by Jeffrey Lord
Call it “The Trump Revolution.”
The news that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — scion of America’s most famous, not to mention one of its most historic, Democrat political families — was endorsing the GOP’s former President Donald Trump spoke volumes about the current state of American politics.
As The American Spectator’s own Paul Kengor and entrepreneur Tim Mellon, the former chairman and owner of Pan Am Systems, write in separate American Spectator columns, RFK Jr. alone poses a serious threat to status quo Democrats. Combine that with the political force of nature that is Donald Trump, and the results are a serious challenge to status-quo American politics.
That doesn’t count the news shortly thereafter that Democrat–turned–Independent Tulsi Gabbard, the one-time congresswoman from Hawaii and Democrat presidential candidate, had also jumped on the Trump bandwagon with an in-person endorsement.
In terms of RFK Jr., as Dr. Kengor made clear:
The liberals made themselves an enemy of Bobby Kennedy Jr. This was their doing. They and their Biden administration didn’t treat Bobby Jr. as an old Democrat ally. They treated him like a political enemy. They drove him away.
To borrow from another ex-Democrat, Ronald Reagan, RFK Jr. didn’t leave the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party left him.
“I left the party,” RFK Jr. said this past weekend. “And, most sadly — for me, for the Democratic Party — in the name of saving democracy, the Democratic Party set itself to dismantling it, lacking confidence in its candidate, that its candidate could win in a fair election at the voting booth.
Exactly.
As one old enough to recall my political hero, RFK Sr. — I was, um, 17 (and still have my Kennedy bumper sticker and button received when I wrote the RFK 1968 campaign) — the fact was that RFK Sr. was involved in a revolution within the Democratic Party.
He was preceded as a candidate in the 1968 primaries by the left-wing Minnesota Sen. Eugene McCarthy, who, with his swarm of anti-Vietnam War college kids, almost beat LBJ in New Hampshire. Within days, Bobby Sr. jumped into the race. And shortly thereafter, LBJ — like Biden today, the incumbent president — who was vastly unpopular with grassroots Democrats — abandoned his race for reelection. The Democrat Party machine had been upended. Neither the party — or American politics — would be the same again.
Without a doubt, American politics is in the midst of what can easily be called “the Trump Revolution.” And the first “tell” of the presence of this Trump Revolution is the fierceness of the opposition coming from the political establishment that is what Americans have come to call “The Swamp.”
Look no further than this headline and accompanying story from, but of course, the Washington Post:
More than 200 former Bush, McCain and Romney staffers endorse Harris
An open letter warned that a second Donald Trump presidency “will hurt real, everyday people and weaken our sacred institutions.”
The Post story opens this way:
More than 200 Republicans who worked for President George W. Bush, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) or the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) have endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, warning in a letter that a second Trump presidency “will hurt real, everyday people and weaken our sacred institutions.”
The open letter with the endorsement was first published Monday in USA Today, with 238 signatures.
The group of former Bush, McCain and Romney staffers issued a similar letter supporting Joe Biden when he ran against Trump in 2020. In their new, pro-Harris letter, alumni from those three top Republicans were joined by at least five former staffers to the late President George H.W. Bush.
Got that? A second Trump term would “weaken our sacred institutions.”
Like … the Department of Education? Which Trump, like Reagan before him, wanted to abolish?
By nominating constitutionalists to the Supreme Court and lower courts? As Reagan did — and as Trump himself did?
By supporting a “peace through strength” national security policy — as Reagan did and which won the Cold War?
Make no mistake. What all these establishment Republicans are advocating is the election of Kamala Harris — who is openly campaigning on a pro-socialist, pro-Marxist platform. What they are really about is understanding that a second Trump presidency that “will hurt real, everyday people” really means that they themselves will be forced to go out in the marketplace and get jobs that have nothing to do with trading on their role as government insiders — Swamp dwellers.
The letter is supremely cynical and, if nothing else, is a bold statement that the signers are all too willing to abandon conservative principles for socialism because, in doing so, they can get or keep a Swamp-related job.
Tellingly, the American people get the game. Which is exactly why they are so staunchly supportive of Trump and his new allies — Democrats Kennedy and Gabbard.
Writing in the second volume on The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution: 1980-1989, biographer Steven Hayward writes of Reagan’s landslide victory in 1980:
For establishment Washington, it was if a barbarian horde had sacked the city. “The Town Trembled,” read another Post news headline…. something of gigantic proportions happened — must have been happening for a long while — and the capital and the political wise men were taken by surprise… [A]n “anti-Washington,” “anti-establishment” political storm warning was missed by Washington and the establishment. Reagan had predicted since the early 1960s that a “prairie fire” of conservative populism would someday sweep the nation.
Substitute “Trump” for “Reagan,” and it is abundantly obvious that yet another “prairie fire” of conservative populism is at hand, with, in today’s world, RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard getting the game and joining the revolution.
How will this end in November? Trump and his revolutionaries seem at this writing likely to triumph.
But win, lose, or draw, the conservative populist revolution — the “prairie fire” that is fueling the core of the Trump Revolution — is not going away regardless of the outcome.
Stay tuned.
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Jeffrey Lord, a contributing editor to The American Spectator, is a former aide to Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp. An author and former CNN commentator, he writes from Pennsylvania at [email protected]. His new book, Swamp Wars: Donald Trump and The New American Populism vs. The Old Order, is now out from Bombardier Books.
Photo “Donald Trump” by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0.
