IF RFK JR. IS TRYING TO GET TRUMP ELECTED, HE'S GOING ABOUT IT IN A PECULIAR WAY

It's widely believed that the campaign of Robert Kennedy Jr. poses a greater threat to Joe Biden than to Donald Trump -- Biden supporters certainly think so -- but if electing Trump is Kennedy's goal, you have to wonder why he's saying things like this:

NEW and very disturbing:

Straight out of Putin’s talking points and out of RFK Jr.’s mouth — here he is saying Putin merely wanted to “de-nazify” Ukraine. Literally pure Putin propaganda for the invasion and war of Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/sE9yxk3sQL

— Adam Parkhomenko (@AdamParkhomenko) April 5, 2024

The notion that Putin wanted to "de-nazify" Ukraine is the kind of pro-Russia messaging we're hearing from the MAGA right. If you want to appeal to voters who might otherwise vote for Biden, why would you want to sound like a Trumpist (or a Putin useful idiot)?

That's in addition to this:

The presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ... said in an email on Thursday that rioters charged with crimes in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and held in a Washington jail had been “stripped of their constitutional liberties.”

Kennedy walked that back...

Nearly four hours later, the campaign retracted the statement. Stefanie Spear, the press secretary for Mr. Kennedy’s campaign, said the statement “was an error that does not reflect Mr. Kennedy’s views,” adding, “It was inserted by a new marketing contractor and slipped through the normal approval process."

But then there was this:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that he would appoint a special counsel to investigate whether Donald Trump’s supporters were subject to politically motivated prosecutions after Jan. 6, 2021.

In a statement Friday seeking to clarify his position on the Capitol attack, Kennedy questioned whether the riot qualified as an “insurrection”; echoed Trump’s claims that the prosecution of its participants was politically motivated; and said he was “disturbed by the weaponization of government” against the former president.

“Like many reasonable Americans, I am concerned about the possibility that political objectives motivated the vigor of the prosecution of the J6 defendants, their long sentences, and their harsh treatment,” the independent candidate said in the nearly 500-word statement. He wrote that the prosecutions fit “a disturbing pattern of the weaponization of government agencies.”

And earlier in the week, in an interview with CNN's Erin Burnett, Kennedy asserted that Biden threatens democracy more than Trump:

“I can make the argument that President Biden is a much worse threat to democracy,” Kennedy [said]. “The reason for that is President Biden is the first candidate in history, the first president in history that has used the federal agencies to censor political speech, so to censor his opponent.

“The greatest threat to democracy is not somebody who questions election returns,” he added a moment later, “but a president of the United States who uses the power of his office to force the social media companies, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter to open a portal and give access to that portal to the FBI, to the CIA, to the IRS, to CISA, to NIH to censor his political critics.”

Kennedy is referring to a White House's staffer's email to Twitter in January 2021 asking the company to remove a Kennedy tweet that blamed the deaths of many elderly people, including the 86-year-old former baseball star Hank Aaron, on COVID vaccinations. (Twitter rebuffed the government, and the tweet is still up.)

Again, if Kennedy's goal is to peel off voters who might otherwise vote for Biden, why is he doing it with Trumpian framing?

I have a theory. Philip Bump of The Washington Post writes:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s approach to national politics is uncomplicated. Whatever the conventional wisdom — however sound it might be and no matter the scale of the evidence supporting it — he’s against it.

That appears to be true. And where are the vast majority of the political conspiracy theories in America showing up? On the right. Some are generated by Republican propagandists. Others come from Russia and are embraced by Republicans in America. So he's saying these things because he's addicted to conspiratorialism, and GOP (and Kremlin) talking points offer him a steady supply.

Ed Kilgore of New York magazine thinks Kennedy is aware that his voters will be people who dislike both Trump and Biden, and he's trying to create more such voters:

RFK Jr. is very much the candidate of what political analysts call “the double haters,” voters who dislike both Biden and Trump for various reasons and would prefer a credible alternative.... if he can help increase the number of “double haters” by describing the two major candidates as “threats to democracy,” there will be even more people open to voting for Kennedy. It’s possible that he believes Biden is more vulnerable to raids on his supporters because they are less personally attached to their candidate than Trump backers; Kennedy is already pulling more votes from the Democratic candidate than from the Republican. So calling Biden an even bigger threat to democracy than the obviously scofflaw Trump could be a matter of hunting where the ducks are.

But in that case, you'd think Kennedy would want to avoid sounding like a Trumper. Yet he keeps doing it, presumably because those Trumpist conspiracy theories are irresistible to him.

Or maybe there's a belief in MAGA World (or Moscow) that Kennedy is useful as a person who can effectively deliver Trumpist (or Putinist) ideas to political or cultural liberals. If so, we'll see if it works. That's the only way a "use Trumpist framing as a means of winning over potential Biden voters" strategy makes any sense to me.