It has been one year since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced his run for president as an independent candidate. The notorious anti-vaxxer’s bid for the White House, funded by pro-Trump billionaires, was the kind of unserious garbage fire we have come to expect from MAGA-adjacent characters.
Let's take a walk down memory lane, and remember some of the highlights:
His Keystone Cops campaign announcement.
The kickoff to Kennedy’s spoiler campaign included a "Curb Your Enthusiasm"-esque comedy of errors, including a broken teleprompter displaying his announcement speech upside down, and Kennedy narrating the problem on a hot mic backstage.
Kennedy’s sister Kerry released a statement calling his independent bid “dangerous to our country” and added that “Bobby might share the same name as our father, but he does not share the same values, vision or judgment. Today's announcement is deeply saddening for us. We denounce his candidacy and believe it to be perilous for our country."
RFK Jr.’s history of saying super crazy stuff and then lying about it.
Kennedy quickly found himself defending some of his previous indefensible statements about everything from COVID-19 being “ethnically targeted” to blaming school shootings on antidepressants.
A couple of months after telling podcaster Lex Fridman that “There’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective,” Kennedy opted to flat-out lie when pressed by “PBS NewsHour” co-anchor Amna Nawaz on his statement.
Lonely St. Patrick’s Day.
President Joe Biden held a St. Patrick’s Day brunch at the White House, and almost the entire Kennedy clan showed up in support. Notably absent was Junior.
Seriously—brain worm.
Denied he was eating a dog in a resurfaced photo.
Vanity Fair published a profile of Kennedy that included an older image of the lawyer eating a cooked and skewered animal. The article asserted that the animal in the picture was a dog. Kennedy called it “a lot of garbage.”
Minimized sexual assault allegations as products of his “very rambunctious youth.”
In the same Vanity Fair profile, a former family babysitter alleged that Kennedy had sexually assaulted her when she was at his family’s home in Mount Kisco, New York, in 1999. Eliza Cooney told the magazine that she was in her 20s at the time and Kennedy was about 45. Kennedy’s response to those allegations fell short.
“You know, in terms of the other allegations, listen, I said this from the beginning,” he said. “I am not a church boy. I am not running like that. I said it in my— I had a very, very rambunctious youth.”
The bear incident.
Who could forget watching RFK Jr. tell comedian Roseanne Barr, in some kitchen somewhere, about how he had thrown a bear cub that was hit by a car into his trunk with the intention of skinning it and eating it later? It’s easy to remember how Kennedy said he ended up having a good day of falconry, never made it home, and then drove into New York City to have dinner with friends—with a dead bear still in his trunk.
Kennedy went on to explain that while he doesn’t drink, his friends do, and they were tickled by the bear story. So when Kennedy remembered he had to catch a flight and realized he didn’t have time to take the bear home, he and his friends decided to stage the bear as a bicycle hit-and-run in Central Park, which led to countless baffled news stories.
Even stranger: The reporter who covered the bizarre story for The New York Times was none other than Tatiana Schlossberg, the daughter of RFK Jr.’s first cousin Caroline Kennedy.
Kennedy ends his campaign and throws support behind Donald Trump.
When Kennedy finally ended his campaign, he did so in true RKF Jr. fashion, giving a long-winded speech endorsing Republican nominee Donald Trump. His family released a statement endorsing Trump’s opponents, Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, and called Kennedy’s failed campaign and support of Trump "a sad ending to a sad story."
Where is he now?
Since joining the Trump campaign, Kennedy’s been making the kind of headlines only RFK Jr. can. He allegedly had a sexting affair with New York Magazine journalist Olivia Nuzzi that has put his marriage in jeopardy, and he is also being investigated for cutting a whale’s head off and taking it home.
And through all of that, he still has his friends and his hobbies!
Don’t just grin and bear it: Donate $5 to help Kamala Harris win the White House!
