The Trump-Kennedy alliance puts policy before personality

One candidate exits Mar-a-Lago to accept a Cybertruck with a decal of his own image. The other feeds local wild ravens between transcendental meditations. One devoted his career to high-price real estate development and reality television, the other to pro bono environmental law and consumer safety activism. One rose as a political outsider well-prepared by his entrepreneurial father, the other as a political dynastic heir coping with the assassinations of his father and uncle.

One is a former president and three-time major-party nominee. The other has never held political office and ran as an independent after being pushed out of his party’s primary process.

One speaks in brash, intuitional streams of consciousness, the other with polite and precise dicta and argument.

The two presidential candidates could hardly be more different from one another in personality than Donald Trump and Robert Kennedy Jr. But on policy, despite vehemently disagreeing on many issues, they share significant priorities. 

Kennedy’s endorsement of Trump, and Trump’s embrace of Kennedy’s platform, reflect the unusual focus of both campaigns on policy in an election cycle otherwise dominated by personality politics.

Kennedy’s recent speech in Phoenix was possibly the most policy-dense speech offered in the 2024 election cycle so far. It homed in on the most pressing issues for our country’s future, and upon which he and former President Trump apparently share common ground: returning democratic process and judicial review to federal regulations, eliminating harmful chemicals in the food and water supply, solving the $35 trillion national debt dilemma, keeping inflation at sustainable levels and curtailing the perpetual dissemination of tax revenue to foreign wars.

Kennedy ultimately boiled it down to the top three “most existential issues: censorship, war and chronic disease.” Mention of these issues was conspicuously absent from the Democratic National Convention, validating Kennedy’s departure from the party. 

Kennedy has now suspended his campaign and will withdraw his ticket from ballots in the ten major swing states. He is expressly encouraging his supporters in those swing states to vote for Trump. 

Kennedy and Trump are calling their new partnership a “unity party.” Kennedy likely will receive a Cabinet-level position focused on one or more of the existential issues on his platform. 

This Trump-Kennedy alliance merges the nationalist conservative and progressive libertarian bases, sidelining the Republican Party’s traditional neoconservative establishment. In contrast, the modern Democratic Party comprises an alliance between a neoliberal establishment and a quasi-Marxist neoprogressive fringe. 

Vice President Kamala Harris has recently released a series of policy positions as well, albeit without any real explanations or offering any interview for scrutiny. These policies include price-controls on the food market, $25,000 aid to first-time homebuyers, and an expansion of the child tax credit (albeit a smaller one than Trump proposes).

Beyond their viability, Harris will be hard-pressed to prove why she has not advocated these policies as vice president, especially given President Biden’s diminished capacity and exit from the presidential race.

Harris has embraced Biden’s proposed $5 trillion tax increase, but while expanding spending and without explanation as to how this would spur enough economic growth to improve our 122 percent national debt-to-GDP ratio.

Harris’s main line of attack seems to remain the alleged “weirdness” of Trump and running mate Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio). In other words, her campaign appears firmly committed to personality politics. 

Ironically, it is the shared policy priorities of Trump and Kennedy that have led to their more recent common personal experience: being misunderstood, defamed and demonized by mainstream media outlets and the Democratic Party.

The Trump-Kennedy unity party could be a doorway out of the cold civil war in which we find ourselves, and beyond the personality politics that has come to define it. The reconciliation of personal differences will be necessary to work together and fix the crises that our country faces in this century. 

Jeremy Etelson was a Democratic staffer in Maryland. He received a J.D. from George Washington University in 2024 and an M.Phil. in political theory and intellectual history from the University of Cambridge in 2019.