Welcome to Margin of Error, a politics column from Tom Scocca, editor of the Indignity newsletter, examining the apocalyptic politics and coverage of Campaign 2024.
The Robert F. Kennedy Jr. presidential campaign, in its final incarnation, pretty clearly seemed to be illegal and unconstitutional. It feels petty and niggling to talk about details like that, next to the delusions of grandeur that got Kennedy so much attention and publicity. Here was an avatar of how antivax conspiracies and other antisocial quackery operate as a political force. Here was billionaire money in a state of such unhinged entitlement that it could prop up a naked spoiler campaign and profess to be performing a public service. Here was, God willing, the last cooling and crumbling briquette of the Kennedy family's long-burning equity as an electoral brand name.
All of that, though, was subsidiary to the fact that Kennedy was a fraud—not just a wacko who confessed to dumping a dead bear cub in Central Park for incoherent reasons or claimed a worm had died inside his brain, not just a creep who responded to an accusation of having groped his children's nanny by saying he had a "very, very rambunctious youth," but more banally a would-be politician who claimed to reside in New York State when all available evidence said he had lived in California for a decade, and who stood accused of deceiving people to get them to sign his campaign petitions. As a California resident, Kennedy would have been ineligible to receive California's electoral votes, because his running mate—the messy-in-her-own-right Silicon Valley divorcee Nicole Shanahan, whose decisive qualification for the vice presidential slot was her willingness to fund the campaign—was also from California, in violation of the constitution's ban on single-state tickets.
The campaign obituaries tended to mention Kennedy's ballot-access problems as if they were a generic problem for a third-party candidate: "The Democratic establishment sought to keep him off the ballot in multiple states," the Washington Post wrote, "challenging his claim of New York residency as well as voter signatures." But while our two major parties are terrible bullies toward aspiring outsider candidates, Kennedy's paperwork problems were flagrant enough that it was Rupert Murdoch's anti-Democratic New York Post that originally broke the news, back in May, when a third-party bid still looked as if it might help Donald Trump.
The Post reported that Kennedy had used the address of a friend's house in Katonah, N.Y. to vote in multiple elections and file his campaign papers, even though "he is not the owner of the million-dollar, in-arrears property, does not show up in resident searches for it, and some longtime neighbors—and even local authorities—were shocked at the notion it’s his home." In New York state court this month, the homeowner, Barbara Moss, testified that the day after the Post story ran, Kennedy had paid her a check for $6,000, representing a year's worth of unpaid $500 monthly rent on her guest bedroom. The New York Times reported that "[a] photo of the spare bedroom displayed at the hearing showed only a few of Mr. Kennedy’s possessions, including what he thought was a photo of himself and Mick Jagger; the bed, bedding and furniture were all Ms. Moss’s, he conceded."
No sooner had the judge declared his residency fake, and thrown him off the ballot for that, than Kennedy was due to testify in a different New York ineligibility case. This one concerned accusations that, as the Times wrote, "paid signature gatherers had been folding over the tops of petitions to conceal the names of Mr. Kennedy and his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, and that some had claimed they were gathering signatures for Democrats and generic third-party candidates." The Kennedy campaign knew about the reported irregularities, declared in public that it would throw out all the pages of signatures supplied by the unreliable canvassers, and then turned in some three-fifths of those signatures anyway. Via video—"from an office in California," the AP wrote—Kennedy told the court, “I suppose I’m ultimately responsible for everything that happens in the campaign."
Can ultimate responsibility reside with someone barely capable of responsibility? The question was built into the whole RFK2 project. He was never so much a candidate as a set of candidate-like gestures. When there seemed to be room for a non-establishment Democratic Party champion to challenge Joe Biden, he aimed for that space. When that failed, he veered toward trying to be a none-of-the above option for voters sick of Biden and Donald Trump alike, or into the autodidactically conformist conspiracism of Silicon Valley. As reactionary money concluded that the Kennedy name might make him a useful spoiler on Trump's behalf, he steered even further Trumpwards, until on Friday he was standing next to the Republican candidate onstage, his unbuttoned suit jacket gaping open over his testosterone-therapy-thickened torso as he waved stiffly at the roaring crowd.
This was where the whole project of being his own man had taken Kennedy, to a role as a rally prop for 13 minutes—less than six of those minutes at the microphone—in an 87-minute Trump rally. "I don't think I've ever introduced anyone that got applause like he just got," Trump said, bringing him on. "I must tell you, I don't think, it's true, I don't think I've ever introduced anybody that got applause like that."
Trump declared that he would appoint a White House commission to investigate assassinations and attempted assassinations—to look into the cases of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Trump himself. "I tell you I have never had so many people ask me please sir, release the documents on the Kennedy assassination, and we're going to do that," he said. And, he said, he would create a "panel of top experts, working with Bobby," to address "the decades-long increase in chronic health problems," including "autoimmune disorders, autism, obesity, infertility, and many more."
Then it was time for Kennedy to speak, briefly. He called Trump "the president" and told the crowd that "our children are now the sickest, unhealthiest children in the world." He talked about having a president "who's going to get us out of the wars and who is going to rebuild the middle class in this country," and who "wanted to end the censorship." He wrapped up with a call to "make America healthy again."
The healthfulness on offer was, at the very least, debatable. As the Washington Post pointed out, the lifelong environmental activist was endorsing the candidate whose official platform reads "DRILL, BABY, DRILL." But the river-cleaning Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was as long gone as all the other Kennedys before him. What was left was one more faded celebrity and bad husband endorsing Trump, one more member of the pack of aging anti-anti-Trumpers choosing the adulation of miserable strangers over his own friends and family.
Kennedy yielded back to Trump, as one does. "To all who supported Bobby's campaign," Trump said, "I very simply ask you join us in building this coalition, it's a beautiful coalition, in defense of liberty and safety, prosperity and peace, it's gonna be an incredible coalition, and the relationship has been so good for so long I have no doubt it's going to work and work well."
