Chris Hayes took a look on Wednesday at Donald Trump’s sudden political alliance with Robert F Kennedy Jr., declaring that the former president “and his campaign really do deserve to inherit all the baggage that comes with him.”
But after running through all of the incredibly weird things associated with RFK Jr only in the last few weeks, Hayes wondered if maybe this whole thing is just a play to make Trump’s running mate JD Vance “seem almost normal.”
About Kennedy, Hayes noted that “the former independent candidate for president was, I think, widely understood to be a Republican spoiler hoping to lure votes away from Democrats in November. He all but confirmed that speculation when he suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump on Friday. Now, Trump has gone one step further and appointed RFK Jr to his potential transition team.”
“While the former president has associated himself with a number of cranks over the years — I mean, the guy had like dinner with a literal neo Nazi,” Hayes continued, “Kennedy is his own special kind of problematic. And so if Trump is going to tie himself to a guy like that, he and his campaign really do deserve to inherit all the baggage that comes with him.”
Hayes’ first example was the bizarre video Kennedy filmed with Roseanne Barr in which he confessed to taking a bear carcass and leaving it in Central Park in New York to make it look like a bicyclist had somehow killed it.
“Kennedy shared that video himself, by the way,” Hayes made clear. “He wanted the world to see him telling Roseanne Barr about how he was going to stage a hit and run bike versus bear accident in Central Park”
But, Hayes wryly noted, this was nothing compared to the story told by Kennedy’s daughter, which was resurfaced this week, about the time he cut the head off of a dead beached whale and strapped it to the top of his car to take home and eat it.
‘I’m going to try to get through this passage,’ Hayes said as he read it verbatim. “‘Every time he accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car. It was the rankest thing on the planet. We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out. People on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.’”
“That’s, well, that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” Hayes continue, relaying the even stranger story of the time Kennedy took a picture with the carcass of an animal he’d grilled, which he then sent to a friend implying that he’d cooked a dog.
“I think it’s fair to say that’s weird. That’s a weird picture. We could say weird, right?” Hayes asked, before reminding viewers of the time Kennedy disclosed he literally had a brain worm once.
“But far, far more seriously, Robert Kennedy has promoted consistently false, dangerous and deranged conspiracy theories. He is probably the most one of the most prominent anti vaccine activists in the world, and it was he and his ilk, but really him, I mean, almost chief among everyone who helped spread deadly lies about vaccination, that ultimately cost the lives — and this is not hyperbole — of literally hundreds of thousands of our fellow Americans during COVID,” Hayes went on.
As he wrapped things up, the MSNBC post said, “So, this is who’s been added to the already very weird campaign of Donald Trump. And hey, maybe it’s strategy to make JD Vance seem almost normal. By comparison, because that guy keeps producing new weirdness himself,” he concluded.
Watch the whole segment below:
