THERE were plenty of red flags — of the warning, not the socialist, kind — the minute Robert F Kennedy Jnr threw his hat into the US presidential campaign, first as a Democrat, then switching last October to run as an independent. 

Those warnings reached their most bizarre apex — or possibly nadir — on Friday when Kennedy held a long and rambling press conference, during which he announced he was suspending his campaign and would endorse Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump. 

“In my heart I no longer believe I have a realistic path to victory,” Kennedy said, although he will keep his name on the ballot in safe states where he cannot act as a spoiler. The press conference, streamed live online, was described as Kennedy’s “address to the nation,” although only around 35,000 watched out of a US population of just over 345 million.

Kennedy is a scion of the famous family that produced US president John F Kennedy and his younger brother Robert F Kennedy, who was US attorney-general in his brother’s administration, then a presidential candidate in 1968, before he, too, was assassinated. RFK Jnr, the latter’s son and namesake, never makes a speech without invoking his father and uncle, as if we might otherwise question whether he has any integrity of his own.

He did not disappoint on Friday, mentioning them three times during the first 10 minutes and six times in total. He opened with a skewering of the Democratic Party, accusing it of abandoning democracy. 

“In an honest system I believe I would have won the election, a system my father and uncle thrived in,” he said. He called the decision to anoint Kamala Harris as the Democratic presidential candidate without any primaries, “a palace coup.”

Then he made the case that the man who praised the January 6 insurrection and told Christian nationalists they will never need to vote again after the November 2024 election, is the more democratic choice and that the US would be a “happier” country after four more years of a Trump presidency.

Kennedy had approached both the Trump and Harris camps offering to end his campaign and throw his supporters their way in exchange for a cabinet job. The Democrats ignored him, a spokesperson declaring that “no-one has any intention of negotiating with a Maga-funded fringe candidate who has sought out a job with Donald Trump in exchange for an endorsement.”

But Trump came through with Kennedy’s dream job, advising on health and human services, although Kennedy did not specify in his remarks whether he had been offered a cabinet position. Under Trump, Kennedy said, “honest scientists” will be in charge.

As president during the beginning and height of the Covid-19 pandemic, Trump notoriously claimed drinking bleach was a cure among other bizarre assertions. Kennedy is a well-known anti-vaccination advocate who has bought into the dangerous and debunked notion that the measles vaccination causes autism in children. He also claimed the Covid-19 vaccination was “the deadliest vaccine ever made.”

During a speech in July 2023, Kennedy asserted that “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese,” and “we don’t know whether it’s deliberately targeted or not.” This prompted an immediate outcry from Jewish groups and the medical establishment.

A darling of some on the left and even more on the right according to polls, Kennedy’s own family members have largely disowned him, with four of his siblings calling him “dangerous to our country,” when he left the Democratic presidential race to run as an independent. “Bobby might share the same name as our father, but he does not share the same values, vision or judgement,” they said.

After Kennedy’s endorsement of Trump, five of his siblings shot back again, calling the decision “a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear. It is a sad ending to a sad story.” President John F Kennedy’s grandson, Jack Schlossberg, went further, posting on X that “RFKjr is for sale, works for Trump. Bedfellows and loving it.”

Early on, Kennedy, who is an environmental lawyer, appeared to be a solid advocate for action on climate change. But there were cracks in the facade, even then. Urgent measures were needed but not if they threatened to spoil the view from his luxury family compound in Hyannis Port on the shores of Cape Cod in Massachusetts.

In 2006, Kennedy vigorously opposed a proposed offshore wind farm there, painting a grim picture of the project as an apocalyptic industrial nightmare in an opinion piece for the New York Times. More than 150 environmental leaders responded in a letter also published by the newspaper. 

“We are, simply put, in a state of ecological emergency,” they wrote. “Constructing windmills six miles from Cape Cod, where they will be visible as half-inch dots on the horizon, is the least that we can do.”

Kennedy never addressed the environment on Friday, preferring to focus on the Russian war in Ukraine and the epidemic of obesity and mental health problems at home, whose high rates he said were “only happening in America.” Under his guidance and a Trump presidency, Kennedy predicted, “chronic disease will disappear” in the US in four years. 

Despite the evidence to date, Kennedy expressed a conviction that “if president Trump is elected and honours his word,” their shared convictions would return the country to “a culture of kindness.”

That kindness did not extend to the Democratic Party however, for whom Kennedy reserved his harshest criticism. On Friday, Kennedy said the “surge of popularity” for Harris had been “engineered” by the Democratic Party “based upon nothing. No policies, no interviews, no debates. Only smoke and mirrors.”

Earlier in the week, he said that “VP Harris’s Democratic Party would be unrecognisable to my father and uncle.”

But the person most unrecognisable to those two former lions of Democratic politics must surely be the man who has decided that a likely fascist takeover of the United States is a reasonable price to pay for a position of power within that regime.

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland.