RFK Jr. Really Had Quite a Week

Donald Trump may be sitting back to watch Democrats implode. But RFK Jr. has opted to seize this moment of existential angst over the future of President Joe Biden’s campaign by presenting himself as, well, more erratic than ever.

All last week, as Democrats were engaged in an internecine struggle, RFK Jr. posted video clips of an alternative debate he had held after not qualifying for the CNN debate; fanned the flames of a damning Vanity Fair exposé that featured several dark secrets from his past; then, seemingly apropos of nothing, posted some unprompted thoughts about 9/11 to X.

The independent candidate clarified in a follow-up tweet that he was responding to “all kinds of speculation on X” and that he was making a political statement in favor of open-mindedness and government transparency for all kinds of controversial issues, including “unidentified anomalous phenomena.”

But the seeming randomness of a 9/11 trutherism statement after a week of bad publicity was an oddly unnecessary attempt to court controversy—when, by all accounts, it could have been a week for RFK Jr. to try to look, as they say, presidential. The Vanity Fair article was a deep dive into his past troubles and his relationship with his family. It also detailed a number of damaging claims about the candidate, including an allegation that he had groped a 23-year-old woman working as a part-time babysitter for his children in the 1990s, and featured a photo of him with what appeared to be a barbecued dog, an image he allegedly sent to a friend with a joke about eating dogs.

The article also detailed the bleak trajectory of Kennedy’s conspiracy-theorist outlook and advocacy. Perhaps the most horrifying example came from 2019, when Kennedy and his wife, Cheryl Hines, flew to American Samoa to meet with the country’s prime minister and promote anti-vaccine policies after two children died there from vaccines that, it turned out, were improperly administered. His campaign was successful; the Samoan prime minister halted the administration of the MMR vaccine. In the months that followed, the island was hit by an outbreak of measles that killed 83. Paul Offit, a pediatrician and member of the Food and Drug Administration’s advisory committee on vaccines, is quoted in the Vanity Fair article, blaming RFK Jr. for the disinformation that led to the deaths. (Kennedy has denied his connection to that outbreak, despite clear evidence of his involvement. In a forthcoming PBS documentary, according to Vanity Fair, RFK Jr. “becomes vividly agitated when confronted with the facts of the Samoa case, insisting that ‘I had nothing to do with people not vaccinating in Samoa; I never told anybody not to vaccinate.’ ”)

The article also hints that most of the Kennedy family sees RFK Jr. as a spoiler candidate who might allow Trump to win the election, a theme that has repeatedly come up in reporting on the candidate. Some of his family members seem to think that his years of heroin abuse permanently altered his brain, causing him to become irrational.

If RFK Jr. were a more serious candidate, the revelations in the Vanity Fair article would have been earth-shattering. But Kennedy has a long history of saying remarkably strange, wrong, and damagingly offensive things. He has dabbled in conspiracy theories about Bill Gates and 5G; compared public health officials with Nazis and anti-vaxxers with Anne Frank; and posited that COVID was “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.

Still, even his defense of himself last week was strange. The candidate appeared on the politics podcast Breaking Points on Tuesday and, when asked about the groping allegation, said, “I am not a church boy.”

“I had a very, very rambunctious youth,” RFK Jr. added. “I said in my announcement speech that I have so many skeletons in my closet that if they could all vote, I could run for king of the world.”

When pressed directly about the allegation, he said he had no comment.

Instead, Kennedy’s camp has, since the Vanity Fair piece, apparently focused almost entirely on refuting the dog-related allegation. His campaign has asserted, on social media and in statements, that the photo featured a goat, not a dog, and that it was taken in South America, not Korea. RFK Jr. described the Vanity Fair story as a “lot of garbage” and alleged that it was coordinating with Democratic Party leadership.

He now appears to have decided he has moved on from his scandals and is posting about Biden’s mental decline and also about his more standard promises: fighting Big Pharma, opposing the prospect of war with Russia. He praised Edward Snowden, promising the whistleblower that he would allow him to “serve his country” again. But above all, RFK Jr. seems to be committed, in the midst of a great existential crisis over the American political system, to being weird in ways big and small. Right now, Kennedy’s pinned post on X is footage of him picking up a western diamondback snake with his bare hands, to have it moved to the wilderness. That was on July 4. Two days before that, the same day the Vanity Fair article dropped, he posted another video of him rescuing a snake.