R.F.K Jr. is a far bigger threat to Trump than Biden

Sometimes it’s hard not to conclude that people get the fates they deserve. Or that, at least, is what it’s beginning to look like in the US.

The current trial of Donald Trump proves again that words should matter, but also that words are routinely overlooked and often abused. One would hope that people in the media would know better, but rarely do they justify that hope. They continue, for example, to describe the current Manhattan trial as the “hush money” trial, which it isn’t. It’s never been about hush money, just like it’s never been about Donald Trump’s Hugh Hefner dressing gown or the contents of his overnight bag. Or even a woman calling herself “Stormy”.

It’s a trial about the breaking of campaign finance rules. As Judge Merchan himself described it: “The allegations are in substance, that Donald Trump falsified business records to conceal an agreement with others to unlawfully influence the 2016 presidential election.”

The problem for the media is that nobody finds campaign finance rules sexy. (Well, okay, there’s you with your hand up at the back but you might need help…)

“Hush money” simplifies it. It steers the mind towards the frilly acts that might need to be hushed up.

Yet despite this week’s headlines, what’s not on trial in Manhattan is the morality (or lack thereof) of Donald Trump having sex with a porn “actress” (itself such an abused word given there can’t be that much acting involved). His many infidelities alone should have kept Trump out of office but the same could have been said about a few former presidents. Yet that’s not what’s on trial.

Across the networks on Tuesday, many pearls were clutched, so much sham outrage duly observed. All that was missing was The Simpson’s meme of the woman screaming “won’t somebody think of the children?”. Anchors were quick to report that they wouldn’t report anything salacious said in court and then they expressed gratitude when Judge Merchan told Stephanie Clifford that he didn’t want her to go into details. 

CNN was quick to report that we’d learn nothing about Trump’s genitalia.

I REPEAT: Nothing about genitalia!

Yet it was very noticeable how quickly the A-team of news anchors turned up on CNN once they learned that “Stormy” had entered the courtroom. We hadn’t seen coverage like that for National Enquirer publisher David Pecker’s testimony when he’d explained the far more insidious way his magazine had allegedly been corrupted by Trump to protect himself and condemn the innocent. Nor were they there when various Trump underlings had explained the strange inner workings of Trumpworld.

But they were there for the porn star because they wanted to be the first to report that… THERE’D BE NOTHING ABOUT GENITALIA!

There’s a crass unreality about so much of the coverage. Often, it seems to repeat all the mistakes that network news had promised never to repeat. They gave Trump all the airtime he wanted in 2016, which they later admitted was a mistake. They stopped broadcasting his interminable, repetitive rallies in 2020. Now they hang on every word and lie he utters outside court.

They also buy into the “Stormy Daniels” fiction but, again, perhaps words don’t matter.

Her name is Stephanie Clifford, but that oversight might be excused if it makes the story more accessible. Yet even then it’s noticeable how fast and loose they play with names. It’s a cardinal sin across all of US news that former President Trump is routinely described as “The President”. Pundits on the right routinely complain that the Judge has referred to him as “Mr Trump” in court.

According to The Emily Post Institute (the keepers of etiquette traditions in the US): “When addressing a former President of the United States in a formal setting, the correct form is ‘Mr. LastName’. (‘President LastName’ or ‘Mr. President’ are terms reserved for the current head of state.)”

Names are words too and open to abuse, as we’re witnessing elsewhere in the 2024 election.

Whilst there’s some clarity emerging around the main race between Biden and Trump, the role of third-party candidates is beginning to change the logic, especially with the numbers committing themselves to the leading third-party candidate, Robert F. Kennedy Jnr.

As it stands, Biden continues to edge away in the polls. The latest bad news for Donald Trump is that The Hill/ Decision Desk HQ’s average of polls has the President leading Trump, 45 per cent to 44.9 per cent. Here the tiny margin isn’t so important – the margin of error might even mean that Trump is ahead – but, at this stage, it’s about momentum. Trump has lost any he had and Biden seems to have been rapidly winning over the undecided. More significant, perhaps, is that in polls with more granularity, Biden already has a big lead among voters certain to vote in November. Trump does well among those less politically engaged. 

Less predictable are those polls measuring the public’s appetite for a broader range of candidates, where 12 per cent of voters say they’ll vote for Kennedy, better known by his initials, RFK Jr. 

Now, it should not need saying but Jr is not Snr. Robert F. Kennedy Jnr is not Robert F. Kennedy, his father and the late senator from New York and former United States Attorney General who was fatally shot in 1968. That “RFK” remains an iconic figure in US history.

The guy going topless in magazine spreads, walking around without his shoes, and (I’m not making this up) revealing details about his brain parasite… That guy is not RFK. It’s debatable if he should even be referred to as RFK Jr, which is beginning to resemble a marketing stunt. Like when a big famous store goes bust and some other party buys the brand and then relaunches it but with totally different business model… 

Woolworths is back!

No, it isn’t, and you aren’t RFK…

Kennedy has been positioned as a real threat to Biden on the naïve belief that he’s a member of the famous family of Democrats and is sure to attract Blue voters. RFK Jr has marketability, with strong brand recognition. He also married into liberal Hollywood. His wife is Cheryl Hines, the TV former-wife of the character Larry David, played by the real Larry David and outspoken critic of Trump. 

Yet Kennedy is far from what we know of the Kennedy clan, who have come out en masse to disown him. Yet that doesn’t overlook how the media is partly complicit in the fiction that he’s anything like JFK and RFK. If they had any sense, they would impose a new collective house style on Kennedy. 

They should give him his own identity. They should call him “Bob Kennedy”. 

And Bob Kennedy is likely to hurt the Trump campaign, rather than Biden. His candidacy is attractive to those people who like much about Trump that’s disruptive. He’s a fierce advocate for body autonomy, especially around vaccines. This also makes him attractive to those Republicans who are uncomfortable with the party’s hard-line stance on abortion. He is also prone to conspiracy mythmaking, meaning he’s more in tune with the MAGA base than he is with the current Democratic Party. 

Trump seems to have realised this and has aimed some barbs toward Kennedy. More are sure to come. We can also expect to see Republicans engaged in the dark art of pumping the candidacy of those third parties who could hurt Biden, being the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein, as well as the far-left oddball, Cornell West, a media-savvy professor and “public intellectual” who has the annoying habit of calling everybody “brother”. Both are polling with one or two percent but in a race of fine margins, small numbers might carry bigger consequences. 

In the meantime, we await the outcome of Trump’s Manhattan trial, which again, isn’t about “hush money”, Stormy Daniels, or even genitalia.

It’s a trial about the breaking of campaign finance rules, if only we can remember that…

@DavidWaywell

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