There was no shortage of issues that Robert F Kennedy Jr could have chosen to talk about in front of the somewhat thin Texas crowd assembled for the inaugural Republican Party midterm conference – now known as ‘Trumpapalooza’.
That he used his speech to accuse the Biden administration of turning the US federal government “into the biggest child trafficking operation in world history” speaks volumes of the moment we’re in, and the sinister impact that Donald Trump has had on US – and indeed world – politics.
RFK Jr, as he’s almost always known, had sought the Democratic nomination for president for 2024, trading off his family name: he’s the son of assassinated Democratic presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy and the nephew of assassinated president John F Kennedy.
When that failed, he briefly ran as an independent – promising to Make America Healthy Again – before rallying behind Trump, reportedly in exchange for the role he now holds: America’s Health and Human Services Secretary.
On Thursday, he said that under the Biden administration his department had become “a collaborator in child trafficking for sex and for slavery”.
“We have ended that,” he added, for good measure.
It was perhaps the most eye-catching claim during the two-day event, which also featured Trump promising a $5,000 “dividend” for every American if Republicans kept control of Congress in the midterms.
At present, the US is battling numerous health crises. Maternal morbidity has risen dramatically after the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs Wade. The country is also battling multiple measles outbreaks, even though the disease was for decades close to eradicated in the US.
RFK has long campaigned against many childhood vaccines, arguing they are unsafe. His campaign seems to be working. Uptake is down, and earlier this year Trump announced – against widespread expert advice – that children should now get separate measles, mumps and rubella vaccines. This is likely to further reduce vaccination rates.
Most glaringly, the US has announced a barrage of widespread recalls of beef, salad and other essential products amid food poisoning outbreaks.
For the man who had explicitly promised to Make America Healthy Again, things are not exactly looking great. Perhaps that’s why the most striking moment of his speech had nothing to do with health.
RFK told the crowd that the Biden administration had “somehow lost 360,000 [migrant] children”, before accusing it of being involved in widespread child trafficking.
The remarks tapped into not one but two sinister and dangerous conspiracy theories, both of which have long animated Trump’s hardcore Maga base.
A family waiting to be apprehended by US Customs and Border protection officers after crossing over into the US from Mexico (Photo: Brandon Bell/Getty Images)The first is the idea that Democrats are operating a deliberate mass illegal migration scheme to change the demographics of the country – often as part of a bid to steal future elections.
The second builds on a QAnon conspiracy theory that has long alleged that Democrats, led by Hillary Clinton, orchestrated a mass conspiracy to abuse and even murder children. The movement started on fringe online message boards but was increasingly embraced by Trump and his team as he campaigned for his second term.
Kennedy could be forgiven for a bit of conspiratorial thinking. His childhood was interrupted first by the murder of his uncle and then his father, in assassinations that spurred conspiracy theories that still last to this day. That would leave a mark. He was also prone to spouting anti-vaccine conspiracies long before he entered politics.
But there is clearly an element of calculation in how he uses them. In his speech, RFK used a real statistic, even if he completely misrepresented it: the 360,000 figure represents child migrants who missed a court hearing.
But given court dates move all the time, and messages get lost, especially among populations with limited access to lawyers and limited understanding of English, this is very different to them going missing in the way he told the Trump-supporting audience, which reacted predictably to his wild claims, by booing heartily.
RFK is surrounded by talented career officials who could have explained the statistic to him, and it’s unlikely to be an accident that he used it in the way he did. RFK is not someone just speaking from the heart: like other Republicans, he seems to choose his words carefully and decide when to openly embrace Maga conspiracies and when to put on a more mainstream face.
At Trumpapalooza, RFK chose to embrace two of the darkest and most dangerous conspiracy theories that animate Trump’s base. That’s almost certainly not an accident. Instead, it likely represents the groundwork for something that once would have been unthinkable: a scion of the Kennedy family preparing to run for president as a Republican in 2028.
But to do this, he needs Trump’s faithful, and he knows that going after the likes of Joe Biden with eyewatering claims is a surefire way to win them over.
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