Scuttled Trump-RFK Ticket Plans Highlight Another Election Where Conservatism's Not on the Ballot

The Republican Party’s presumptive nominee for the Presidency of the United States simply doesn’t care to understand anything about anything.

In September 2016, two months before the election of one of the two most absurd presidents in American history, the late Rush Limbaugh said the following about the candidate who just won’t go away:

Can somebody point to me the conservative on the ballot?  “What do you mean, Rush? Are you admitting Trump’s not a conservative?” Damn right I am! Folks, when did I ever say that he was? Look, I don’t know how to tell you this. Conservatism lost, in the primary, if that’s how you want to look at it [...] I wish conservatism was on the ballot.

Rush sadly would not retain that candor in the years that followed, but the statement was as succinct and dead-on an assessment of the situation as anything said about that election before or since. Eight years later, we face another general election ballot where conservatism won’t be on the ballot because the same man will be—only, somehow, even less so.

On January 27, the New York Post reported that, according to its sources, early last year the Trump campaign reached out to lifelong Democrat-turned-iconoclastic-outsider Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about being his running mate:

“Trump operatives expressed an interest in Kennedy early on, but it was all premature,” said one person familiar with the matter, adding that it was “right out of the box when Bobby announced” in April 2023 he was running for president.

“Anything’s possible. I wouldn’t write it off by any means,” the insider continued.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s been paying attention. For months last year, MAGA fans on social media would openly hype the idea of a Trump-Kennedy ticket. Around April, Trump pardon recipient (who will probably need another one in the near future) Steve Bannon was calling RFK an “excellent choice for Trump to consider.” But the same day as the Post’s report, Trump campaign senior adviser Chris LaCivita vociferously denied it:

This is 100% FAKE NEWS - NO ONE from the Trump Campaign ever approached RFK jr (or ever will) - one of the most LIBERAL and radical environmentalists in the country. For all the fake news- update your stories.

Enter Kennedy himself, who said the news wasn’t fake at all:

Q: If he asked you that today, what would your response be?

RFK: I would not take that job. I’m flattered that President Trump would offer it to me, but it’s not something that I’m interested in.

Q: Did he reach out, or his team?

RFK: People from the team have reached out to me.

So on one side, we have the Post’s reporting, which admittedly is anonymously sourced but fits with both the sentiments of Trump’s voter base and the advice of one of his former top advisers, and the subject of the offer stating on the record that it happened. On the other side, we have a denial from a campaign known for its lying. Conclusion: the story’s probably true.

It’s exactly the sort of dumbass stunt that would appeal to Trump and his brain trust: two outsiders who speak for the disaffected forging a new populist coalition! In reality, however, it just illustrates how the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee for the Presidency of the United States doesn’t care to understand anything about anything.

First, the proposed alliance ignores the tiny detail that RFK’s popularity on the Right is entirely due to what he doesn’t have in common with Trump: Covid. As I’ve written about before, it was never responsible to embrace Kennedy despite our common ground, because his opposition to the medial establishment was rooted in an affinity for junk science that long predated 2020, and the stopped-clock effect finally landed him on the right side. Regardless, his antipathy for the lockdown architects and vaccine rushers is 100% genuine, so the idea that he would have any interest in joining forces with the man who empowered the Covid tyrants, stands by the Covid vaccines, and won’t repent for any of it is basically a single-question IQ test.

Second, despite his support for medical freedom and a few other dissents from Democrat orthodoxy, Kennedy is a lifelong leftist with most of what that entails.

Before vaccines, his biggest claim to fame was as an environmental lunatic—in 2014, he said he wanted the Koch brothers “at The Hague with all the other war criminals” for supporting conservative environmental policy preferences and that corporations who “sponsor climate lies” should be shut down. During his current campaign, he has affirmed that he’s pro-abortion and pro-affirmative action, he’s suggested that the federal government should forgive student loans. He’s preposterously credited Vladimir Putin with “acting in good faith” prior to invading Ukraine, echoing his 2005 suggestion that America only invaded Iraq and Afghanistan to steal the Middle East’s oil (in fairness to the Trump campaign, those last two do play well with MAGA these days).

No, not all of these happened prior to the reported offer, but they all come from a set of values and ideological disposition that RFK has exhibited all his political life. The fact that he’s a leftist was not a dealbreaker for Trump, who would be 78 by the time he became president again, making the possibility of his vice president having to step in at some point during his term much realer than it is for most of our history’s chief executives.

Team Trump saw nothing disqualifying about putting leftism a heartbeat away from the presidency because Donald Trump and those closest to him are simply indifferent to conservatism. But sure, we can definitely count on him to continue to represent and fight for our values and causes if he’s reelected.