RFK Jr.'s political clout grows after Trump victory

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is seeing his star rise after President-elect Trump glided to a second White House victory on Tuesday, a remarkable trajectory for someone who was long dismissed as a fringe political figure.

Kennedy and Trump bet big on each other, taking a gamble that independents and other coalitions of voters disillusioned with establishment politics would merge to beat Vice President Harris. That partnership paid off for both men, with a massive Trump win all but ensuring Kennedy is poised to have a prominent role in Washington. 

One idea that’s being floated, per a source privy to discussions about Kennedy this cycle, is making him “an adviser that wouldn’t need Senate confirmation, but have a direct line to POTUS.”

“He would make personnel recommendations,” the pro-Kennedy source said. “Nothing solid or in stone yet.”

Still, figures close to both Trump and Kennedy believe it’s only a matter of time before the environmental lawyer is elevated within Trump’s newly revamped brain trust. They see the president-elect rewarding Kennedy, who has shown considerable loyalty to the MAGA movement in recent months, with a spot that could have great impact. 

Key nominations, appointments and other top roles in the incoming Trump administration are starting to be discussed as speculation builds around where Kennedy could be a plausible fit. 

In the immediate aftermath of the election, the ex-Democrat has already started flexing some muscle privately. The source familiar told The Hill that Kennedy has some early personnel preferences, including around foreign policy. Sen. Marco Rubio’s (R-Fla.) name has been floated as a potential nominee for secretary of State, to which Kennedy has expressed opposition.

“He will be advocating for someone who is less neocon,” the source said.

The scope of influence Kennedy may have is yet to be determined, but many of his critics — in particular Democrats who strongly opposed his third-party run — are already casting doubt that he’ll be a major figure in Trump’s orbit. 

Democratic strategists who were worried about Kennedy being a “spoiler” in the election painted him as a noncredible conspiratorial candidate who struggled to get on state ballots and then, later in the contest, even had trouble removing himself from battlegrounds where he could hurt Trump. 

Party advisers and operatives circulated talking points and held calls about Kennedy’s potential danger to Harris’s campaign, highlighting his most controversial moments. An image of Kennedy trying to eat a charred animal carcass and news stories about him tossing a dead bear into Central Park were only a few of the bizarre stories that surfaced about the contender.

Democrats also played up a line in a profile on Kennedy where he said his brain was damaged by a worm years ago. 

Those peculiar life events, which shaped the narrative around Kennedy as an odd character, came on top of some already controversial stances on vaccinations that disregarded much of the scientific community’s consensus. 

None of that, however, seemed to faze Trump. Kennedy was, instead, considered a strong asset, able to tap into certain groups who shared many of his unorthodox views, which at times ran counter to both neoliberal and neocon thinking. 

Before he dropped out of the presidential race, Kennedy and Trump allies discussed ways that the independent, who had reached double-digit support but struggled to get broader traction, could lift Trump. They settled on a plan that would remove Kennedy from key swing states, wagering that it would help the Republican nominee.

Kennedy, for his part, pressed for an unspecified place within what both people hoped would be a second Trump administration. As the election entered its closing weeks, Kennedy made his preference to change America’s approach to public health — his primary focus beyond his more recent foray into electoral politics — known to Trump.

Publicly and privately, the president-elect was receptive to that idea, even teasing a possible role working on women’s health specifically — which quickly angered Democrats who failed to get enough momentum with female voters by pushing an abortion message.

Trump said he would let Kennedy “go wild” on the government’s health care systems, a line that his son Donald Trump Jr. also enthusiastically repeated to conservative media after his father’s victory. 

Kennedy has most recently claimed he wants to eliminate fluoride in the country’s drinking water supply, concerning health officials who consider adding the mineral chemical a major advancement to preserving teeth.

Trump has been nondescript other than pledging to give Kennedy breathing room to advance some of his health goals. “He wants to go do some things and we’re going to let him go to it,” Trump said in part of his postelection victory address. 

Reeling from their loss against Trump, some Democrats are skeptical that Kennedy’s biggest agenda items will come to pass and point to large bureaucratic bodies like the Environmental Protection Agency as checks on his power. And while Republicans regained control of the Senate, there’s an existing 60-vote threshold to get Cabinet nominations confirmed in the upper chamber, making a high-level post harder to navigate. 

“RFK’s eyebrow-raising ideas are so toxic that he’d never be confirmed in a Senate,” said Sacha Haworth, a Democratic strategist. “You think Collins or Murkowski are really going to vote for the brain-worm guy who wants to ban childhood vaccines?” she said, referencing the moderate Republican senators from Maine and Alaska. 

Some Democrats like Haworth are also hopeful that Trump, who is known to have shifting and fleeting, alliances, will not remain steadfast to Kennedy. “Now that RFK Jr. has served his purpose, Trump will do what he always does: Drop him like a rock,” she added.  

The early debate playing out over Kennedy, in and of itself, is somewhat astonishing and showcases his unlikely rise over the past two years. After failing to get any traction challenging President Biden for the Democratic nomination last year, few expected that Kennedy could be advising the GOP president-elect on the country’s most pressing health considerations. 

But Trump’s interest in Kennedy only increased as the election neared. The two appeared together at battleground state rallies and Kennedy gave public directives to his supporters not to vote for him in places where he couldn’t legally get off the ballots, like Michigan and Wisconsin.

Despite no longer being an official candidate, Kennedy still amassed nearly 44,500 votes in those two states, showing his popularity with his own diehard base. 

As Kennedy now moves to hone his focus more closely on health during the transition, Democrats are pointing fingers at each other, questioning who is ultimately to blame for his ascent.

“As a progressive it’s disappointing that the Democratic Party establishment is allowing an existential threat to our public health to wreak havoc on our country because they failed to stop Donald Trump,” said Kamran Fareedi, a left-wing Democratic operative.

Fareedi said that for a variety of reasons, Democrats didn’t adequately address voters’ concerns and now could “fall victim to the conspiracy-laden populist right.”