RFK Jr., Donald Trump, and the Big-Tent GOP

RFK Jr. clearly agonized over his decision to find common cause with Donald Trump over the restoration of our republic and its core values. I can relate.

Sometimes a news item hits close to home.  For me, RFK Jr.’s decision to reach across the aisle and find common cause with Donald Trump did the trick.  As painful as it clearly was to become a Republican Kennedy (a much harder transition than becoming a Kennedy Republican), RFKJ understood that the American republic—and the Bill of Rights at its heart—cannot sustain continued rule by today’s Democratic Party.

His speech hit close to home because RFKJ is hardly the first to encounter the irreconcilable conflict between political home and core values.  As a friend, a lifelong active Republican recently asked: “You must have been a Democrat at some point, right?”  I mean, it’s not exactly a tough call.  New York Jewish intellectual?  The only real question is whether I crossed the aisle personally or my parents crossed the aisle for me.  Demography may not determine where you end up, but it’s a decent indicator of where you started.

For me, the wakeup call came around 2002/03—and it was clear largely because of who I am and how I operate.  Back then, I was an active Democrat, living in Washington, DC, deeply involved in organizations generally considered to have been towards the moderate end of the party.  We were all licking our wounds after the 2000 election, 9/11, and the post-9/11 unity moment that rallied the entire country behind a President we distrusted intensely. 

The future of the Democratic Party was a front-burner question.  I had some opinions.  I sketched together two lists on yellow pads.  (Anyone else miss the world of yellow pads?)  The left-hand column listed great things accomplished in the 1990s that we should emphasize.  I organized them around a theme: Opportunity.  I wanted the Democrats to become the Opportunity Party. 

The right-hand column was a list of crap still clinging to party reputation thanks to some crazy, dangerous, radical factions.  I advocated distancing ourselves from this garbage, sidelining its advocates, and doing the bare minimum necessary to hang onto their votes.

The clarity of my pitch earned me an unusually clear reply: I had things precisely backwards.  The future of the Democratic Party, I was repeatedly told, required disowning every positive development of the Clinton years while embracing and empowering crazy anti-American, anti-capitalist, and increasingly antisemitic radicals. 

In 2004, I volunteered for the Kerry campaign, though my heart was hardly in it.  The strongest retort I could muster when my then-girlfriend (a Republican-leaning European) opined that a Kerry presidency would be a disaster was: “There’s room to be both a disaster and an improvement.”  My belief at the time was that if Kerry won, he would rotate back into power many of the folks who’d done good work in the 1990s.  If Kerry lost, the Democrats would break hard to the left and it would be at least a generation before a return to decency was even possible. 

Kerry lost in November 2004.  In January 2005 Howard Dean became DNC Chair and I re-registered (quietly) as an independent.  In August 2006, Connecticut’s Democrats cast aside Joe Lieberman in favor of Ned Lamont.  I issued my Declaration for Independents explaining why I found the then-current incarnations of both parties fundamentally unsupportable.  The key passage explaining my refusal to become a Republican read:

The Republican Party has failed as the party of government.  Were I already a longtime Republican I might remain within the Party’s embrace, but join such a Party?  I think not.

I am hurt.  A plague o’ both your houses.

Yet, the Republicans do have one significant asset that the Democrats lack: their fall from grace began much earlier, and as a result it is far more advanced.  The Democrats will not recover until their new leaders destroy the party completely.  They will hit rock bottom before they rebuild.  The Republicans, having seen the shambles that their leaders have made of their asserted ideals, may be closer to rebuilding.

True to expectations, the GOP melted down completely over the following four years.  The Tea Party (I’m still not sure what it was) blew it open.  Whereas the Democrats had cohered behind their worst factions in 2005, the Republicans became a bunch of squabbling factions in 2010.  I finally had a place I could call home!  It was not, however, until Trump took office in 2017 that I felt fully at home in what had become a deeply dysfunctional big tent.

RFKJ tread a similar path at a far higher profile.  If X is any indication, some conservatives are displeased with his arrival.  They disagree with him on many important issues (as do I).  Nevertheless, RFKJ’s speech last week marks an important turning point in America’s political evolution.  The GOP must become a big enough tent to isolate the anti-American, antisemitic, Marxist radicals that control the energy and agenda of the Democratic Party. 

A big-tent party cannot govern as its most conservative factions (or any individual faction, for that matter) might desire.  A successful, durable coalition will always govern from the middle of its membership.  The larger the coalition, the closer that middle will be to the American center.  That’s not a value statement, it’s math. 

With the American republic, the Bill of Rights, and the primacy of biblical ethics all hanging by a thread, we lack the luxury of policy perfection.  As RFKJ correctly noted, the first order of business must be restoring the values and beliefs that have made America exceptional from the moment of its founding. 

With the Kennedy name on board, the Trump campaign took another critical step towards becoming the big-tent reform vehicle America so desperately needs.  I only hope it’s not too little, too late.

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For more information about Bruce D. Abramson & American Restorationism, visit: www.BruceDAbramson.com

To learn more about America’s Spiritual Crisis and the new religion of Wokeism, see: American Spirit or Great Awokening?  The Battle to Restore or Destroy Our Nation (Academica Press, 2024). 

To learn more about how America’s elites destroyed the republic, see:  The New Civil War: Exposing Elites, Fighting Utopian Leftism, and Restoring America (RealClear Publishing, 2021).

To learn more about the ideology driving today’s anti-American leftism, see: American Restoration: Winning America’s Second Civil War (Kindle, 2019).

To learn more about our work at the American Coalition for Education and Knowledge, visit us at The Coalition for America.

To learn more about how I turn the ideas I discuss here into concrete projects that serve the interests of my clients, donors, and society at large, please e-mail me at bdabramson@pm.me.