The Left’s Swift Shift (Shit?) After RFK Jr.’s Trump Endorsement
Kennedy’s indictment of his former party, along with his endorsement of Donald Trump, has sent shock waves through the chambers of the self-appointed elite who would rule us.
by Roger Kimball Aug 25/24
The thing I admire about contemporary deep-state Democrats is their nimbleness. This nimbleness was on ostentatious view in the regime response to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s announcement Friday that he was 1) suspending his campaign (at least in battleground states) and 2) throwing his support behind Donald Trump. The acrid scent of panic might have been expected among the limp-wristed, totalitarian faithful. And, in fact, beneath the amusing cologne of anti-Trump bluster, the panic was indeed discernible.
But there was also that trademark smooth-as-a-suppository (as Saul Bellow put it) suaveness, exemplified, for instance, by former Obama strategist David Axelrod. “Robert F. Kennedy Sr.,” Axelrod posted shortly after the deed was done, “would have been appalled to see his son cut a deal to drop out for [t]he race and endorse Trump.”
Imagine: someone agrees to drop out of a race at the last minute and support a rival candidate! As the commentator Ned Ryan put it in response to Axelrod’s snippy post: “You suddenly seem offended by someone cutting a deal to drop out of the race and endorse someone else.”
Cast your mind back, David, to July 21 of this year. That’s when Joe Biden, having been made an offer he couldn’t refuse by the secret committee running the country, suddenly announced that he was dropping out of the race. This was, remember, after Biden repeatedly insisted that he was staying in the race and was looking forward to the next debate against Trump. Yes, the first was a disaster, but he would show ’em!
Biden’s missive, posted to his personal—not his official POTUS—account, bore all the earmarks of haste not to say coercion. Had someone actually dictated the text to him? We don’t know. But it was widely remarked that he neglected to endorse Kamala Harris. That came a few moments later in a separate post.
It is easy to forget what prodigious feats of political nimbleness were required to carry out this most delicate operation. First, the media and the party bosses had to stop mid-track and start marching in the opposite direction. On the morning of July 21, Joe Biden was “sharp as a tack.” By sundown, he was sadly diminished but also a brave hero for putting country before self and nobly bowing out of the race. The whole maneuver displayed an Olympics-level nimbleness.
So has the subsequent coronation of Kamala Harris. On the day before Biden’s defenestration, she was widely acknowledged to be a disliked, incompetent, airhead. The day after, she was hailed as the reincarnation of Winston Churchill.
As I have several times noted since the magic bus of Kamala’s supreme makeover got underway, the nimbleness of her canonization, though impressive, was the brittle project of magical thinking. It was like a hot-air balloon: eye-catching on ascent, intractable in flight, and dangerous when the air cooled and the plummet began.
As I and others observed, the ecstasy surrounding Kamala Harris on the run-up to the Democratic Convention was but a “sugar high,” a temporary state of intoxication that would be as short-lived as it was numbing.
The convention wasn’t over before strains of “the thrill is gone” could be heard beginning to echo in the chambers of the punditocracy.
By Thursday, the day that Kamala was to speak, it was beginning to be clear that her image as a great statesman-in-waiting was the closest thing to creatio ex nihilo since the events recounted in the opening chapters of Genesis.
This was something that Kennedy underscored in the course of his remarkable address Friday afternoon before joining Donald Trump at his rally in Arizona that evening. “[T]he DNC and its media organs engineered a surge of popularity for Vice President Harris based on nothing,” Kennedy said. “No policies, no interviews, no debates, only smoke and mirrors and balloons in a highly-produced circus.” Various Dems mentioned Trump 147 times from the stage on just the first day of their convention, while Republicans mentioned Joe Biden but twice over the course of their entire four-day event.. But “Who needs a policy,” Kennedy asked with calculated bile, “when you have Trump to hate?”
Bingo. I understand that Kennedy has espoused certain ideas—about who actually killed his father, for example, or the legitimacy of the 2004 presidential election—that many will take issue with. But his penetrating grasp of what has happened to the Democrat party, and therefore to the tradition of democracy itself, is as bracing as it is accurate. “In the name of saving democracy,” he notes, “a Democratic Party set itself to dismantle it.”
Lacking confidence that its candidate could win a fair election at the voting booth, the DNC waged continual legal warfare against both President Trump and myself. Each time that our volunteers turned in those towering boxes of the signatures needed to get on the ballot the DNC dragged us into court, state after state, attempting to erase their work, and to subvert the will of the voters who had signed those petitions. It deployed DNC-aligned judges to throw me and other candidates off the ballot and to throw President Trump in jail. It ran a sham primary that was rigged to prevent any serious challenge to President Biden. Then, when a predictably awful debate performance precipitated a palace coup against President Biden, the same shadowy DNC operatives appointed his successor, also without an election. They installed a candidate who was so unpopular with voters that she dropped out in 2020 without winning a single delegate.
Everything Kennedy says in that searing assessment is true. He is also right that the media, once thought to hold power to account, have become creatures of the ruling consensus, “stenographers for the organs of power.”
Kennedy noted that he and Trump were not in agreement on every issue. But, he said, they were at one about several important policies, including “ending the Forever Wars, ending the childhood disease epidemics, securing the border, protecting freedom of speech, unraveling the corporate capture of our regulatory agencies, and getting the U.S. intelligence agencies out of the business of propagandizing, censoring, and surveilling Americans, as well as interfering in our elections.” That’s a good bit to be getting on with.
Kennedy’s indictment of his former party, along with his endorsement of Donald Trump, has sent shock waves through the chambers of the self-appointed elite who would rule us. The timing of Kennedy’s announcement—he spoke mere hours after Kamala’s acceptance speech—could not have been more deadly. For one thing, he monopolized the headlines, just when the Dems were planning to luxuriate in their moment of triumph. For another, his endorsement of Trump was almost instantly reflected in the polls.
Tony Fabrizio, Trump’s chief pollster, noted later on Friday that in every battleground state, Kennedy’s endorsement shifted votes to Trump. For example, “the net vote gained in a state like Arizona based on just a 2020 turnout model would be over 41,000 votes, nearly 4 times Biden’s winning margin.”
As I have said repeatedly these last few months, I expect Donald Trump to win on November 5. But as he himself has put it, he has to win by a margin that is “too big to rig.” Kennedy’s suspension of his campaign in battleground states and his endorsement of Donald Trump almost guarantees that winning margin.
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