“Benefits Harris”…“More Of A Problem Than An Asset [For Trump]”… “People Who Take Dead Bear Cubs To Central Park, If You Want That Vote, Go For It”… “I Think The More People Know About Bobby Kennedy, The More People Who Are Sane Will Not Want To Vote For Him” 

Key Excerpts

The Hill: GOP strategist cautions Trump on joining forces with RFK Jr: ‘He’s kind of a looney tune’

“Republican strategist Scott Jennings advised former President Trump to be careful now that he has seemingly joined forces with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., arguing the independent presidential candidate is ‘kind of a looney tune.’ […] ‘There could be some cost on the other side of the algebra…he’s a conspiracy theorist, and a lot of people think he’s kind of a looney tune.’”

Ali Velshi Hosting MSNBC’s Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell 

Velshi: “The independent presidential candidate RFK Jr. suspended his campaign, and, as expected, endorsed Donald Trump. We learned some surprising things about the conspiracy theorist RFK Jr. in the last few months of his campaign. He admitted to dumping a dead bear cub in Central Park 10 years ago. Doctors found a dead worm in his brain in 2010, not to mention his anti-vaccine rhetoric. But one thing that is absolutely not a surprise, RFK’s mission in this campaign is, and always was, to help elect Donald Trump. That’s it. Because how else can you explain this?”

Stuart Stevens on MSNBC with Ali Velshi 

Velshi: “RFK. Jr.,  leaving the race, endorsing Donald Trump, bear cubs, brain worms, all of it. Okay? What do you make of it? Because he was an unserious man too, sadly, because he’s got a great family legacy. And he could have been a serious guy, but he chose to be an unserious guy. He was never going to be president. He still carried on about the fact that he might actually still be president of the United States. It’s a lot of BS. But what do you make of this whole development?”

Stevens: “Well, you know, Donald Trump objects to being called weird. So what does he do…he goes and takes this endorsement from, you know, one of the sadder figures in American public life. A guy who clearly is just broken…you have two candidates that are supporting Putin, two candidates who would like to end the war in Ukraine so that Russia could take Ukraine, and you have two candidates who are against any mandatory vaccines in schools…that’s the pro- polio route. I mean, it is just as nutty as it can be, and it will continue to dismay me that other members of my former party don’t call it out. It’s just crazy.

Velshi: “…They’re conspiracy theorists. It’s a very narrow band. The Democratic Party came out and put a statement out saying it’s not going to get Donald Trump more votes. And I kind of agree with that. He’s got that locked up. Like you don’t need the guy, the conspiracy theorist, to get you more votes if you’re Donald Trump. You’ve actually got that constituency locked up well.”

Stevens: “…it never really matters. It doesn’t change a race, and this won’t change the race.”

Ronald Brownstein with CNN’s Michael Smerconish

Brownstein: “And I think this latent threat to Trump of being associated with anti vaccine extremism that Kennedy brings to him, I think on balance, this will end up being more of a problem than an asset.”

Molly Ball and Jeff Mason on CNN’s Inside Politics with Manu Raju 

Ball: “[Democrats think this is] part of the weird narrative…[he] belongs with Trump.” 

Mason: “Voters who were a risk of going over to him are now going over to her [Harris]”

Scott Jennings and Karen Finney on State of the Union with Jake Tapper

Jennings: “My caution, my advice, would be the downstream effects of this. You now own anything [RFK Jr.] might do or say for the next couple of months, and this may or may not insure your benefits. So I would just caution, careful, careful.”

Finney: “If you want to have that endorsement, I’m perfectly happy for you to because that’s fine. I mean, people who take dead bear cubs to Central Park… if you want that vote, go for it.”

Maya Wiley, Jennifer Rubin, Barbara F. Walter with Jonathan Capehart on MSNBC’s The Saturday Show 

Wiley: “Very, very little [impact]. Except it does give the Harris campaign a lot of opportunity for a lot of more, a lot more attack ads. Having sat in a house congressional hearing with Kennedy Jr. on vaccines and on the conspiracy theories that he spread around those, I can tell you that I think you can expect the word weird to continue to circulate from the mouths of the campaign and its supporters […]  You know, frankly, Kennedy supporters were not very strong supporters. They were not deeply committed to him, and that both Harris and Trump really kind of divided up his constituents, so I don’t think this will have much impact at all, accepting attack ads.”

Rubin: “I think the more people know about Bobby Kennedy, the more people who are sane will not want to vote for him. I think he is a perfect match for Donald Trump. And in fact, if I were JD Vance, I would stick by the phone, because he might be just the kind of guy that Trump would pull in as an October surprise. He is freakish in every sense of the word, whether it’s picking up bear road kill or eating a barbecue dog. But much more seriously, he’s a nut. He is a conspiracy nut. He’s a racist. He has come up with all of these cockamamie theories of persecution. In that sense, he’s very much a Trump rather than a Kennedy. And I have to say it’s a very sad denouement to the Kennedy legacy, and I think his family is justifiably very embarrassed and really ashamed of him.”

Walter: “RFK, I think in addition to being weird, is also opportunistic. You know, he contacted the Harris administration to see if there was a place for him in their administration. He’s clearly hoping that he can get something if Trump wins and he’s a really interesting character. The Harris administration wants nothing to do with him, and if we talk about voters, it’s because most of the left leaning voters who were likely to vote for Kennedy have already gravitated over to Harris. So the ones that are left are either people who aren’t going to vote because they truly are independents, or they’re already Trump leaning and that’s where they’re going to go.”

Marc Short and Cornell Belcher on Meet the Press

Short: “The reality is that Trump has such a low ceiling that he needs to win a race in the mid 40s…but it doesn’t help Trump to have this a binary race. And so I think that, in the end, this actually helps the Harris campaign more come November.”

Belcher: “I think you also have to be careful on the polling on this, because it’s such a narrow swath of the electorate that you got to be careful…I agree with Marc completely on this is that she benefits from a two person race. I understand what happens in the multi-candidate race, because I saw it in 2016. He wins by subtraction, not addition, I think, one on one race. Most of the battleground states. I think it benefits Harris.”

Rachael Bade, Jonathan Martin, and Donna Brazile on This Week with Jonathan Karl

Bade: “…These are also low propensity voters. So are they going to show up at all? There’s a reason they were voting for Kennedy. They didn’t like either candidate.”

Martin: “It’s more tragic than it is anything else, given his spiral here.”

Brazile: “I’ve always believed that old English proverb, birds of a feather flock together, so they’re made for each other…He was no longer a factor…” 

Wall Street Journal: RFK Jr.’s Double-Edged Trump Endorsement

“RFK Jr. has lost about half of his standing in the polls since President Biden dropped out of the race. Most of those voters seem to be disgruntled Democrats who are now returning home for Kamala Harris. […] Mr. Kennedy also said Mr. Trump plans to ‘enlist’ him in government if he wins in November, and that’s the potential rub. […] But the former Democrat lives in the fever swamps with his anti-vaccination views, his support for an extreme climate agenda, and his belief that American health ills are largely the result of collusion between big business and government regulators. He’s also the guy who admitted recently to dumping a dead bear in New York’s Central Park. If RFK Jr. is anywhere near the healthcare or environmental agencies in a Trump Administration, look out.”

New York Magazine: RFK Jr., Trump Form Coalition of Vengeful Whiners

“And so, this deeply alienated man will form a strange partnership with the Republican candidate for president based mostly on a common sense of grievance with Democrats and other elites, and a common lust for vengeance…He’s been dropping like a rock in the polls, especially since Kamala Harris became the Democratic candidate; the most recent national survey, by RMG Research, put him at three percent of the vote. And it is not at all clear how many of his remaining supporters will follow him over the brink into MAGA-land, which some correctly perceive as a place where environmentalists and those who fret about military spending […] We’ll also see what, if any, effect RFK Jr.’s support has on Trump, surely the most narcissistic and hard-to-influence presidential candidate ever. At his presser, RFK Jr. said he wanted to introduce a ‘culture of kindness’ into the Trump campaign. Good luck with that, Bobby. Probably should stick to the script of whining and plotting vengeance.”

David Brooks on PBS Newshour with Anna Nawaz

Brooks: “But I think most of them probably will, and because, in retrospect, they’re sort of telling the same story, that there’s all these crazy conspiracies by elites and our systems need to be taken apart. And that’s the RFK story, and that’s the Donald Trump story. And so I think people who want to — who were voting for RFK sort of buy into that story. And so Trump seems to make some sense. So I imagine — it won’t make some big effect on the race.”

James Carville on Real Time with Bill Maher

Carville: “Take him.” […] every family has a whatever. That guy is not weird. There’s an expression that we use in New Orleans– that boy ain’t right. Okay. You’re weird. Okay, there’s nothing wrong with being weird, but that boy ain’t right. He just did something wrong. He hit his head or something.”

Newsnation: RFK Jr.’s Trump endorsement a ‘nothing burger’: Democrat

“‘I don’t think the Robert Kennedy endorsement really affects the race fundamentally. I think it’s a nothing burger,’ Goyle told ‘NewsNation Prime.’ ‘Look how well they’ve (voters) responded to Kamala Harris in the last 35 days. I think they’re going to fall even more in line with her vision for the future after they see her debate and take down Donald Trump,’ he added.”

Washington Post: RFK Jr., environmental warrior, backs the ‘drill, baby, drill’ ticket

“Kennedy had promised to be ‘the best environmental president in American history.’ […] Now he joins a campaign whose policies, according to critics, would scale back those regulations and weaken the agencies that uphold them. His decision has left many of Kennedy’s former allies on environmental causes in shock, even those who had already broken with him over his anti-vaccine views or quixotic presidential bid. […] ‘It’s sad and surreal,’ said Michael Brune, a former executive director of the Sierra Club… ‘It’s a betrayal of his values and the work that he’s done for most of his career. He’s supporting someone who’s been the most aggressive in terms of trying to undermine our bedrock environmental laws.’”

Time: Inside the Last Weeks of RFK Jr.’s Campaign

“Like the candidate himself, [the campaign] operated without a clear goal or coherent ideology […] The 70-year-old candidate was more or less cosplaying the process of running for President, according to current and former staffers. ‘He hates making binary, black-and-white choices, and he hates deadlines,’ says one former adviser. Staffers described a chaotic campaign rife with screaming matches on Zoom calls. […] ‘I can’t be the only one saying let’s go to Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada,’ recalls one former staffer. ‘Why are we going swimming with sharks in Hawaii from an electoral standpoint? Why are we posting videos of him sailing and skiing?’ Surrogates found themselves having to guess Kennedy’s stance on issues. ‘I’m going on TV in front of millions of people,’ says a former staffer, ‘and if they ask me about this guy’s policies, I have no f—ing clue where he stands day to day.’”

Sen. Cory Booker on MSNBC’s Inside with Jen Psaki 

Booker: “I’ve known RFK and followed him since I was a student. And something happened that went from the guy who used to be with Riverkeepers and talk about the environment, where he spun out into a dangerous conspiracy theorist that has really had sort of negative impacts on the lives of people. I think the reason why he had such a marginal campaign is because the closer people looked, the more they realized that this was sort of Trump-lite, or in some ways, from Trump telling us to inject bleach, that this was a guy just as dangerous as Trump. […] So I don’t think this was a big deal this week.