societal evil, like opioids, or the War on Christmas — utterly failed to stop transmission of the coronavirus, just as the government secretly knew it would.
Of course, the main point of the vaccine wasn’t to stop us from catching variants of the virus — it was to stop those variants from killing us at intolerable rates. Which it did.
What makes Kennedy most like Trump, though, is the overlay of conspiracy and contempt that tinges nearly everything he says, the destructive distrust in the electorate he seeks to channel. During the rambling, nearly two-hour, Trump-like monologue in which he launched his campaign in Boston, Kennedy sketched the bleak tableau of a government wholly owned and controlled by corporations, of nefarious powers in both parties hellbent on enslaving people with bureaucratic mandates.
Kennedy made light of the schisms in his own famous family; several Kennedys have publicly criticized him for opposing vaccines and don’t support his campaign. But that rift hints at a deeper truth, which is that Kennedy has a lot more in common with Trump than with the famous relatives to whom he connects himself.
By constantly invoking his father and his uncle — President John F. Kennedy — Kennedy holds himself out as a bridge back to the golden age of American liberalism. But instead of “ask not what your country can do for you,” he offers a variation on the Trumpian theme of trashing government and science, while stoking fear and resentment.
Press Enter to skip to end of carousel
Instead of, in his uncle’s famous words, paying any price and bearing any burden for liberty around the world, Kennedy bizarrely accuses his government of killing hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians by helping them fend off Russian barbarism. He decries the $100 billion cost of keeping Vladimir Putin’s army out of Europe — a fraction of the nation’s military budget. This sounds awfully much like “America First” and nothing at all like the New Frontier.
I met Bobby decades ago, when many Democrats were pushing him to run for Senate in New York. He seemed to me then more grounded and more thoughtful. I liked him and thought he could win.
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But that was before Kennedy began to see conspiracies in every corner, railing against the corporate media’s secret agenda, even lobbying for the release of his father’s killer, Sirhan Sirhan, on the grounds that he was somehow framed. It was before Trump came along and established a new paradigm in American politics: the entertainer who replaces party loyalty with populist grievance, at the cost of truth.
I don’t think Kennedy will get very far testing that paradigm — not in this party, not at this moment. But I’ve been wrong before, and he won’t be the last to try.
