On Friday, Donald Trump accepted Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s endorsement and appeared with the independent candidate at a rally in Phoenix. Democrats do have reason to be concerned that this will boost Trump’s campaign: A recent poll published by the Cook Political Report, for example, found that about half of RFK’s supporters said Trump was their second-choice candidate, as opposed to only about a quarter who said the same about Kamala Harris.
But there’s also a reason for Democrats to be hopeful: The member of Team Trump who reportedly brokered the alliance is Donald Trump Jr., whose role as an adviser to his father and powerful voice within the Republican Party is, arguably, one of the Republican Party’s biggest problems.
AdvertisementThe younger Trump is often described as a GOP “kingmaker” because he uses his connections and public stature—he’s an extremely prolific social media poster and ubiquitous right-wing TV and podcast guest—to decide who the party will nominate in high-profile races. But the term seems ill-applied given that the candidates Trump Jr. has supported have tended to lose. He is like a political King Midas, except instead of everything he touches turning to gold, it turns to raw sewage and drops a key race by 6 points.
Trump Jr.’s influence really began to take hold during the 2022 midterm cycle, although he was also involved in earlier bad ideas like trying to overturn the 2020 election. (He texted White House chief of staff Mark Meadows on Nov. 5, 2020, that Republicans held “operational control” of “multiple paths” to retain the presidency, which, in addition to exposing him as someone who thinks he’s in a Bourne movie, was not really true in any sense.)
In that year, Republicans lost several high-profile governor’s races in swing states and failed to win control of the Senate despite incumbent Democratic president Joe Biden’s unpopularity. The elder Donald Trump is usually blamed for this—and that blame is deserved—but behind every Trump endorsement of a conspiracy theorist with a messy personal life, there was often an even more enthusiastic endorsement of........