But not because they reluctantly finalized the divorce from a party that long ago left them behind.
It’s easy to see why those who invested their hopes in the theory that Donald Trump could engineer a “great realignment” are excited by the addition of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard to the GOP presidential candidate’s roster of endorsees. The migration of these erstwhile Democrats into the Republican camp vindicates what they always saw as Trump’s potential to remake the political landscape. But Trump’s Democratic opponents don’t seem especially upset by this development.
Both Kennedy and Gabbard were politically homeless well before Trump folded them under his wing, but not because they reluctantly finalized the divorce from a party that long ago left them behind. They got the boot.
Kennedy attempted, in his own manic way, to insert himself into Democratic politics by seeking the party’s presidential nomination. But the Democrats, who have demonstrated enviable institutional disregard for the loudest minority factions in its ranks, declined to sanction debates between the incumbent president and his would-be challenger (who only ever polled in the low double-digits among Democrats). RFK took the hint and withdrew from Democratic politics.
In 2020, Gabbard declined to run for a fifth term in the House seat she had occupied since 2013. She claimed her presidential campaign demanded all her attention, but Gabbard had courted a contentious relationship with her fellow Hawaii Democrats and drawn a formidable primary challenger, state senator Kai Kahele, who would succeed her in Congress. They didn’t leave the Democrats; the Democrats left them.
And for good reason. There’s no question that both Gabbard and Kennedy enliven a particular sort of voter who is deeply suspicious of the status quo, American institutions and their stewards, and the enterprises tasked with holding the powerful to account. This is also the type of voter to whom Trump appeals — or, perhaps, appealed before he became the unquestioned leader of one of those powerful American institutions.
The theory behind this unlikely alliance is that, by sideling up alongside these two figures, Trump reclaims his title as champion of those who believe the American civic compact is corrupt and sclerotic. There are no tradeoffs in this theory. Trump’s gain is the Democratic Party’s loss, even if Democrats themselves seem not to recognize it.
Maybe. But there is another side to that coin that has gone relatively unremarked upon. Embracing the paranoia these two one-time Democrats court — an agitated unease that leads them both to conclude that America and Americans are the problem — is not a risk-free proposition.
Let’s be honest: RFK Jr. is a crank, and eccentricities all seem to orbit around the assumption that there are malign forces at work in America devoted to meting out harm merely to delight in the suffering of others. He has alleged that Wi-Fi signals cause “leaky brain” and cancer. He alleged that a secret cabal is putting chemicals in the water supply that cause children to identify as the opposite sex. His anti-vaccination activism long predates Covid. Indeed, he maintains that vaccinations, including wildly successful immunizations like those that prevent Measles, Mumps, and Rubella, are to blame for a suite of underdiagnosed maladies. The only reason why anyone remains skeptical of Kennedy’s assertions, in his estimation, is that some nefarious they are holding back the evidence that would vindicate him.
Kennedy’s conspiratorial instincts seem rooted in the proposition that a small number of malevolent Americans have pulled the wool over the eyes of an impossibly larger number of Americans. The common denominator is that Americans are the problem — either because they’re too cowed and complacent to know what’s good for them or because they’re consciously wicked.
Kennedy maintains that his support for Trump was reciprocated with the promise that he would serve on Trump’s transition team, helping to “pick the people who will be running the government.” The only source of solace for those of us who shudder at the prospect is that all the players involved in this tale are inveterate liars. Small blessings.
If Kennedy defaults to the most uncharitable assumptions about this country on the home front, Gabbard’s instinct is to accuse Americans of deliberately sacrificing U.S. interests abroad.
Gabbard served her country in uniform — admirably, by all accounts. But that’s why she had to know that, when she made her 2017 sojourn to Damascus to meet with blood-soaked Syrian despot Bashar al-Assad, she was lending legitimacy to an actor who had facilitated the slaughter of her fellow soldiers. From the outset of the Iraq War, Assad’s security personnel facilitated the introduction of would-be jihadists into the country with the aim of killing U.S. troops. It provided sanctuary to Saddam Hussein loyalists and “emerged as an important organizational and coordination hub for elements of the former Iraqi regime,” according to the Pentagon. Coalition forces conducted several raids into Syria in this period because the mission in Iraq demanded it.
If Gabbard was aware of this, she subordinated that knowledge to her desire to allege that the West had lied about Assad and its primary patron, Russian president Vladimir Putin. She maintained that the U.S. had no evidence the Syrian regime was deploying chemical weapons against civilians (they did). She alleged that only the Assad regime and its Russian allies were attacking the jihadist insurgents that somehow managed to survive their mutual assault on Western-backed Syrian rebels (Russia focused on attacking rebel strongholds like Homs and Aleppo while the Assad regime purchased oil from the incipient Islamic State). Through it all, Gabbard professed deep concern that the West’s response to Russian aggression and foreign intervention could spark “nuclear war,” but the problem is always the response to aggression and never the aggression itself.
Indeed, in the years since, Gabbard has continued to retail the dubious narratives promulgated by the Kremlin — among them, the debunked notion that the U.S. maintained biological warfare laboratories developing “deadly pathogens” inside Ukraine. The implication being that the existence of these facilities compelled Moscow to engage in an uncommonly brutal war of conquest and subjugation. When challenged, Gabbard did what the “just asking questions” crowd always does — retreat to a more defensible Bailey. “What she has said is simply fact: there are US-financed ‘biolabs’ in Ukraine,” said a Gabbard spokesperson. Sure thing. If Gabbard had only meant that the U.S. helped sponsor medical research in Ukraine, it would have only been a paranoid non-sequitur. The fact that Gabbard’s intention only suddenly became murky and misunderstood when her allegations encountered a skeptical audience is revealing.
Gabbard, too, defaults to the belief that the U.S. is the problem. It is, if not the sole arbiter of events outside its borders, the malign force whose influence compels the reciprocal actions of others all over the globe. These are the “blame America first” Democrats Jean Kirkpatrick warned us about, and the Republican Party’s titular leader has now taken them under his wing.
There may be a price to pay for abandoning all discretion in the effort to craft a durable coalition of disaffected voters. Yes, Gabbard and Kennedy speak to an unenthusiastic subset of voters who don’t believe either party is capable of producing meaningful (read, radical) change. But their absorption into the Republican coalition risks alienating a galactically larger host of voters who turn out to vote for establishmentarian figures regular basis.
Those voters are not paranoiacs who see their fellow citizens and the country of their birth as the locus of evil in the modern world. They vote on pocketbook concerns, not their desire to see the establishments that have scorned them over the years brought low. They may not trust the elite institutions that have done their utmost to sacrifice their own credibility, but they don’t believe Putin is the real victim, the water supply is glutted with mind-altering chemicals, and the only thing we have to fear is their neighbors.
Trump is most certainly building a new sort of coalition. And maybe, given the tightest of margins in the swing states, the voters he is courting will deliver him victory. Or maybe they won’t. Either way, these overtures come at the cost of lending credence to two rogues who don’t deserve it.