During the 2016 presidential campaign, tens of millions of Americans turned away from the two elitist, entrenched political parties and toward then-New York City businessman Donald Trump. They did so like someone drowning in turbulent waters who is suddenly thrown a lifeline. Support for Trump became a survival instinct for the millions who viewed him as their last hope.
Come 2023 and 2024, millions of Americans cast their eyes toward Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Like Trump, they saw him as a non-politician who could not be cowered or controlled by the special interests. They saw Kennedy as a truthteller who would fight for them against the elites in both parties.
Soon thereafter, the Biden-Harris White House and the Democrats went after Kennedy with a vengeance — a vengeance that may well prove their ultimate undoing. Their smears and attacks against Kennedy not only pushed him to endorse Trump but will ensure that he spends every waking moment from now until Election Day seeking to peel the bark off the Harris campaign.
To that point, during his televised remarks on Friday announcing why he was suspending his campaign and endorsing former President Trump — all but ignored by ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and MSNBC — Kennedy said: “As you know, I left that party in October because it had departed so dramatically from the core values I grew up with. It had become the party of war, censorship, corruption, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Ag and Big Money…In the name of saving democracy, the Democratic Party set itself to dismantling it.”
Kennedy’s warnings, much like Trump’s before him, are not lost on those tens of millions of American voters. In fact, it should be stressed that those warnings are taking deeper root precisely because of the two men waving those red flags, whom these tens of millions of voters have come to believe are the only ones left in our nation with the independence and platform to fight for them and their families.
Like Trump, when Kennedy speaks, millions of Americans who feel cast aside by the political, corporate and media elites hear his voice. Such as when during his remarks on Friday, Kennedy also highlighted: “How did the Democratic Party choose a candidate who has never done an interview or a debate during the entire election cycle? We know the answers. They did it by weaponizing government agencies. They did it by abandoning democracy. They did it by silencing the opposition and by disenfranchising American voters.”
Millions upon millions of Americans feel totally disenfranchised by a system seemingly rigged to benefit the elites. For a multitude of reasons, Kennedy may be the best person to grab their attention and convince a number to either cast their vote for Trump or switch their vote from Harris. Even a 1 percent swing in Trump’s favor could make all the difference in states such as Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and North Carolina.
By attacking Kennedy, Biden-Harris, the Democratic powerbrokers and much of the mainstream media foolishly awakened a sleeping giant — one who, because of his own exceptional body of work and his still-revered family name, has tremendous rapport with and respect from minority communities; blue collar workers; rust belt workers; union workers; parents of children with chronic diseases; communities dealing with polluted lands and waterways; young voters; independent voters; and the disenfranchised.
These are communities Kennedy was looking to on Friday when he also declared: “When a U.S. president colludes with or outright coerces media companies to censor political speech, it is an attack on our most sacred right of free expression, the very right upon which all our other constitutional rights rest.”
Hopefully, in the future, we will once again have historians not in the tank for the Democratic Party or Harris. And when we do, they will recognize Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as a true statesman and a patriot, who not only put our country before political parties, but then put the disenfranchised and voiceless before all.
Those same future historians may also cite that it was Kennedy who flipped a close election into a victory for Trump — an outcome that the Democrats will have brought upon themselves if it comes to pass.
Douglas MacKinnon is a former White House and Pentagon official.