The crank who can force Trump’s hand

Robert F Kennedy Jr is a prolific conspiracy crank who believes chemicals in water are turning children transgender, WiFi affects your brainpower, vaccines cause autism, and any number of wild, discredited beliefs.

He has been accused of sexual assault by several younger women, and has suggested more may come forward. He is a reformed drug addict who dodges questions about his current use of steroids in his 70s by saying he takes “testosterone replacement – which is just another word for steroids. He attempted to reduce his payments to an ex-wife by saying a worm had eaten part of his brain, and once deposited the corpse of a dead bear cub in Central Park.

And yet he probably has more influence over who becomes the next president of the United States of America than anyone else in the world barring the two candidates themselves. Why? Because he’s a Kennedy.

Robert F Kennedy might have sorely tested the extent of the Kennedy magic, but as the son of the assassinated presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy and nephew of the assassinated president JFK, Robert Jr is still managing to poll at 5% or more in multiple states as a third-party candidate – despite many of his own family having actively spoken out against him and endorsed the Democrats.

Because of the structure of the US presidential race, in which the race is decided by an electoral college rather than simply on which candidate gets the most votes, modern presidential races are extremely close. In all likelihood, the margin of victory for Donald Trump or Kamala Harris will come down to a few hundred thousand voters across a handful of states.

That means that if an independent candidate polls around 5%, that is comfortably the margin that decides victory or defeat – and if they attract more votes from one candidate than the other, they can switch the result in the opposite direction.

This has stung the Democrats on more than one occasion. Bush vs Gore in 2000 was eventually decided by the Supreme Court, but if Ralph Nader hadn’t run on the left of Gore as an independent, Gore would comfortably have been the winner.

Jill Stein, a reliably pro-Putin crank left candidate who has dined with the Russian president, played a similar spoiler role as the Green candidate in 2016 – had she not stood, the chances are Hillary Clinton would have scraped the narrowest of victories over Trump. So Democrats have been looking at RFK Jr with concern bordering on alarm – not only do they have a new potential spoiler, but he comes with the Kennedy branding.

The picture is getting more complicated, though. Initially, RFK Jr was very obviously pulling more votes from Joe Biden than he was from Donald Trump. He is somewhat younger and in better physical health than either Biden or Trump, and the Kennedy name plays well with voters who might be otherwise unaware of RFK Jr’s many, many personal shortcomings. At one stage in the race, he appeared to be polling as high as 15% in some states – until people saw more of him.

Now Kamala Harris is installed as candidate, she is younger than RFK Jr and neutralises that threat. This has combined with greater awareness of RFK Jr’s conspiratorial mood and style, which naturally appeals more to Trump’s base – as Trump himself has embraced every conspiracy theory going, from those about a “stolen election” to QAnon itself.

That means it is not so clear who benefits and who is harmed by RFK Jr staying in the race. If he pulls more votes that would otherwise go to Kamala Harris, RFK Jr staying in the race helps Donald Trump – if it’s the other way round, he could actively harm Trump’s efforts.

RFK Jr’s campaign is unlikely to run out of money soon, either. Kennedy picked Nicole Shanahan as his pick for the vice-president slot on his ‘ticket’. Shanahan is not particularly well known in her own right, but as the ex-wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, she is a billionaire several times over and easily has the ability to fund the campaign as much as she likes.

Everyone concerned knows that RFK Jr cannot win himself, and has zero chance of being the next president. It is not even clear that he can get himself on the ballot in enough states to make this even a theoretical possibility.

But if he won’t run out of money, the only way for a major campaign to take him off the board is to persuade RFK Jr to step down, and ideally to endorse them instead. That is about as close to an absolute non-starter for Kamala Harris and the Democrats as it could possibly be – but it is an obvious possibility for Trump.

RFK Jr has somewhat burned his bridges on this front, having flagrantly breached protocol by releasing video of a phone call between himself and Trump in which Kennedy appeared to ask whether Trump would offer him the role of secretary of health if he dropped out – in what seemed like an entrapment attempt.

So obvious was the attempt to ask for an inappropriate quid-pro-quo that even the Trump campaign publicly rebuffed the deal, but something quieter and more subtle behind the scenes will clearly be weighing heavily on minds all around. After all, if he doesn’t cut a deal, RFK Jr will be left with nothing after election day.

For Trump, it could make the difference between spending the next four years in the White House versus spending them in a jail cell. There is, in short, a deal to be done.

RFK Jr is a crank and a weirdo, who even his own family want nowhere near power, but he could still decide 2024’s presidential race. America may not yet be done with the curse of the Kennedys.