With RFK JR., a weird campaign just got a lot weirder

History books may well document it as the most unusual selection of a running mate ever. By most accounts, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz got the nod from Vice President Kamala Harris not because of his legislative or executive experience, but because of his uttering just one word: “Weird.” 

He used it first on “Morning Joe,” breaking from fellow Democrats calling former President Trump and Sen. JD Vance “dangerous” or a “threat to democracy.” Instead, like a true Midwesterner, he said “These guys are just weird.” The word took off, and so did Walz. A couple of weeks later, at his introductory rally with Harris, Walz repeated the refrain: “These guys are creepy, and yes, just weird as hell.”

“Weird” is the perfect word to describe Trump and Vance because it needs no definition. It’s a blunt, one-syllable word. Everybody knows what it means even if they can’t quite define it. And it fits Trump and Vance perfectly. It is, in fact, weird for Donald Trump to insist he’s better-looking than Kamala Harris. It is weird for Trump to brag about killing Roe v. Wade one day and then promise to be “great” for women’s reproductive rights the next. And it was weird for Vance to advocate in 2021 that Americans who have no children should pay higher taxes than those who do. 

But you must admit that an already weird Trump-Vance campaign got a whole lot weirder with the endorsement of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. In the world of weirdness, you could not get any weirder than RFK, Jr.  

Start with the fact that since 2005, Kennedy has been promoting bogus theories about vaccines: complaining that vaccines, unlike other drugs, are not first tested by Food and Drug Administration before being approved, which is not true; and claiming that vaccines cause autism, which has been scientifically refuted by dozens of tests on millions of children. 

Peddling various conspiracy theories, Kennedy also claims, without evidence, that the CIA was behind the assassination of his uncle, John F. Kennedy, and his father, Bobby Kennedy; that the 2004 election was stolen from John Kerry; and that HIV might not be the true cause of AIDS.  

Things got even weirder with Kennedy after he launched his improbable campaign for president. In May 2024, Kennedy acknowledged that he, too, once, like Joe Biden, suffered problems with word retrieval and short-term memory loss. But he said it was “caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died.” Kennedy didn’t say which part of his brain the worm ate, nor how much of his brain was left. 

You thought that was weird? Then came Kennedy’s own account of spotting a dead bear cub on the side of the road, putting it in the trunk of his car and then dumping it in Central Park, after taking a couple of photos with his hand in the bear’s mouth. 

But the weirdest of all was still to come: his daughter’s story of how her father used a chainsaw to cut the head off a dead whale on a beach on Cape Cod, then strapped it to the roof of his car and drove it five hours to his home in New York state. 

And now Donald Trump has embraced Kennedy, appointed him to his transition team and reportedly promised him a job in his administration. There’s only one word to describe that: Weird!

 Press is host of “The Bill Press Pod.” He is the author of “From the Left: A Life in the Crossfire.”