CLAY TRAVIS: When the Dems lose a Kennedy, they’ve lost the plot

Yesterday in Arizona, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the eldest son of Robert F. Kennedy, Sr. and the best-known surviving scion of the Kennedy family dynasty, took the stage to endorse Donald Trump for president of the United States. It was an iconic and consequential moment: A member of the Kennedy family, royalty in Democratic politics for generations, turning his back on the party of his family’s legacy to endorse a Republican candidate. In so doing, Kennedy did something extraordinary; he stood on principle over politics and embraced actual democracy instead of the rigged candidate system created by the Democratic National Committee.

In the space of a few sentences, Kennedy erased four days of speeches at the DNC. His clarion call for truth, accountability and the democratic system, has reverberated loudly for many middle of the road voters, people who feel alienated by the politics of both left and right, folks who no longer believe that people in positions of power care about their concerns at all. 

Having initially sought the nomination of the Democratic Party, Kennedy was blocked at every turn by President Joe Biden’s supporters in the DNC. They wouldn’t allow debates, wouldn’t allow a full contest for the party’s nomination. Even though Biden was mentally and physically a shell of the man he’d once been, the DNC protected Biden, arguing anyone sharing videos of his clear mental and physical deterioration was participating in ‘cheap fakes.’

So too did their allies in the left-wing media. 

Remember, it was only 60 days ago that CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other left-wing media allies attacked anyone who dared to suggest Biden was anything other than sharp as a tack behind closed doors.

Kennedy lambasted this in his address Friday afternoon endorsing Trump for president, and articulating the primary challenge of our times quite clearly.

‘When a U.S. president colludes with, or outright coerces, media companies to censor political speech, it’s an attack on our most sacred right of free expression,’ he said. ‘And that’s the very right upon which all of our constitutional rights rest.’

Democrats have become so corrupt that even a Kennedy can’t support them any longer.

RFK Jr. asserted that in the 16 months of his campaign, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, and CNN combined gave him only two live interviews.

‘The mainstream media was once the guardian of the First Amendment and democrat principles, but has since joined the systemic attack on democracy,’ he said.

To bring this point into clear focus, after ignoring him for 16 months, as soon as he endorsed Trump, CNN had a member of the Kennedy family on last night in primetime to attack RFK Jr. The network that wouldn’t carry Kennedy himself or any of his arguments was happy to offer live primetime guest spots to members of his family who would trash him. 

All of this led to what I believe will be seen as an important legacy of the 2024 campaign. Democrats have become so corrupt that even a Kennedy can’t support them any longer. Kennedy’s embrace of Trump, which he compared to Abraham Lincoln’s team of rivals in his address, represents yet another incredible twist in an election season that has so far been propelled by the unexpected.   

Less than two months ago, on June 27, Trump took the stage to debate Biden in Atlanta.

I know it feels like two years since then, but consider what has happened since that night. Trump knocked out Biden, ending his political career. It was the first true knockout we’ve ever seen in the history of American presidential debates. It took several weeks — including Trump becoming the first president to be shot by a would-be assassin since Ronald Reagan in 1981 — for Biden to realize he couldn’t get back up off the electoral canvas, but on July 21 — three weeks and three days after the debate — the Biden campaign finally waved the towel in the corner of the ring. 

Biden was done. 

He withdrew from the race and has barely been seen since.

Next up, Kamala Harris. Yes, the same Kamala Harris who Democrats spent months arguing should be dropped from the political ticket because she was the least popular vice president in the history of modern American politics. Hell, Dick Cheney shot someone in the face while he was vice president(!), and was still more popular than Harris. In one fell swoop, without receiving a single vote for president, Democrats canceled the expressed will of 14 million primary voters and elevated Harris to the nomination. 

Amazingly, Harris, who has never received a single vote for president, is the nominee. 

Yes, the same Harris who dropped out of the 2020 presidential race before a single vote had been cast. The same Harris who most with functional brains realize would have never been the Democrat nominee if Biden had done what he should have done and announced he wasn’t running in the late spring of 2023. That would have allowed an actual Democratic primary but, alas, we’ve all come to realize Democrats don’t want elections, they want selections. 

Hillary Clinton in 2016, Biden in 2020, now Harris in 2024. They’re all the product of the people running the DNC, the hand-selected nominees of the party, will of the voters be damned. 

The party that claims Trump is a threat to democracy has now, incredibly, charged Trump with felonies in three different states and Washington, D.C., seeking jail time in each case, removed the president who received the Democrat nomination for president and replaced him with a nominee who received not a single vote for that nomination, fought every third party challenger, including Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the green party, Cornel West, and the libertarian party, who has sought ballot access in the 2024 election, and dutifully hidden Harris from all media, refusing all interview requests and all press conference availabilities. 

This is not the democratic process. This is not how candidates should be chosen. 

Kennedy realized all of this. 

It’s why he couldn’t stand silently by and allow himself to be a spoiler in this race. It’s why he felt compelled to speak out, stand on principle, and endorse the only presidential candidate who actually won a primary, to support the only presidential candidate who supports free speech and believes in sharing his vision for the world. 

Ultimately, even if it required him to turn his back on the party that made his family a mythological heir to Camelot, Kennedy had only one choice. 

The result — Trump and Kennedy are now a team. 

Thanks to the bevy of interviews, press conferences, and public events both men have had, we know exactly where Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy stand on all the issues. But we still don’t have a single policy page on Harris’ website. Her team has spent more time telling us what she doesn’t believe than what she does.

Harris is the phantom candidate, a smiley-faced emoticon gazing back at you from a computer screen as her videos play on social media influencer pages fed to our young by an algorithmic rig job perpetrated by our online billionaire lords, a constant loop of vacuous nothingness, as deep and complex as the number of votes she received for the most important job in the world — a rigged candidate from a rigged party, the antithesis of American democracy, the only person in any of our lives to ever run for president without a single person voting for them.

So now, here we are, it’s Harris vs. Trump and Kennedy, and if you’re paying attention to the slightest degree, even if you’re a lifelong Democrat like Kennedy, it isn’t a tough call at all. 

It’s Trump or nothing.