Right-wing media stars who want Trump to win the presidency were among the most fervent supporters of Kennedy’s bid. They encouraged him to run for the Democratic nomination, touted his campaign after it launched, then urged him to run as an independent when they thought he would take votes away from that party’s standard-bearer. But they turned on him as it became increasingly clear that his run was actually hurting Trump.

History’s most obvious political rat-fucking attempt is now coming to an end, but its impact on the 2024 race reflects the broader ongoing right-wing turn against vaccinations since the COVID-19 pandemic. And it could still have even more disastrous consequences if Trump’s right-wing media supporters get their way and Kennedy snags a position running a federal health care agency in a second Trump administration.

A right-wing plot to put a “chaos agent” in the Democratic field

Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show was a launchpad for Republican extremists seeking the GOP kingmaker’s support in their election bids. But on the night of April 19, 2023, the candidate receiving plaudits from the Fox star was ostensibly seeking the Democratic presidential nomination.

“Bobby Kennedy is one of the most remarkable people we have met and we are honored to have him on our show tonight,” Carlson told his viewers at the top of their fawning interview.

Kennedy’s friendly sit-down with Carlson was characteristic of the glowing treatment he received from right-wing outlets and influencers for the Democratic run he had officially announced earlier that day. His bid drew fervent praise from the likes of Trumpist political operative Charlie Kirk and arch-conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and he became a constant presence on right-wing cable outlets and podcasts. In the early months of his campaign, Kennedy received more Fox weekday appearances than high-profile Republican presidential candidates like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and more mentions on that network than all but three members of that field.

It’s no secret why avowed right-wingers were so interested in Kennedy’s Democratic presidential bid — they thought he could be a spoiler who would help Trump win. Indeed, Steve Bannon, a former Trump White House adviser who had spent years using his streaming show to promote Kennedy’s anti-vax conspiracy theories, reportedly encouraged him to launch the run because he viewed Kennedy as “a useful chaos agent.” Other current and former Trump advisers also talked up Kennedy’s campaign and were not shy about why they were doing so: As Roger Stone put it, Kennedy would “soften Joe Biden up for his defeat by Donald Trump.”

Kennedy was a bad fit for a Democratic campaign. He has one of the party’s most celebrated names, and played a leading role in environmental organizations earlier in his career. But in recent years, he became better known for promoting conspiracy theories about childhood vaccinations, and his extremist views on the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccine put him in step with the right-wing propaganda machine. As a candidate, Kennedy thrilled white supremacists by claiming that the virus had been “ethnically targeted” to not affect Jewish people.

Kennedy’s positioning made him a better fit for MAGA voters than Democrats. So when he failed to gain traction in the Democratic race and switched to an independent run in the fall, he immediately became a thorn in Trump’s side.

The right turned on RFK Jr. when his independent campaign started hurting Trump

Sean Hannity, the Trump political operative who also has a prime-time Fox show, used a September 2023 interview with Kennedy to pitch the candidate on switching from his Democratic primary bid to a third-party run.

“When Sean Hannity's nicer to you than they are, you got a problem,” the Fox host told him. “You would agree with that. If they're not treating you fairly, why stay with them? If they're not going to treat you fairly, why?”

But a month later, when Kennedy returned to Hannity’s show shortly after announcing his run as an independent, the host shivved him. Over more than seven minutes, Hannity characterized Kennedy as “very liberal,” and criticized him over his positions on environmental policy and for endorsing Democrats for president in past elections.

Again, there’s nothing subtle about what was going on. Trump’s campaign saw polling which suggested that Kennedy would attract more support from Republicans than Democrats as an independent candidate, so they pivoted to attacking him — and Trumpist shills like Hannity followed along.

Over the following months, the right-wing press struggled with how to cover Kennedy, seemingly hoping to use him to damage Democrats while also trying to remind their viewers that he was too liberal to actually support.

Meanwhile, reporters produced features detailing embarrassing events from Kennedy’s past, including his claims that a parasite had eaten parts of his brain and triggered memory loss, and his admission that he had once discovered the carcass of a bear cub by the site of the road in upstate New York, driven it into New York City, and dumped it in Central Park with an old bicycle to suggest that it had been killed by a cyclist (“Maybe that’s where I got my brain worm,” he told The New Yorker).

Kennedy had too little support in national polls to make the presidential debate stage and no path to electoral victory. All he could do was take votes from Trump — and so after reported lobbying by people like Carlson, he’s apparently planning to drop out and endorse the Republican nominee instead.

The question is what Kennedy secured in return.

An anti-vaxxer running HHS?

Kennedy’s campaign had reportedly been trying to secure him a future administration position in exchange for his endorsement. His efforts to meet with Harris to discuss such a deal went nowhere.

But Kennedy found Trump more amenable to such a deal. Kennedy reached out to Trump following the July assassination attempt on the former president, using a phone number reportedly provided by Carlson. The pair reportedly talked about Kennedy “endorsing his campaign and taking a job in a second Trump administration, overseeing a portfolio of health and medical issues.” Kennedy subsequently told The Washington Post he is “willing to talk to anybody from either political party who wants to talk about children’s health and how to end the chronic disease epidemic.”

Trump has since publicly floated giving Kennedy a major job in his administration, telling CNN he “probably would” consider such an appointment.

It’s unclear what such a job might look like, and Trump is such a huge liar you’d have to have brainworms to trust him to hold up his end of such a bargain. But Donald Trump Jr. has said of Kennedy, “I love the idea of giving him some sort of role in a three-letter agency and letting him blow it up.” And Trump’s media supporters have proposed offering Kennedy a position as prominent as secretary of health and human services, with Paul Dans, the former director of Project 2025, suggesting Kennedy should head that department, the Food and Drug Administration, or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in order “to really clear house at the agency.”

Granting Kennedy control of HHS and its $1.5 trillion budget, or one of the “three-letter agencies” it oversees, like the FDA or CDC or the National Institutes of Health, could have disastrous consequences. As a report on the prospect from NBC News detailed, Kennedy has kooky health views and “has described wanting to dismantle those offices and rebuild them with like-minded fringe figures.”

But such a move would serve as the natural culmination of the right-wing media’s campaign against the COVID-19 vaccines developed under Trump and rolled out under Biden. Carlson and his ilk spent years waging war on those lifesaving medications, falsely claiming they were ineffective and inflating claims about their potential side effects. (By driving down support for the vaccines among Republicans, their effort surely led to the deaths of many members of their audiences.)

Thanks to that campaign, Trump was unable to take credit for the COVID-19 vaccines on the campaign trail. The former president shied away from discussing his administration’s greatest accomplishment to avoid alienating his own supporters during the GOP primary. He’s tried to court Kennedy’s endorsement by talking down childhood vaccinations, bizarrely telling him in a leaked phone call, “I want to do small doses” rather than giving infants a shot that “looks like it’s meant for a horse, not uh, you know, a 10-pound or 20-pound baby.” And on the campaign trail, he’s vowed that his administration “will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate.”

All of this is troubling enough. Trump’s anti-vaccine rhetoric — and threats to enact it as policy — has come as Republicans have become generally less supportive of vaccination. But putting an anti-vax crackpot in charge of a government health agency could supercharge that process, with dire consequences for America’s children.