RFK Jr. Says That, Like All The Worst People In The World, Trump Is An 'Empath'
And a talented cartographer!
Perhaps one of the most striking things about public figures who make the leap from “anti-Trump” to “pro-Trump” is the fullness of that conversion. It’s never “Oh, I changed my mind about some things and here is why,” or the traditional “We agree on more things than we disagree on,” it’s that they suddenly, magically, come to the conclusion that he is perfect in every way, the best at everything he does and also really, really ridiculously good looking. JD Vance did it, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham. Megyn Kelly did it, although it appears she’s on the outs again.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had a slightly longer way to go, and as a former Democrat, has had to go even further than we’ve seen from any former Trumper. Sure, Rubio and Vance are cursed to wear ill-fitting shoes, but “Bobby” has to claim that not only does he love Trump, but that his dead relatives would have adored him as well. Also that Trump is actually more of a Democrat than members of the Democratic Party are now. Incredible!
This is what he did during an extraordinarily bullshit-filled chat with Mercedes Schlapp during CPAC this weekend. So bullshit-filled, in fact, that we’re just gonna do a straight-up rundown of all the ridiculous claims he made.
The Biden Administration put Froot Loops at the top of the food pyramid!
This one really stunned Mercedes Schlapp — and perhaps everyone else other than Toucan Sam, as he clearly has a bit of a problem. And it is a shocking claim, undermined only by the fact that we haven’t had a “food pyramid” since 2011, and the food pyramid that encouraged people to eat a lot of grains came out in 1992, when George H. W. Bush was president.
Though, in Sam’s defense, I feel it’s worth pointing out that when he said “Follow your nose, it always knows!” in the 1980s and ‘90s, he was referring to cereal, whereas, had Kennedy followed that same advice, he would likely have been headed towards a pile of cocaine on a toilet seat. I’m not saying Froot Loops are good for you, but, you know … it’s a sliding scale.
Kennedy also claimed that his food pyramid was the first “backed by science,” although there really aren’t too many scientists that recommend eating mostly meats and saturated fats. Mad scientists, maybe. Not regular ones.
The Biden administration BANNED faith-based addiction programs from getting federal funding
Kennedy told a whole story about how Roland Hazard, this guy who helped Bill Wilson (Bill W) establish Alcoholics Anonymous, asked Carl Jung for help on what could help addicts like him, and Carl Jung told him that the only people who recovered from addiction were the ones who had a “profound spiritual realignment.” This, he says, is why one of the steps is finding a higher power. (True story, the crux of the “drugs and alcohol” talk I got from my mom was the risk of becoming a Jesus freak after getting sober and it was very effective!) This, he lamented, was one reason why it was so very unfortunate that the Biden administration barred faith-based addiction recovery programs from getting federal funding.
Of course, that did not actually happen, even sort of.
The Biden administration literally reestablished the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, which had been replaced in 2018 (after being without a director or website since his election) by Trump’s Faith and Opportunity Initiative, which was exclusively focused on funneling money to faith-based programs. Faith-based programs were absolutely able to get funding, just not exclusively faith-based programs. Because people who aren’t religious deserve options, too!
The only issue that unites Democrats is ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome!’
He spent a while on this, and told a variety of lies, starting with “I noticed this very early because I was raised in a Democratic party that was very opposed to NAFTA. And then in 2016 when President Trump came out about NAFTA, the Democrats suddenly became pro- NAFTA.”
Except that was not even remotely Trump-related. It was an anti-Bernie Sanders/pro-Hillary Clinton thing that was going on well, well before the general. Do I think it was a mistake? I sure do, but I was a Bernie Bro purity pony. The Democrats, however, are a bigger tent, so it actually does make sense is that most of what unites us is being strongly against someone like Trump, who is the epitome of everything that is bad and horrible.
As far as the anti-war thing goes, I don’t know if he got the memo, but … there’s a war.
For the record, the reason those of us who opposed NAFTA did so was because we wanted people to be able to keep their jobs and because we opposed sweatshops, not because we just wanted to weirdly inflict pain on random countries because “AMERICA FIRST!” Trump’s tariffs actually spurred a decline in manufacturing jobs (which increased under Biden), and both Trump and his daughter literally manufactured their garbage products in sweatshops. They’re also having a much higher impact on mid-size, sustainable fashion brands than on fast fashion, which is more able to absorb the shock or move to facilities with even cheaper labor and lower tariffs than China.
Ted Kennedy did Title IX so women could have sports, but Democrats say there should be no women’s sports!
Also not a thing. There are 510,000 NCAA athletes, and fewer than 10 of them are transgender. This is not a real problem, and anyone who thinks these people give a flying shit about “women’s sports” is an idiot.
I never knew anyone with autism!
Again, for the 80-millionth time, that is because they literally locked them away, same as they did to his Aunt Rosemary. Additionally, they now understand it better and are better at diagnosing it, and expanded the criteria so that it now covers a larger group of people than it once did, which is why there are “more” autistic people. This is not hard, but I’m going to point it out every time he says it, because it annoys the shit out of me.
I thought Trump was a bad narcissist, but he’s actually an empath!
I swear to God, you will never meet a bigger, more self-centered asshole than someone who calls themselves an empath. So I suppose it’s fitting that Secretary Brainworms has designated Trump as one.
“Well, let me just say this. President Trump is exactly the opposite of everything that I believed him to be, you know. Um, and you know, I met I, you know, I basically drank the Kool-Aid that he was this, you know, bombastic narcissist who didn’t read books, was ill-informed.
“And um, and then, you know, now I know exactly the opposite. He’s the opposite of a narcissist. He’s an empath. You’ll see that every time he talks about the Ukraine war, he talks about the casualties on both sides. You will not hear any Democrat ever talk about that. And he talks about the Russian kids who are dying. He gets the reports every week and he they make a huge impression on him about the death rates.”
Note that he only points out the Russian children here. And as terrible as it is that any children are dying in a war, it is their own country at fault here. They’re the aggressor. They can literally stop at any time, they just do not want to.
But here’s where I really have a problem — this “I was brainwashed!” nonsense. I’m sorry, but he was just as capable as the rest of us of hearing the words that come out of Trump’s mouth. He also lived through the last Trump presidency. So if the only reason he thought Trump was bad when he was actually good was because all of the bad people in the media or whatever said that he was, that is a him problem. That makes him a very stupid person, frankly. The same goes for literally any other convert who says the same thing. Anyone who has been politically adjacent as long as he has (70 years!) and is that easily brainwashed cannot be trusted on anything.
Also he’s a genius!
According to Kennedy, Trump possesses a miraculous “encyclopedic molecular knowledge on these this wide range of very, very eclectic interests” including “music, Broadway shows, pro wrestling, football, every sport, golf,” and business deals. Is that really that impressive? I feel like it is not. That seems like a regular amount of interests, especially when “sports” is included four times. So he likes musicals, sports and business. Congrats?
Oh, but also he is a master cartographer!
Now, I swear (I SWEAR) he has told this story before, but I can’t find proof of it anywhere.
“I was on the airplane with them and we were sitting across the table from each other eating McDonald's drinking Diet Coke. And um, he, we started talking about Syria and he got a placemat and he turned it on its back, and then he took a Sharpie and he drew a perfect map of the Middle East, and then he put the troop strength of every country on every border on that map and it just, uh, it challenged a lot of the assumptions that I had been told about him,” he said.
Well, that definitely happened. Or it did, but it was actually entirely inaccurate and Kennedy is just very easily brainwashed into believing whatever people tell him. I think we’re all going to need to see Trump’s cartography skills before we can truly weigh in on what a fabulous map savant he is.
You know, the irony is, the way he’s describing Trump actually makes him sound not entirely unlike Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, a movie based on an autistic man, Kim Peek, who was born three years prior to Kennedy.
My dad and my uncle would have LOVED Donald Trump and also invaded Iran
OK, you know, the cartography was great, but I really love the way he chooses to retroactively turn his uncle and father into big MAGA guys. Largely because it clearly satisfies a desire among a lot of Republicans to steal JFK for themselves. They’ve always had a weird thing about this, and boy, if he isn’t telling them what they want to hear.
“I think that if they were around today that, um, they would, you know, they would be doing, making the same kind of choice that President Trump is about Iran, about Ukraine, about, um, trying to raise up the middle class,” he said.
Ah yes, Bobby Kennedy, who was very famously against the Vietnam war, totally would have invaded Iran. That tracks. It’s also highly unclear how Trump is raising up the middle class other than through rhetoric, but whatever helps him sleep at night.
Actually — actually! — Republicans are Democrats now!
“You know, I'll tell you something that, well, I grew up in a Democratic party when the Democrats owned 30 percent of the wealth and the Republicans owned 70 percent of the wealth. And today, it's exactly the inverse. The Democrats own 70 percent of the wealth and the Republicans own 30 percent of the wealth. And the Democrats are no longer on this side of the middle class. They're contemptful of it. And, uh, President Trump is completely committed to farmers, to firemen, to police, people who are working in this country. And you know, that was the Democratic constituency that I grew up with,” he said.
That statistic is entirely false. It’s not that Democrats have 70 percent of the wealth, it is that areas where Biden voters lived generated 71 percent of US economic activity. This is not wealthy vs. poor, it’s urban vs. rural.
There’s a lot to take away from this, but I do have one big one — for us. It’s something I’ve been saying for a while, now. The things Democrats do in hopes of winning over Republicans will always end up biting them in the ass and actually serving as a cudgel that Republicans will be more than happy to beat them with, given the opportunity. We are better off when we are anti-war, because that is always going to be more authentic to who we are than trying to be big, bad alpha warhawks ever will be. The last two elections we lost, we lost in large part because the candidates were hawkish or supportive of extremely unpopular military interventions.
We’re also always going to be better when we are fighting for just labor laws and higher, better paying employment here and around the world. We’re always going to be better when we fight for social and economic justice, even when it’s not the popular thing to do. That’s the long game, and it’s ultimately an easier sell than “Oh, well, we totally did believe this correct thing, we just pretended not to because we wanted to win the votes of soccer moms!” Because, see, when we do the right thing, we can easily say “Hey, this brainworms guy is lying — we did the right thing, and here is the evidence for that, right here.”
And isn’t that fun?
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
The empath line really pissed me off, because it made me remember all the times I goggled in disbelief at my ex-wife while she told people what a big old empath she is.
Because empaths are always trying to stab their spouses with a steak knife in front of the kids.
Trump is an empath and I, Hamilton is The Dalai Lama.