Column: Even Trump and JD Vance can’t match the unbearable weirdness of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
It took a decade, but the man who left a dead bear cub in Central Park finally fessed up in a social media post Sunday.
Why now? Because he wanted to get ahead of a New Yorker profile that included the bear story. The magazine also obtained a photograph of the culprit posing with his fingers in the little creature’s bloody mouth, pretending it was biting him.
“Maybe that’s where I got my brain worm,†Robert F. Kennedy Jr. joked to New Yorker writer Clare Malone.
Listen, I get that Democrats are having a lot of fun calling former President Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, weird — an insult popularized by the entirely-not-weird Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who became Kamala Harris’ running mate Tuesday. But I’m not sure Trump and Vance can top Kennedy, the independent presidential candidate who is the very embodiment of Hunter S. Thompson’s famous aphorism, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.â€
House Speaker Mike Johnson warned fellow partisans to avoid bigoted attacks on the vice president. Donald Trump and J.D. Vance aren’t listening.
“Weird†barely begins to describe Kennedy, a dangerous demagogue who shamelessly trades on his family name, associates with far-right figures while masquerading as a liberal and lies to Americans about vaccines.
No wonder his family has disavowed him. Jack Schlossberg, John F. Kennedy’s grandson, said on Instagram last month that his cousin’s candidacy is “an embarrassment.â€
“He’s trading in on Camelot, celebrity, conspiracy theories and conflict for personal gain and fame,†said Schlossberg, a Vogue politics writer. “I have no idea why anyone thinks he should be president. … Let’s not be distracted, again, by someone’s vanity project.â€
Kennedy seems to make news only when he’s done something, well, weird.
A court reshaped by Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell is imposing a radical right-wing vision on the country. President Biden’s proposed reforms make sense.
The New York Times reported in May that Kennedy said doctors had found a dead parasitic worm in his brain in 2010, when he was experiencing brain fog and memory loss. He had originally disclosed that information in a deposition taken while he was seeking his second divorce, from Mary Richardson Kennedy. He testified that a worm “got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died,†which was relevant to the divorce proceedings because he claimed his earning power had been diminished by the parasite.
Around the same time, the Times reported, Kennedy also suffered from mercury poisoning, which can affect cognition, and atrial fibrillation, which he described in the divorce deposition as making him feel as if “there’s a bag of worms in my chest.â€
Another recent report noted that Kennedy posed with the barbecued remains of what he eventually claimed was a goat during a 2010 trip to South America, though some veterinarians said the animal appeared to be a dog.
But when you’re generating news leads like “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been forced to deny that he took a bite out of a dog carcass,†how much do the details really matter?
The New York Times published a puffy story in June about two wild ravens that Kennedy had sort of tamed at his Los Angeles home. The newspaper reported that the birds had succeeded his pet emu, Toby, who regularly attacked his wife, the actor Cheryl Hines, and was later killed by a mountain lion.
Totally not weird, amirite?
But back to the bear. In the video Kennedy posted, he is telling the story to Roseanne Barr, who received about 70,000 votes when she ran for president on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket in 2012. It’s unclear why Barr was in the video, but my theory is that it was a meeting of the Weird Presidential Candidates Club.
As Barr listens, Kennedy recounts the tale: On his way to a falconing outing in upstate New York, he saw a van hit the bear cub. He scooped up the carcass, intending to skin it and put the meat in his refrigerator later. But he was late for dinner at Peter Luger Steak House in New York City, so he didn’t have time to stop at his home in Westchester County. Then dinner ran late, and he needed to get to the airport, so he hatched a plan: “I said, ‘Let’s go put the bear in Central Park and we’ll make it look like it got hit by a bike. It would be funny for people,’ †Kennedy said. He also explained, “I wasn’t drinking, of course, but people were drinking with me who thought this was a good idea.â€
Harvesting road kill and dumping it in Central Park as a prank, he said, might have been “a little bit of the redneck in me.†Kennedy is a redneck the way Donald Trump Jr. is a blue-collar everyman. No, this was the behavior of a ragingly entitled scion of a rich and famous American clan.
In any case, many headlines were generated when the inexplicable bear was discovered in the park the next day, including in this newspaper. The New York Times assigned a young environmental reporter named Tatiana Schlossberg to the story: Yes, another Kennedy unknowingly chronicled her cousin’s misadventure:
“Calls were made to a retired Bronx homicide commander, Vernon Gerberth,†Schlossberg wrote. “ ‘It wouldn’t be a police matter,’ he said, ‘unless the bear was killed by a person, or if somebody was keeping it as a pet and brought it to the park. People are crazy.’ â€
And, of course, weird.
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