At a modest podium framed with American flags stands the man with a golden name.
His dynasty is even more famous than the one he traveled to rural Wisconsin to campaign for, and clearly can still draw a crowd.
From mothers bouncing months-old babies to white-haired old men with walking sticks, whole families have squeezed into the basketball court-turned-Trump campaign rally venue to hear him speak.
“It’s not every day you see a Kennedy,” an older woman says to her smiling husband as they make their way across the creaking panels of the gym floor.
They gaze up at a man who wandered the halls of the White House as a child and who suffered the double tragedy of having both an uncle and father assassinated.
But Robert F. Kennedy Jnr.’s message to the Wisonsinites is not about the past. He’s got a startling opinion on the way things are today.
“The Democratic Party is no longer the party of Robert and John Kennedy,” he tells the crowd, “it is the party of Big Pharma, Big Tech and the military-industrial complex.
It’s hardly a secret that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is backing Donald Trump for president, but hearing the way he sells the Republican Party to the voters is remarkable. It reveals how everything we thought we knew about US politics has changed.
As Kennedy points out, the President of the Teamsters Union, known for decades as the backbone of the Democratic Party, is another who has sided with its historic opponents apparently because “75%” of his members “support Trump.”
But it’s not just long-time wearers of blue turning red, what’s striking is how policies that felt tied to the Republican Party are now a stick to beat rivals with.
“Why is Dick Cheney supporting the Democrats?” RFK Jnr. asks the crowd, “because they are the party of war and surveillance.”
He highlighted the Bush administration’s infamous Patriot Act legislation, the post-9/11 law that paved the way for unprecedented spying on Americans by their government, and then claimed Donald Trump would abolish it.
An environmental lawyer for most of his life, RFK Jnr. has only gained national prominence recently as one of the loudest voices in the anti-lockdown and anti-vax movements that have exploded as a result of the Coronavirus pandemic.
It was this that put him on the trajectory to becoming a big Republican backer or as he puts it “Covid opened my eyes.”
According to Kennedy, Trump asked him to support him “even though they didn’t agree on everything” because he wanted to be as inclusive as possible.
“Trump called me two hours after he was shot [in the assassination attempt in Pensylvania]. I met him in Milwaukee and said he wanted me to be in a big tent [of opinions],” he added.
Even then, it’s an allegiance that seems to be so counterintuitive.
One of RFK’s big gripes is about the types of chemicals allowed in American foods a problem which would surely require the type of heavy regulation that the former president is vehemently opposed to.
But at this stage, there is no real test for whether the pair will agree on enough for the alliance to survive. Kennedy can believe that Trump is the president “for peace” without knowing whether he actually will be.
It is the very existence of their partnership that is the reason this election is so close.
We don’t know who will win because the traditional ideas about who falls into what camp and how you determine what way they will vote are no longer the same.
This was clearly demonstrated by a lifelong Democrat I met after the rally named Brian who said he’d voted for Hillary Clinton and then Joe Biden.
The reason he was now wearing a Trump t-shirt and going to rallies was because he’d been convinced that the party, as RFK Jnr. claimed, no longer represented what it once did.Meeting the locals who turned out to see Kennedy or Trump the night before, I was surprised by the extent to which any idea about the ‘type of person’ who supports Kamala Harris or Donald Trump is completely redundant.
