“Nobody ever complied their way out of totalitarianism,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. warned a few thousand people on the National Mall yesterday. It was a true Kennedyism: ominous and not quite self-aware. That RFK himself had recently ended his rebellious presidential campaign in service to an aspiring autocrat was but an inconvenient detail.
The former insurgent candidate was the main attraction at “Rescue the Republic,” a free rally-slash-concert at the foot of the Washington Monument that featured Jordan Peterson, Russell Brand, and Lara Logan, to name a few. “This is where you end up when you do your own research,” the writer Walter Kirn noted in his evening address. A banner with Kennedy’s new slogan, “Make America Healthy Again,” flew across the top of the stage, and its shorter version, MAHA, was affixed to the lectern behind panes of bulletproof glass. At the mic, Kennedy’s instructions to attendees were clear: “You need to go to the polls, and get your friends there, and get Donald Trump and me into Washington, D.C,” he ordered.
[Read: The first MAGA democrat]
I went to “Rescue the Republic” because I wanted to know whether Kennedy’s latest pitch to his supporters—Buckle up and vote for Trump—would work. Nearly every Kennedy follower I met while covering his campaign over the past year and a half told me they were disillusioned by the two-party structure. And countless Kennedy acolytes had said that they just couldn’t vote for Trump in 2024.
Kennedy’s former national field director, Jeff Hutt, is now the advocacy and outreach director of the RFK-aligned MAHA super PAC. He told me that Kennedy’s team had conducted informal polling of supporters and volunteers before he left the race and found that roughly 60 percent of his fans would vote for Trump and about 40 percent needed convincing. Of that 40 percent, Hutt said he believes that 20 to 25 percent are moving toward Trump as Election Day approaches. But he also acknowledged that 5 percent of Kennedy supporters may never get behind Trump under any circumstance: “Politically and mathematically, that’s pretty much impossible.”
As I walked the grounds and interviewed Kennedy-heads yesterday, Hutt’s ratio appeared roughly correct. Hardly anyone I spoke with seemed excited at the prospect of voting for Trump. In an echo of 2016, many people sounded more motivated to vote against the Democratic establishment out of vengeance. Trump wasn’t their guy. He was just a blunt instrument, a way to potentially keep a shred of Kennedy’s movement alive. Trump wasn’t the plan, but, for now at least, he would do.
“Rescue the Republic” was the creation of the self-described “exiled professor” Bret Weinstein, Defeat the Mandates founder Matt Tune, and Libertarian National Committee Chair Angela McArdle. Nearly every speaker invoked the need to resist conformity, groupthink, and censorship. “Do you ever think about why people root for the robbers in heist movies?” the Rolling Stone writer turned Substacker Matt Taibbi asked the crowd. “There’s a little bit of outlaw in all of us.”
Destiny Tyson, a 22-year-old RFK supporter from Laurinburg, North Carolina, was standing near the stage holding a homemade sign that read WOMEN 4 KENNEDY. “I called myself a Democrat all my life, and voted for Biden last election, but at the end of the day, our health needs to come first,” Tyson told me, echoing Kennedy’s MAHA pitch. “I hate Trump, but hey, I don’t hate him enough to not vote for him. If he’s the best option, he’s the best option. I had to learn you can’t just ‘vote blue no matter who.’”
[John Hendrickson: RFK Jr.’s philosophy of contradictions]
A Kennedy supporter from Vermont named Kathleen O’Hara told me she’d been a fan of RFK for two decades and had fallen for him “hook, line, and sinker” after reading his 2004 book, Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy. Now, after a lifetime of voting Democratic, she was readying herself to vote for Trump. Another rallygoer, Ed O’Shea, one of Kennedy’s signature-gatherers in Appleton, Wisconsin, described himself to me as a “flaming liberal,” noting that he had worked for George McGovern and voted for Bernie Sanders twice. Was it hard for him when RFK endorsed Trump? I asked. “I’m very practical,” O’Shea responded. Voting for Trump in November, he said, would be “easy.” He also wanted me to know that he had canceled his Atlantic subscription because the magazine had turned “so disgustingly woke.”
I wandered toward the back of the crowd and approached a man wearing a black T-shirt that read TIN FOIL HAT: IT’S ALL JUST GEORGE BUSH DEATH CULT, with images of George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Ronald Reagan, as well as several Democrats: Joe Biden, Barack Obama, the Clintons. The man, Bryan Belice, was a 38-year-old military veteran who had deployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan. He told me he was troubled by the Democratic Party’s support of the war in Ukraine—a conflict that Kennedy has campaigned to end. Belice said he identifies as an independent, and has supported both Democrats and Republicans in past elections. This year, he’d been drawn to Kennedy and would have voted for him had he stayed in the race. Now, Belice said, he’d probably vote for Trump. “I may not agree with everything on the conservative Republican side, but I certainly think that the policies that are being put forth now by Trump are more in line with workers and average people, and in opposition to corporate interests and things that are damaging to our nation today,” he said.
Other attendees were more reluctant to follow Kennedy’s directive. Shauna Reisewitz, a Kennedy supporter from Santa Cruz, California, told me that she was still weighing whether to vote for RFK or Trump, given that Kennedy is still on the ballot in her state. But she conceded that, living in such a deep-blue state, her decision may not ultimately matter that much, and she didn’t feel in a rush to make one at all; she knew only that voting for Kamala Harris was out of the question.
Mike Patton, a former Kennedy-campaign volunteer from central Florida, told me that RFK’s late-summer exit had created “turbulent waters” for many people he knew. “There was a little remorse. You go through the whole psychological process,” Patton said. He told me he was still toying with writing in Kennedy as a way to boost RFK’s fledgling We the People Party and help position it for the 2028 election. I asked Patton if he was worried about Trump becoming an autocrat. “There is some possibility. And that’s the danger of the thought that nobody knows. It’s a percentage of risk,” he said. “And so I think it’s for people to decide: What’s a higher-percentage risk, and what’s more detrimental in the end? I don’t like having to choose that. But that’s where we are.”
If he did vote for Trump and Trump did become a dictator, would he feel regret? “I don’t know a person who wouldn’t,” Patton said. “I support Bobby. I understand where he’s at, but I’m not going to blindly listen to him.”
Onstage, Kennedy played the hits, and stuck mostly to the MAHA framework, railing at length against pandemic-era public-health restrictions. He spoke repeatedly about tyranny as it pertains to personal choice and medical freedom: “Only the worst tyrannies in the world, people like the Taliban, like the Iranian government, the Saudi government, these are the ones that force their citizens to wear masks, because it dehumanizes them. It turns them from spiritual, creative, independent human beings into a faceless mask of compliance and obedience.”
And then, about 15 minutes later, he implored his followers to help him elect a would-be strongman. The crowd clapped dutifully.
theatlantic.com