What do you do when you're angry because your opponent keeps calling you "weird" and you’re also behind in a race you were expecting to easily win? For Donald Trump, the answer seemed obvious: Flatter independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. into dropping out and endorsing you, then collect his 4-5 percentage points in national polls. And Trump did that just last week.
Only there’s no guarantee that Kennedy’s exit will shift those supporters to Trump. We’ll have a better idea about that as new polls come out in the next few days.
In the meantime, what is certain is that, by putting Kennedy on his team, Trump gets … Kennedy and all his fun issues. So open up the door, Johnny! Let’s show him what he bought!
No, we’re not talking about the brain worm. Open the other door. No, not the dead baby bear. Next. Not the sexist emu. And not the time he chainsawed the head off a dead whale and took it home as a hideous souvenir—though there is someone who would like to talk to him about that.
No, it’s that other thing. The one that may be sillier than Kennedy’s other exploits combined.
Ahh, there it is.
In this tweet, posted Monday, the “crime” Kenendy is promising to stop is something called “chemtrails.”
The chemtrails conspiracy theory emerged in the 1990s and evolved alongside the internet. Though by now it has accumulated so much legend and lore that proponents can rant about it endlessly, at its core is nothing more than this: Someone saw the lines in the sky that followed a jet and thought it wasn’t just moisture stirred up into fog by a passing wing, but instead a chemical being sprayed on everyone by someone.
What kind of chemical? Secret. For what purpose? Mind control. Or making us all sterile. Or fighting climate change. Or causing climate change. Or something. Who is behind it? The government, or maybe aliens. Possibly, it’s a team-up.
What the proponents of this conspiracy theory call a chemtrail is known back in the real world as a contrail, short for “condensation trail.” And it’s possible that no other conspiracy theory has been so thoroughly debunked by so many sources on so many occasions. Of all the conspiracy theories Kennedy might believe in, this is the most profoundly foolish. And unlike what he once did to a bear or a whale (or that poor worm), this is a nuttiness with which Kennedy is still actively engaged.
More importantly, notice that Kennedy doesn’t just step in to express his support for the theory, he says, “We are going to stop this crime.”
We.
That sounds very much like Kennedy is speaking as a member of the potential 2025 Trump administration. He’s promising the government will get right on this problem of chasing literal clouds.
And that’s apparently the case. A couple of hours after that post, Kennedy was on with Tucker Carlson’s web show, claiming that Trump has made him a member of his transition team.
“I’ve been asked to go onto the transition team to help pick the people who will be running the government and I’m looking forward to that,” Kennedy said. (On Tuesday, a Trump campaign adviser corroborated this to The New York Times.)
Now we can only wait until he appoints a Secretary of Chemtrails and Chainsaw Dissection.
In bringing Kennedy on board, Trump gets all of Kennedy. Trump has now made himself the candidate of planted cub carcasses, highways awash in whale juice, and chemtrails. That’s sure to stop people from calling Trump weird.
They’ll just call him what he is: ridiculous.
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