RFK's Appeal Should Not Be Overlooked

It's the message that resonates, not the messenger

RFK Jr. speaks on stage alongside Trump | Getty

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr has risen to become co-chair of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and seems a likely cabinet-level member in his possible administration. I’d normally ignore this as just another act in the Trump circus, but over the past week, I’ve heard gushing reviews of RFK’s speech explaining his decision to suspend his campaign and endorse Trump. “He’s saying stuff no one else is saying,” one said, hopefully. “I think it was the best political speech I have ever heard,” a relative said, urging me to watch it. This was the first time I’d ever seen him express enthusiasm for a candidate.

I watched the speech and got a taste of why his message resonates so strongly, despite the avalanche of news focusing on RFK’s bizarre personal history and his anti-vax stance. I came away not with an appreciation for RFK, but for the hunger people clearly feel for someone, anyone to talk about the issues he raises. He resonates not because of any clarity of thought or grasp of the issues or the solutions he advances. The appeal is in the problems he identifies — from endless wars like in Ukraine to the utter failure of the U.S. healthcare system — which Trump and Kamala Harris have been disinclined to discuss.

When I watched Harris’ keynote speech at the DNC, I was struck by how much less important healthcare seemed than in previous elections. In the last two presidential elections, Senator Bernie Sanders made Medicare-for-All the centerpiece of his campaign. Other Democratic Party candidates fought to keep up, advocating for less ambitious but still significant overhauls like the so-called public option. By 2020, over half a dozen Democratic Party candidates, including then-Senator Kamala Harris, expressed support for some version of Medicare-for-All or a combination of it alongside private insurance. Today, however, those proposals are absent. Harris has backed away from the issue, and even Trump, once famous for not shying away from controversy, avoids it. During his convention speech last month, the word “healthcare” doesn’t appear even a single time. (Harris uttered the word once in her convention speech.) “Unless we can do something much better, we’ll keep it,” Trump said at a rally this month, referring to the Affordable Care Act. What that much better policy is no one knows, because he still hasn’t proposed anything. 

So when RFK alleges in his speech “the insidious corruption” at federal health agencies that’s “destroying America’s health,” is it any wonder that millions of people take notice? What he says is riddled with inaccuracies, but he says something. And if you squint, it sounds vaguely like all that ambitious healthcare talk we heard in previous elections:

“These agencies, the FDA, the USDA, CDC, all of them are controlled by giant for-profit corporations. 75% of the FDA funding doesn’t come from taxpayers. It comes from pharma. And pharma executives and consultants and lobbyists cycle in and out of these agencies. With President Trump’s backing, I’m going to change that. We’re going to staff these agencies with honest scientists and doctors who are free from industry funding. We’re going to make sure the decisions of consumers, doctors, and patients are informed by unbiased science. A sick child is the best thing for the pharmaceutical industry. When American children or adults are sick with a chronic condition, they’re put on medication for their entire life.”

This view of hidden forces working against Americans’ health is so widely held by people that even President Joe Biden brags that he beat “big Pharma” in reducing the cost of some medications. Given the cost of healthcare, given how difficult it is for so many to actually get treatment, and given the constant news of a sicker and sicker American people, it is both a simple and personal issue.

None of what RFK is describing would significantly address the exorbitant cost (and inadequacy) of health insurance plans. But unlike Trump, who’s been virtually silent on the issue of healthcare, and Harris, who I’m sure will push some kind of piecemeal Medicaid expansion plan, RFK is willing to frame the issue as a crisis and identify the “culprits” responsible, as he put it.

At some points he diagnoses the problem correctly, sounding like Bernie Sanders:

“Today we spend more on healthcare than any country on Earth, twice what they pay in Europe. And yet we have the worst health outcomes of any nation in the world. We’re about 79th in health outcomes, behind Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Mongolia and other countries. Nobody has a chronic disease burden like we have. During the COVID epidemic, we had the highest body count of any country in the world. We had 16% of the COVID deaths even though we only have 4.2% of the world’s population.”

Then there’s what RFK said our “endless military adventurism.” On the war in Ukraine, another issue that has gotten relatively little attention from either of the major candidates, RFK also has something he wants to get off his chest:

“In fact, tiny Ukraine is a proxy in a geopolitical struggle initiated by the ambitions of the US neocons for American global hegemony. I’m not excusing Putin for invading Ukraine. He had other options, but the war is Russia’s predictable response. The reckless neocon project of extending NATO to encircle Russia is a hostile act. The credulous media rarely explain to Americans that we unilaterally walked away from two intermediate nuclear weapons treaties with Russia and then put nuclear missile systems in Romania and Poland.”

His focus on neocons, a term made popular during the Bush administration regarding the push to invade Iraq in 2003, feels dated. He doesn’t understand Putin’s thinking (or iniquity) in mounting a full scale invasion. He’s also dead wrong about American nuclear missiles in Romania and Poland; but when is the last time you’ve heard arms control discussed in a presidential election? 

RFK’s account of the war is much too sympathetic to Moscow in general, but again, it at least purports to offer an explanation. Compare that with Trump’s bluster and Harris’ adherence to Biden administration policies. Says RFK:

“the Biden White House repeatedly spurned Russia’s offer to settle this war peacefully. The Ukraine war began in 2014, when U.S. agencies overthrew the democratically elected government of Ukraine and installed a handpicked pro-Western government. They launched a deadly civil war against ethnic Russians in Ukraine. In 2019, America walked away from a peace treaty, the Minsk Agreement, that had been negotiated between Russia and Ukraine by European nations. And then in April of 2022, we wanted the war. In April 2022, President Biden sent Boris Johnson to Ukraine to force President Zelenskyy to tear up a peace agreement that he and the Russians had already signed. The Russians were withdrawing troops from Kiev, Donbas, and Luhansk. And that peace agreement would have brought peace to the region and would have allowed Donbas and Luhansk to remain part of Ukraine.”

It is a rant that uses false specificity to snow non-experts into thinking he must know what he's talking about, but is wrong in countless ways. Still, it touches a nerve in America about the cost of U.S. support and the dangers in using the war as a proxy to fight Russia.

But what do the others have to say? Donald Trump just trashes the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of the war. During his convention speech last month, Trump mentioned the Ukraine war several times saying Biden has handled it badly. But he provides not a hint of what he would do differently, nor even any specifics. All Trump does is bluster about how he would end the war “in one day.” 

Harris, for her part, said the word Ukraine just twice during her speech at the DNC. Neither reference propounded any analysis or solution. “Five days before Russia attacked Ukraine, I met with President Zelensky to warn him about Russia’s plan to invade,” Harris said, as if the Ukrainians couldn’t see this themselves. “And as president, I will stand strong with Ukraine and our NATO allies.” What does that even mean? In other remarks, Harris has done little more than offer up affirmation of Biden’s handling of the conflict, which is now approaching its third year with no end in sight. President Biden’s answer to how long the U.S. would back the Ukrainian’s war effort: “As long as it takes.” I don’t think Americans are lacking in sympathy for Ukraine, but leaders should at least have a plan for how to bring the war, or really any war, to an end.

“War has been a disaster for our country, as well. We have squandered nearly $200 billion already,” RFK says, echoing the inaccurate claim that the U.S. has sent Ukraine aid in an amount that is the equivalent of its GDP. The figure he quotes is overstated and American opinion on aid is divided, but a significant number of Americans are uneasy with the amount of aid being doled out. Thirty-one percent of Americans say it’s too much aid, whereas 25 percent say it’s too little and 18 percent say they’re not sure, according to a Pew survey in May. That’s by no means clear cut and as I said before, Americans rightly have a lot of sympathy for Ukraine. But the split hints at more nuanced attitudes that I suspect are skeptical not of Ukraine aid as such, but the never ending open pocket book. These are the people RFK is speaking to.

RFK has now bent the knee before Trump and in return has been elevated as the new fresh face willing to stick his neck out to describe his policies (whatever you think of them). He is the 2016 Trump of today — the outsider — channeling continued anxiety and discontent, supplanting Trump and J.D. Vance with his ability to actually say something. The messenger is irrelevant; the message, especially on healthcare, is what’s at the top of people’s minds.