Oh My: Deal Brewing Between Trump, RFK?

by ED MORRISSEY

Color me highly skeptical about this latest development. The idea that Robert F Kennedy Jr and Donald Trump could team up to defeat Kamala Harris sounds more like Fantasy League Politics than an actual possibility.

Of course, so did Joe Biden’s withdrawal and the anointing of Harris in the first place. This cycle is already so nuts that this report from ABC News sounds almost normal:

Former President Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spoke multiple times in the span of a few days this month, multiple people familiar with the conversations told ABC News, including an in-person meeting in Milwaukee during the Republican National Convention where the two presidential candidates discussed ways Kennedy could be involved in a second Trump administration.

At least one idea floated, according to two people with knowledge of the talks, was for Kennedy, a vaccine skeptic who speaks often about the perils of chronic disease, to oversee the Health and Human Services Department under a possible Trump administration.

According to one source, the in-person meeting, which took place the Monday of the convention, never reached a point where Trump and Kennedy had a deal in place for Kennedy to exit the race and endorse the former president in exchange for a role in the administration. Rather, it was an “informal,” “free flowing” conversation, the source said.

So no deal yet, but according to this single-sourced report (a red flag, of course), a deal did get floated in the discussion. That in itself is remarkable, although with Donald “The Art of the Deal” Trump, not terribly surprising. RFK may take more votes from Democrats, at least speculatively, but he does take some from Trump too. Getting RFK to endorse him and withdraw from the race might not just get Trump those voters but also the disaffected Democrats that abandoned Biden, and will probably abandon Harris too.

Although one does have to wonder whether Trump would be better off with RFK absorbing those voters, especially close-run swing states. Ralph Nader turned out to be awfully handy for George W. Bush in Florida, or so Democrats will believe until their dying breath.

Why would Kennedy consider this kind of a deal? For one thing, Kennedy has zero chance of winning; that was true before the assassination attempt on Trump and even more zero-y after it. Kennedy can’t go back to the Democrats in their current form either. Kennedy may be a nut on certain issues, but he recognizes that the Democrats have gone nuts on practically everything else, dumping their working-class roots and orientation for elite authoritarianism and segregation. (Again.)

ABC’s report claims this weighs heavily on Kennedy’s mind, and that he may see a Trump partnership as a way to jolt his old party into jettisoning their new elites:

Two people familiar with Kennedy’s thinking told ABC News that the agreement to meet with Trump stemmed from Kennedy’s desire for national unity.

According to one of the sources, Kennedy has tried to connect with Democratic leaders regularly for roughly a year to try to discuss ways to “bring the party back to its roots,” but has not succeeded in having those conversations.

After watching the party abandon any sense of democracy in anointing Harris as its nominee, Kennedy probably isn’t anticipating having any of these conversations in the future, either. I wrote yesterday about the Democrats’ divorce from its roots in favor of the Marxist Left elites, a process completed by pushing “Scranton Joe” Biden onto the dungheap and selecting the intellectually vapid Harris as their puppet. Kennedy may not be the real solution to the problem, but he at least grasps its basic outlines. And he knows that the only way to force the party to change is to see it suffer a major defeat in November.

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