Loony and The Beast: How RFK Became a Trump Consigliere

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a vision for overhauling American health. He’s charming a fast food–loving, exercise-phobic ex-president to do it.

(Composite / Photos: GettyImages x4)

MANHEIM, PENNSYLVANIA—Moments before the start of a Trump campaign panel discussion here on Thursday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appeared on a skywalk above the idling crowd of about 100 supporters. 

Those gathered at the Spooky Nook Sports Complex¹ screamed when they saw him. And he responded to their adulation by raising his fists triumphantly and mouthing, “Yes!” 

Kennedy’s interlocutors this day were Trump-supporting health and nutrition writer Calley Means and Dr. Phil McGraw, the longtime daytime talk show therapist. But it was Kennedy—the scion of one of the grandest and most overrated Democratic families, one who famously gave up his birthright to become a vaccine conspiracist and Trump surrogate—whom they had come to see. 

Kennedy is on the latter stage of a strange life path, one that has seen him go from black sheep to activist, outcast to weirdo, and now, potentially, to someone with real, tangible power. He’s on a mission to dramatically alter the way food regulators, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and health practitioners treat Americans, both sick and healthy. And he now has a significant vessel for his worldview: Donald Trump, a McDonald’s-loving exercise hater who greenlit Operation Warp Speed—rightly celebrated as a humanitarian success by virtually everyone except Trump’s own supporters—and did much during his term to bolster the agricultural and chemical industries that Kennedy despises. 

Both Trump and RFK have acknowledged that they are not the most natural of fits. But they do share a trait that draw people to them—one evident at the gathering in Pennsylvania. They suffer from an acute case of Golden Age Thinking, as it’s described by Michael Sheen’s character in Midnight in Paris—“the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one one’s living in.” This gives Kennedy, in particular, a romantic aspect in the eyes of the similarly disaffected—one that is accentuated by his famous family’s tragic history. He is not just preaching about a beautiful, lost past; he is the embodiment of it. His frailties and quirks, the tragedy and oddness, are all proof that modernity can take a toll, and that modern life is not all it is cracked up to be. 

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IN A PARTITIONED-OFF SPACE down the hall from a bustling rock-climbing gym and several games of pickup basketball, the “Make America Healthy Again Conversation” began.

Republican congressman Lloyd Smucker informed the audience that the event was being taped as a special for Dr. Phil’s new network. Kennedy began to launch into his familiar rants. Dr. Phil waited stone faced for an opening to ask questions. And Means, the health writer, occasionally delivered comments containing bits of MAGA fan service.

But as things progressed, it was clear that Kennedy would dominate the proceedings. He spoke the most, unspooling a long mental list of diseases and disorders that perplexed him, but that he also blamed with certainty on Americans’ diet. Each time he referred to a condition, he mentioned that it was unheard of in his youth.

“Speech delay, language delay, tics, Tourette’s Syndrome, narcolepsy, ADHD, autism. These are words I didn’t know as a kid,” Kennedy said, adding that he had “never heard of a peanut allergy” until becoming an adult.

He noted that he wanted to be a scientist as a child because he would visit the National Institutes of Health and “look through the microscopes.”

Recounting these childhood memories seemed to get Kennedy into a state of agitation and irritability. He started to talk nonstop for several minutes at a time, prompting Dr. Phil to cut him off.

“Bobby, take a breath for a minute,” he said. “You’re breathing through your ears.” It was doubtless one more condition that Kennedy had never heard of as a kid. 

Kennedy is preoccupied with his youth. It is an era in which things were less complicated, almost idyllic, for him. He speaks of the 1960s as a paragon of American health, even though life expectancy was more than a decade shorter then. He talks about the moral fortitude of political leaders from that era, including his father, who was tragically assassinated while running for the Democratic nomination for president.

Even his style harkens back to the midcentury aesthetics his father and uncle embodied. As the New York Times’ Vanessa Friedman noted in May:

His look—skinny rep ties, button-downs, shrugged-on suits, shock of gray hair and weather-beaten tan—not only sets him apart. It also speaks directly to associations with the early 1960s, a golden age of promise that represents “vigor, wit, charisma, change,” said Sean Wilentz, a professor of American history at Princeton University, and that are buried deep in the American hive mind.

This elegiac association with the past makes him a natural fit, in one way, for Trump’s militantly nostalgic campaign. Instead of evoking visions of Camelot, though, the former president has campaigned on a mythical era that flatters the sentimentality of his followers in different ways—promising to take the country back to an imaginary time when tariffs worked, cities were immaculately clean, and America was not a nation of immigrants from undesirable parts of the globe.

The differences between the two men run much deeper, of course.

RFK’s health mission puts him at odds with Trump’s own track record. As president, Trump heavily subsidized the agricultural industry to alleviate pains he inflicted on farmers with his own tariff policies. His administration peeled back toxic chemical regulations and environmental rules. He undermined school lunch programs and flooded cafeterias with junk food, rejecting the healthy options pioneered by the Barack Obama administration.

But that was then. Now, Trump wants Kennedy’s support and supporters. And Kennedy wants something he never was given before: political acceptance.

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INSIDE THE SPOOKY NOOK SPORTS COMPLEX, you can see how the RFK-TRUMP pairing works, at least for the time being.

RFK brought some people into the MAGA fold when he left the Democratic Party and endorsed the GOP ticket. And those “Blue MAGA” supporters are willing to give Trump a chance. While they remain aware that Trump’s record on health was quite bad, they were eager to believe that Kennedy can persuade the famously stubborn ex-president to come around to his points of view.

“Well, I'm trusting that Robert knows that Trump is going to take his advice,” said Donna Bervinchak, a rally attendee. “I'm trusting that Robert is reading him because I don't have that trust [in Trump], but I do trust Robert Kennedy.”

Bervinchak was getting a lot of attention from others at the event. She wore a green Kennedy 2024 campaign shirt with trees and rainbows surrounding some of Kennedy’s most famous quotes. She acknowledged that voting for Trump was a hard pill to swallow.

“Well, at first I went through a mourning period [when Kennedy endorsed Trump], but I'm realizing that a vote for Trump is a vote for Kennedy, and I do believe that Kennedy knows how to clean out the swamp and all these captured agencies,” she said. “I don't think Trump knew how to do it, but I think Kennedy does.”

While Bervinchak was a perfect representative of the Blue MAGA tendency, as I began mingling with the crowd, I saw many more of the unique characters eager to see Kennedy, Means, and, to a much lesser extent, Dr. Phil. 

There were body builders, hippies, and adult goths. Some attendees had mullets, dreadlocks, or face tattoos. The old stood alongside the young, the middle aged, and others who were difficult to place in the way that health-obsessed people sometimes are.

I sought out the most jacked attendee to see what drew him to the event. His name was Anthony Diehl, and it turned out he is a professional strongman who goes by “Meat Head Professor” on Instagram. Diehl fits the mold of a right-leaning Trump supporter whose MAGA enthusiasm is redlining thanks to Kennedy’s involvement.

“If [Trump] is elected, maybe I would hope—he's a human being—I would hope that he learned from COVID, that Fauci was the wrong choice,” Diehl told me, trailing off. He then stopped speaking and ran out of the room.

Moments later, he returned carrying several chairs on his shoulders. It turned out he’d seen some elderly attendees scanning the room for available seats. Having brought them chairs and seated them, he returned to our conversation. “So surround yourself with people who know more than you do about things, right? That’s not too hard.”

Elsewhere in the crowd, the aesthetic and vibe was more standard fare for any Trump campaign event. There were MAGA hats aplenty, copious amounts of Zyn, a Secret Service officer wearing a Gucci belt, and t-shirts boasting of Trump’s felony conviction. I noticed a copy of JD Vance’s autobiography Hillbilly Elegy sitting on the floor. And then, from afar, I saw Tony Agbay, a radiologist from Sellersville, who wore Trump sneakers.

“These happen to be knockoffs,” he admitted. “The originals, they sold out in a matter of minutes—they were four-hundred dollars.”

Agbay said he admired the former president. He told me he has found comfort in Trump’s ability to respond to popular opinion. As a proof point, Agbay spotlighted the way in which vaccine skepticism went from the political fringe to a force that overwhelmed one of Trump’s main domestic achievements. 

“He heard from his people, because we would literally hear President Trump, when he would have a rally, say, ‘I encourage you to take the jabs and take the vaccine,’” Agbay said. “And he would get cheers on 99 out of 100 points. But when he said that, we’d say, ‘No.’ We’d say, ‘No, Mr. President,’ and we booed him.” 

“He got that feedback and he changed, and now he’s not telling people anymore to go get that jab,” Agbay added. “So President Trump is smart.”

Being responsive to public opinion doesn’t necessarily make someone smart. It makes them pliable. And perhaps that’s why Kennedy and his followers are willing to take a chance on Trump. They see him as a person who—in his lust for adulation—can be changed or manipulated.

The challenging thing about being around RFK and his crowd is that while their ideas can be hard to take seriously, the underlying concerns they carry are basically unimpeachable: frighteningly high healthcare costs, the murky relationship between pharmaceutical companies and doctors who prescribe their pills, and a very real decline in overall health among the population. 

But they are seeking solutions to real problems in the wrong places. Looking into the past won’t save us any more than forgoing your vaccine shots, drinking raw milk, or voting for Trump will.

1. Actual name of the venue.