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It appears MAGA Republicans are no longer keen on the idea of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s presidential campaign.
Over the last several months, Republicans aligned with former President Donald Trump haven't hid their excitement over Kennedy waging a Democratic campaign for president.
In April, CBS News reported that former Trump adviser Steve Bannon had encouraged Kennedy to run for months, hoping the candidate’s purported liberalism — along with his anti-vaccine conspiracy theories — would make him a chaos agent who’d pull votes from President Joe Biden in next year’s presidential race.
This thinking helps explain why Kennedy received financial backing from a right-wing megadonor, and why he's been a frequent guest on conservative media platforms, where hosts have invited him on to rail against the Democratic Party. I’ve also written about Kennedy’s effort to spread these theories and other crackpot claims through at least one ostensibly Black media platform.
But some Republicans' love affair with Kennedy seems to have come to an end after this week's announcement that he’ll no longer run as a Democrat. Now that Kennedy is running as an independent, losing his Democratic veneer and, thus, waging a more overtly right-wing campaign, MAGA Republicans aren’t so happy about a bid they worry could pull from the same pool of conspiratorial conservatives Trump will likely need to win. It's a group of voters Slate writer Ben Jacobs described as the “partyless — and the paranoid.”
Kennedy’s independent campaign has already earned ire from MAGA allies, including Trump’s campaign, which has tried to sully Kennedy in the eyes of right-wing voters by suggesting he isn’t conservative enough. Kennedy has even fallen out of favor with Fox News' Sean Hannity, who's shown the candidate his colder side since the party switch — after previously portraying Kennedy as a principled liberal hero.
Republicans are now having second thoughts about how eagerly they've wrapped their arms. Last week, the Conservative Political Action Conference announced it had invited Kennedy to speak at its “Investor Summit to Save America” in mid-October, seemingly killing any pretense about where he and his campaign are on the political spectrum.
Predictably, the announcement agitated many Republicans. This response, from a top official at the Trump-aligned Turning Point USA's political action arm, is remarkably transparent.
“RFK shouldn’t be speaking at cpac. Let RFK convince and steal votes from democrats,” Turning Point Action executive Tyler Bowyer tweeted on Monday.
Bowyer added: “I think it was okay to lean in when he [RFK Jr.] was running as a dem, but now that he is running as an independent, why would you give him a stage to potentially split our own votes? Let him split dems.”
It's always seemed obvious to me that Republican leadership only liked Kennedy to the extent he could chip away at potential Biden votes. But now, it looks like they’re starting to realize Kennedy is just as likely — if not more likely — to appeal to the MAGA supporters they want uniformly backing Trump. It's a rather funny conundrum of conservatives' own making.