What to Make of the Trump-RFK Alliance

Trump supporters seem giddy over RFK Jr. ending his independent presidential campaign and joining forces with Donald Trump. Should they be? What are the consequences?

John Solomon’s “Justthenews.com” website is a terrific news aggregator. The former reporter for the Washington Post, Associated Press, and The Hill has carved a substantial niche in the conservative “Alterna-verse” of center-right media, which includes videos on Rumble, media entities such as Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire, online “publications” such as the Free Beacon and Washington Examiner, and all manner of podcasts and conservative radio (e.g., Salem Media Group).

One of Solomon’s daily features is a nonscientific poll of its largely pro-Trump readers. On Saturday, the poll asked, “Do you approve of RFK Jr. suspending his campaign and backing Trump?” Before 9 a.m. on Saturday, 96 percent of JTN’s readers voted “strongly approve.”

Many in the MAGA-verse seem downright giddy about the new alliance. Should they be?

Time will tell, but it is essential to parse Kennedy’s fascinating, policy-oriented, and grievance-filled “speech to the nation” on Friday, where he officially endorsed Trump. And on the day after the Democrats concluded their convention.

I assure you that my former counterparts in the food, agriculture, and pharmaceutical industries are paying careful attention.

The news of Trump’s immediate response to having Kennedy lead a new commission on assassinations shook the foundations of the intelligence community. They’re best represented by the 51 former national security and intelligence senior officials who claimed Hunter Biden’s laptop disclosure by the New York Post in October 2020 had “all the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign.” We all know how that turned out - we were lied to as the story was censored and unfairly discredited.

It was a disinformation campaign, indeed, but directed at the American people by our very own national security and intelligence community, including many of the same partisan, if not corrupt, officials who worked overtime to keep Trump out of the White House in the first place.

The animosity between the intel community and the Trump World is palpable and might be the real story of this campaign. From SkyNews (UK):

…Mr Trump pledged that, if elected, he would establish "a new independent presidential commission on assassination attempts" which would review the attempt on his life in Pennsylvania on 13 July.

He added the commission would also be required to release all of the remaining documents linked to the assassination of Mr Kennedy's uncle, President John F Kennedy, in 1963.

Roughly 4,700 files tied to the case remain partially or heavily redacted more than 60 years later.

Here are a few clips from Kennedy’s speech (you really should read or watch the whole thing) that caught my eye, with emphasis added:

I left (the Democratic) party last October because it had departed so dramatically from the core values I grew up with. It had become the party of war, censorship, corruption, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Ag, and Big Money. When (Democrats) abandoned democracy by canceling the primary to conceal the cognitive decline of the sitting President, I left the party to run as an independent. . .

I do interviews every day. Some days, as many as 10. President Trump, who actually was nominated in an election, also does interviews daily. How did the Democratic Party choose a candidate that has never done an interview or debate during the entire election cycle? We know the answer. They did it by weaponizing the government and agencies. They did it by abandoning democracy. They did it by suing the opposition and by disenfranchising voters. . . .

I want everyone to know that I am only suspending my campaign, not terminating it. My name will still be on the ballot in most states. If you live in a blue state, you can vote for me without harming or helping President Trump or Vice President Harris. In red states — the same applies. I encourage you to do so. And if enough of you vote for me and neither of the major party candidates win 270 electoral votes, I could still end up in the White House in a contingent election. But in about ten battleground states where my presence would be a spoiler, I will remove my name and urge voters not to vote for me. . .

RFK Jr. held back nothing when discussing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine:

I want to say a word about the Ukraine war. The military-industrial complex has provided us with the familiar comic-book justification that this war is a noble effort to stop supervillain Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and to thwart his Hitler-like march across Europe. 

In fact, tiny Ukraine is a proxy in a geopolitical struggle initiated by the ambitions of the U.S. Neocons for U.S. global hegemony. I’m not excusing Putin for invading Ukraine. He had other options. But the war is Russia’s predictable response to the reckless Neocon project of extending NATO to encircle Russia.

He also signaled strongly that Trump’s views on health-related issues mirror his own.

Less than two hours after President Trump narrowly escaped assassination, Calley Means called me on my cell phone. Calley is arguably the leading advocate for food safety, soil regeneration, and ending the chronic disease epidemic that is destroying American health and ruining our economy. Calley has exposed the insidious corruption at the FDA, NIH, HHS, and USDA that has caused the epidemic. Calley had been working on and off for my campaign, advising me on those subjects, which have been my primary focus for the last twenty years. I was delighted when Calley told me, that day, that he had also been advising President Trump. He told me President Trump was anxious to talk to me about chronic disease — and other subjects — and to explore avenues of cooperation. He asked if I would take a call from the President. President Trump telephoned me a few minutes later, and I met with him the following day.

Somewhere, Trump’s former FDA Commissioner-turned-Pfizer-official, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, is sweating bullets. And don’t look for former Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue to be making a return as Secretary of Agriculture if Trump wins (he’s said as much already). Maybe Calley Means, or his sister, Dr. Casey Means. More from Kennedy’s speech:

Poor and minority communities suffer disproportionately. Industry lobbyists make sure that most of the food stamp and school lunch program dollars are funding processed foods. We are systematically mass-poisoning America’s poorest citizens. 

The same food industry lobbied to make sure that nearly all agricultural subsidies go to the commodity crops that are the feedstock of the processed food industry. The policies are destroying small farms and our soils.

Kennedy’s alliance with Trump is significant. It clarifies the Trump policy agenda in ways that will forge an interesting alliance of anti-establishment conservatives and environmental and food activists, many of whom have long found a home in the “progressive” community. It bolsters a populist attack on the collusion between big corporations and government.

Is that perception of collusion real? You bet it is. I’ve not only seen it first hand, I’ve been a part of it. Example: When the Obama Administration and a Democratic Congress enacted the Food Safety Modernization Act in 2010 (Obama signed the bill into law on January 4, 2011, just before the GOP retook control of Congress) - the most sweeping expansion of federal power over food and agriculture since the Franklin Roosevelt Administration during the Great Depression.

FDA officials then solicited the nation’s largest food companies to help craft the regulations. They lacked the capacity to do without the expertise of the nation’s largest food and agriculture companies, and we happily helped. The food industry also helped write the underlying law, persuaded that after a series of major food recalls, gaps in FDA regulation of food were undermining confidence in America’s food safety system. Regardless, congressional Democrats were going to craft a bill, and it’s better to be at the table than on the menu.

Meanwhile, small “sustainable” farmers and companies rebelled. If Trump wins, their time will come. And the attacks on Kennedy are just beginning.

Meanwhile, the food and agriculture world is watching one campaign that wants to impose food and price controls to eliminate “price gouging” and another to upend a nearly century-old farm system of subsidies and nutrition. This could get very interesting. The collusion between corporate agriculture and the government also passes through Congress in a very bipartisan way.

When people call Trump a “disruptor,” they’re not kidding. By suspending his campaign, Kennedy may have actually advanced his agenda by joining Trump and rearranging politics for the 2024 election. He made that clear in his opening remarks where he took pains to praise and assure his army of supporters that the endorsement would be worthwhile. That was the crux of his decision after lengthy discussions with the Trump campaign and after being rebuffed by arrogant Democrats.

A few weeks later, I met again with President Trump and his family members and closest advisors in Florida. In a series of long, intense discussions, I was surprised to discover that we are aligned on many key issues. In those meetings, he suggested that we join forces as a unity party. We talked about Abraham Lincoln’s team of rivals. That arrangement would allow us to disagree publicly and privately on the issues over which we differ, while working together on the existential issues upon which we are in concordance. I was a fierce critic of many of the policies of his first administration, and there are still issues and approaches upon which we continue to dispute. But we are aligned with each other on key issues like ending the forever wars, ending the childhood disease epidemics, securing the border, protecting our freedom of speech, unraveling corporate capture of the regulatory agencies, and getting U.S. intelligence agencies out of the business of propagandizing, censoring, and surveilling Americans, and interfering in our elections.

How will this change people’s election calculus? We’re about to find out, significantly depending on how the Trump campaign decides to use RFK Jr. on the campaign trail.

Stay tuned.