Conservatives' big bet on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continues to backfire on them.
Last year, Steven Bannon, a former adviser to Donald Trump, encouraged Kennedy to challenge President Joe Biden in the Democratic primary, according to CBS News’ Robert Costa. Bannon reportedly thought Kennedy would create chaos and stoke anti-vaccine sentiment.
After his Democratic bid fizzled, Kennedy kicked off an independent run. And the whole time, he was bankrolled by conservative millionaires, who no doubt hoped Kennedy’s family name would cost Biden enough votes in battleground states to hand the 2024 election to Trump.
Democratic voters mostly didn’t fall for it, though. Even worse, Kennedy’s QAnon-adjacent conspiracy-theorizing began attracting support on the right, imperiling Trump’s electoral chances. So Trump got Kennedy to drop out and endorse him in late August, promising Kennedy who-knows-what.
But now a slew of womanizing revelations are swirling around Kennedy, causing chaos for Trump. And it’s freakin’ hilarious.
On Wednesday, Mediaite reported that three women claim to have had romantic relationships with Kennedy within the past year. Those three women do not include New York magazine journalist Olivia Nuzzi, whose own alleged affair with the brain-worm-afflicted conspiracist seemingly destroyed her impending marriage and career. Kennedy, it should be said, is himself married to “Curb Your Enthusiasm” actress Cheryl Hines.
And reportedly, the Trump campaign sees this scandal as a threat.
Here’s Mediaite:
One of the sources who spoke with Mediaite said the scandal swirling around Kennedy over the relationship with Nuzzi is seen internally as an issue the campaign wants to stay as far away from as possible, particularly given Trump’s own history of womanizing.
“Trump is concerned,” the person told Mediaite. He’s “concerned that there are more women, and that more affairs will come out. Right now, they are waiting to see if the news cycle will blow over, but it won’t, which has Trump reconsidering Bobby’s value.”
None of this should surprise anyone. People close to him have described him as a “lifelong philanderer.” And during his second marriage, Kennedy reportedly kept a diary detailing his affairs with dozens of women, bizarrely referring to them as “muggings.”
“He blamed the women, calling the sex acts ‘muggings,’” The New Republic reported in August 2023. “In one entry, he recorded he ‘narrowly escaped being mugged’ by a team of two women. ‘It was tempting but I prayed and God gave me the strength to say no,’ he wrote. In a May 21, 2001, entry, according to the [New York] Post, he wrote that he ‘got mugged on my way home’ from Manhattan and included the name of a woman with a 10 next to it.”
His first wife died by suicide amid their divorce, and some people close to them reportedly believe that he contributed to her death.
Why did so many Republicans think Democrats would be seduced by arguably the only person in the country as morally bankrupt and repugnant as Trump?
Daily Kos has its own history with Kennedy, of course. He sued us to surrender the identity of one of our community members in a gross violation of the First Amendment. We successfully resisted in the courts thanks to your generous support. And when Kennedy’s investigators eventually figured out the person’s identity, that lawsuit fell apart as well.
What hasn’t fallen apart is our own countersuit, which continues to be considered in New York’s appeals court.
Trump and Kennedy were made for each other. It is fitting that after investing so much effort and money into using Kennedy to screw over Democrats, it is Republicans that are suffering the consequences. In other words, conservatives paid millions to ratfuck themselves.
And that is simply hilarious.
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