Trumpism is Now the Establishment

It always has been. Its opponents should recognize that if they want to win.

(Credit for the voiceover for this article goes to the great Samuel Lipson)

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is not like his father in two ways. First, he has lived to become an old man. Secondly, across all of his 71 years, he has never once said something profound.

At one point, however, he said something quite interesting. This was back in August 2023, when he was running for the Democratic nomination for president and campaigning primarily in the form of YouTube videos. One of these videos was titled “Economic Policy: An Introduction.” Content-wise, there’s not much to take from this video. It’s only its opening line that has stuck with me:

Both President Trump and President Biden like to boast about the prosperity that they brought to our country, but in crisscrossing America myself, I’m not seeing evidence of that prosperity…I’m seeing an America that I never thought that I’d witness.

Not many out there remember this line. Or this video. Or the Kennedy 2024 campaign in general. Even at its height, it was dismissed as an assuredly temporary fluke, which it ultimately was. What stays on my mind is the fact that his candidacy—and this sentiment—had a height in the first place. That someone running as a purely oppositional candidate railing against the status quo was capable of getting over 20% of the vote at any point, with particular strength among young voters and nonwhites.

This isn’t because anti-establishment politics isn’t supposed to sell. In a lot of ways, it’s really the only current that has over the past number of decades. It’s because that lane was supposed to already be filled by Donald J. Trump: the alleged arch-populist and ultimate outsider of American politics. Yet for over a year, it was not. Instead, the anti-establishment lane belonged to someone casting Trump himself as an overseer of American decline.

By the end of the election, this framing was all but absent from the political discourse. Kennedy himself had dropped out of the race and joined Trump’s team, and voters had come to overwhelmingly see the former president as a change candidate. This was a massive transformation of the former president’s political standing and is still the most overlooked reason as to why he won.

And right now, it is once again in the process of completely unraveling.