Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s extremely colorful run for office is expected to come to an end soon, but it will not be forgotten. Since his campaign began last April, the anti-vaxxer told us about his brain worm, his uncertainty around 9/11, and the time that he left a dead bear cub in Central Park. Democrats have made hay calling Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and Republicans “weird,” but Kennedy exists on a plane of strangeness inaccessible to anyone operating within the two-party system. As the cash-strapped Independent reportedly prepares to drop out of the race and endorse Trump, here are some of the most bizarre moments from his failed — but memorable — campaign.
He said doctors found a dead worm in his brain
In May, The New York Times reported that in a 2012 deposition Kennedy said doctors found a dead worm in his brain, which contributed to memory loss and mental fog. He explained that what doctors found in scans “was caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died.”
RFK responded by posting on X: “I offer to eat 5 more brain worms and still beat President Trump and President Biden in a debate.”
He admitted he left a dead bear in Central Park
Kennedy posted a video in early August in an attempt to get ahead of a New Yorker profile that included a story about how in 2014 he left a dead bear in Central Park. In the video, Kennedy explains that he was in the Hudson Valley when he says he saw a woman hit a bear cub with her car. He says planned to skin the bear and “put the meat in my refrigerator.” He took the bear carcass and spent the day doing falconry, drove back to New York for dinner, then had to get on a plane. He needed to do something with the bear, though, so he decided it would be funny to dump it in Central Park and create the impression that a cyclist hit it. He did so, and the next day the dead bear was a major local news story. No one knew how the bear got into the park — until now.
Kennedy later told the New York Post that he has been picking up roadkill all of his life. At one point, he said, he had a “freezer full of it.” He continued that he had a “thousand cubic foot freezer full of roadkill.”
He said “I’m not a church boy” in response to sexual assault allegations
In July, Vanity Fair published a story on Kennedy’s dark past that included an accusation that he sexually assaulted a family babysitter. Eliza Cooney alleged that in 1998, when she was 23, Kennedy came up behind her in the kitchen pantry and groped her breasts. On another occasion, a shirtless Kennedy allegedly asked her to rub lotion on his back.
The crazy part is that Kennedy did not deny the allegations. “Listen,” he responsed on a podcast, “I’ve said this from the beginning. I’m not a church boy. I am not running like that. I had a very, very rambunctious youth.”
“I said in my announcement speech that I have so many skeletons in my closet that if they could all vote, I could run for king of the world,” he added.
He was accused of eating a dog
The bear story is not the only time Kennedy has appeared to be an adventurous eater. The Vanity Fair story on Kennedy’s past included an image of Kennedy making like he was eating what was speculated to be a dog. He said that he was actually eating a goat in Patagonia.
He expanded on his culinary morals in an interview with NewsNation: “I’ll eat virtually anything. There’s two things I wouldn’t eat. Well, three. I wouldn’t eat a human, I wouldn’t eat a monkey, and I wouldn’t eat a dog. I think I’d eat anything else, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do those things, so it is a goat and you are what you eat.”
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He held a sweepstakes to fly falcons with him for a day
Kennedy held a sweepstakes to win a day of falconry with him on his campaign’s website. “Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. discovered hawking when he was 9 years old and has been involved in the sport ever since. It’s one of the great joys of his life. And now, he’d like to share his love of hawking with you.”
Kennedy also has two pet ravens, and he claims they can talk “like a parrot.” At one point, he had a pet emu that would attack his wife.
His son leaked a phone call of him talking with Trump about vaccine conspiracy theories
RFK Jr. apologized last month after his son leaked a video of him talking on the phone with Donald Trump about vaccine conspiracy theories. “When you feed a baby, Bobby,” Trump apparently said, “a vaccination that is like 38 different vaccines, and it looks like it’s meant for a horse, not a, you know, 10 pound or 20 pound baby.”
Trump seemingly offered Kennedy an administration spot in the phone call. The Washington Post later reported that the two have discussed an administration position, contingent on Kennedy dropping out and endorsing Trump.
He pushed bigoted Covid conspiracies
Last year, video surfaced that showed Kennedy saying: “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese. We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted that or not.”
He said the story was “mistaken,” but also mentioned a study that “shows that COVID-19 appears to disproportionately affect certain races.”
This year, a TV station in Maine gave Kennedy another opportunity to respond. “All I was doing,” he said, “was quoting an NIH [National Institutes of Health] funded paper that anybody can look up … that was funded by the United States government … that showed that certain races were more susceptible.”
He continued: “The races that it was least compatible with were people from Finland. The second most was Ashkenazi Jews. The third most was Chinese nationals. It was most compatible with Blacks, with people from Africa, and with Caucasians.” Kennedy attempted to clarify: “There are ethnically targeted bio-weapons. I never said that Covid was one of those.”
He apologized for a Super Bowl ad imagining him as his uncle, John F. Kennedy
RFK Jr. apologized in February after his super PAC ran a Super Bowl ad that recreated a famous ad for former President John F. Kennedy, his uncle, but with pictures of himself. This was after JFK’s grandson called the campaign “an embarrassment.”
Bobby Shriver, RFK’s cousin, posted on X that the ad “used our uncle’s faces — and my Mother’s. She would be appalled by his deadly health care views.”
“I’m so sorry if the Super Bowl advertisement caused anyone in my family pain,” Kennedy responded on X. “The ad was created and aired by the American Values Super PAC without any involvement or approval from my campaign. FEC rules prohibit Super PACs from consulting with me or my staff. I love you all. God bless you.”
He told Elon Musk anti-depressants are responsible for school shootings
Last year, Kennedy told Elon Musk in a long-winded X interview that he blames school shootings on anti-depressants. “I also am going to look very closely at the role of psychiatric drugs in these events,” Kennedy promised. “And there are no good studies right now. That should have been done years ago on this issue, because there’s a tremendous circumstantial evidence [that] SSRIs and benzos and other drugs are doing this.”
He added: “Prior to the introduction of Prozac, we had almost none of these events in our country.”
He debated by himself
In June, CNN excluded Kennedy from the presidential debate between former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden because he didn’t meet certain criteria. Kennedy’s solution was to hold his own debate — by himself. Kennedy stood behind a podium and watched the CNN debate, which he would pause and offer his own responses to the questions.
He said he “won’t take sides” on 9/11
In July, Kennedy said he was unsure of his take on 9/11. He posted on X: “My take on 9/11: It’s hard to tell what is a conspiracy theory and what isn’t. But conspiracy theories flourish when the government routinely lies to the public.”
He continued: “As President I won’t take sides on 9/11 or any of the other debates. But I can promise is that I will open the files and usher in a new era of transparency.” He said that he was referring to a CBS 60 Minutes segment on possible involvement by Saudi Arabia. He promised transparency on the matter should he become president.
Sign at a protest in Paris on Saturday, Oct. 24: “Expensive life and suffering schools. Same government, same misery.”
Donald Trump bangs a gavel after signing the "Big Beautiful Bill Act," on July 4, 2025.
100 Unhinged Things Trump Did That You May Have Forgotten
“Flood the zone with shit.”
That’s how Steve Bannon once described Donald Trump‘s attention-overload strategy. It’s designed to overwhelm your senses, so the latest outrage erases your ability to remember the avalanche of outrages past. The “shit” part matters as well — because the goal is to make politics seem so dirty and indecent that no sane person would ever get involved in the political arena. This cedes the civic ground to hyper-partisan sociopaths.
That’s exactly why combating the memory hole is essential as voters head to the polls. The 2026 midterm elections are the only structural opportunity to put guardrails on this runaway train of a president who seems hell bent on destroying our democratic norms, dividing the American people, and alienating our allies while emboldening our enemies. The result is a tsunami of sleaze: unprecedented corruption, rising costs, and governmental chaos.
But the voters who most need to remember are the ones most likely to forget.
Independents are the largest block of American voters, and they decide who wins elections. They’re fed up with both parties and tend to be fiscally responsible, socially tolerant-to-libertarian, and strong on national security. This election, their number-one issue is affordability. They voted for Trump in 2024 but now his approval rating among independents is a pathetic, record-low 22 percent.
Here’s the catch: independents are also the voters least likely to pay attention to politics on a regular basis. That’s why they are so susceptible to the trap set by the Trump team: sliding from healthy skepticism into the corrosive cynicism that says all parties and politicians are equally corrupt. While no party has a monopoly on virtue or vice, Donald Trump’s reign is in a heated feces class by itself.
Below is a reminder of Trump’s second term low-lights. You’ve probably forgotten most of these amid the doomscroll of our daily lives. But the damage doesn’t disappear because our attention drifts. Share it with your independent friends and neighbors who may have quietly voted for Trump in 2024. It’s a timely reminder that Trump’s billionaire cabinet and his democracy-deforming presidency is an insult to their wallet, their health, their government, their safety, and their values.
Your Wallet
Trump promised that “when I win, I will immediately bring prices down, starting on Day One.” He promised gas below $2 a gallon. But, of course, prices did not come down. Instead, Trump now calls the affordability crisis a “hoax.”
Gas now averages $4.28 a gallon, up 38 percent since his inauguration, and diesel is $6.28, up 69 percent. The main cause is the $47 billion war with Iran he launched without offering the American people a reason or an exit strategy, let alone getting congressional approval. So much for no new wars.
Trump’s tariff obsession is costing American households more than $1,000 a year. And Trump has inexplicably aimed some of his harshest tariffs at America’s closest democratic allies and trading partners, including the European Union and Canada.
Health care costs are also spiking because of Trump’s actions. After the longest government shutdown in American history, enhanced Affordable Care Act tax credits were allowed to expire in the Trump-Republican budget. As a result, in 2027, premium payments are expected to more than double, from $888 to $1,904 a year, and as many as 5 million people may drop coverage. The Congressional Budget Office projects that Trump’s budget will add roughly 10 million Americans to the uninsured over a decade.
Food aid for kids wasn’t spared in the GOP budget either. ProPublica found that more than 770,000 children in 12 states lost SNAP benefits.
But surely all these cuts will help get America’s debt and deficit under control, right? Wrong.
Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” adds an estimated $3.4 trillion to deficits. For all the chaos unleashed by the DOGE cuts that threw career civil servants and programs into the “wood chipper,” less than $1.5 billion in savings have been verified and government spending actually increased. This year’s $2 trillion deficit is the highest ever outside a war or recession. The U.S. national debt just hit a record $40 trillion. Moody’s downgraded America’s credit rating from its top AAA grade. As Trump assaults the independence of the Federal Reserve, America is careening toward a fiscal cliff.
All this has happened while the Trump administration has taken ownership stakes in some 30 private companies, from 10 percent of Intel to 15 percent of rare-earth miner MP Materials, a “golden share” in U.S. Steel, and a stake in a magnet maker backed by Don Jr.’s venture capital firm. Conservatives used to call that socialism or crony capitalism. Now it’s business as usual in the GOP.
Your Health
In 2024, many independent voters were swayed by independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s endorsement of Trump as part of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement.
But once in office, the Trump administration that promised to take on pesticides actually sided with the company that makes Roundup at the Supreme Court against cancer lawsuits and won. Yep, that happened.
On Day One, Trump withdrew the U.S. from the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Accords, while banning any mention of climate change from U.S. government websites — because ignoring a problem always makes it better.
That’s not all: the Trump’s administration rolled back limits on “forever chemicals” in drinking water and on mercury and arsenic from power plants. It also eliminated the Environmental Protection Agency’s research office. You can’t make America healthy while making our water and air dirtier.
During his confirmation hearings, Kennedy promised the Senate that he was not an anti-vaxxer, despite boatloads of evidence to the contrary. But he turned around and fired the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel and replaced it with hand-picked successors. Then he fired the new CDC director after just 29 days. She testified that she was ousted for refusing to preapprove the new panel’s vaccine recommendations without reviewing the evidence.
Kennedy’s founding MAHA report seemed to have been written with AI, and cited studies that do not exist. He then canceled nearly $500 million in mRNA vaccine research. Meanwhile, measles has come roaring back under his watch. Once considered an eradicated disease, the U.S. has recorded more than 4,400 confirmed cases so far this year, nearly double last year’s total — with 96 percent of this year’s cases among people who were unvaccinated.
Your Government
In his last inaugural address, Trump pledged to restore competence to the federal government.
That’s the punchline. The Trump administration has consistently chosen loyalty over expertise. In addition to an anti-vaxxer with no medical experience running the health department, we’ve got a self-styled Secretary of War who was a Fox News weekend host with no experience running a large organization who is now in charge of the world’s largest military. FBI Director Kash Patel is a conspiracy theorist who one senator credibly called the “least qualified and most partisan FBI director in our nation’s history.”
Personnel is policy and the pattern runs all the way down the ranks. At Homeland Security, the job of safeguarding elections went to Heather Honey, an activist whose faulty voter-data claims Trump cited in trying to overturn the 2020 results. The DHS terrorism-prevention hub went to Thomas Fugate, a 22-year-old Heritage Foundation intern a year out of college with no national security experience. FEMA put disaster response in the hands of Gregg Phillips, an election denier who claimed he had been teleported to a Waffle House 50 miles away. He was removed from the post only after months of embarrassing headlines. The White House hired “Stop the Steal” lawyer Kurt Olsen to reinvestigate the 2020 election, then ordered the nation’s spy agencies to share intelligence with him. Trump nominated Paul Ingrassia to run the office that protects federal whistleblowers until texts surfaced in which he admitted to “a Nazi streak.” When Republican senators sank the nomination, Trump simply moved him to the General Services Administration, where he is now acting general counsel overseeing more than 100 government lawyers. These are not “the very best people.”
The problem isn’t just incompetence, it’s corruption. On her first day in office, former Attorney General Pam Bondi disbanded the task force pursuing Russian oligarchs and told prosecutors to deprioritize foreign bribery cases. Five days later, Trump froze enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. By spring, the department slashed its Public Integrity Section, the unit created after Watergate to prosecute corrupt officials, and scrapped its crypto enforcement team.
This has unleashed a wave of corruption and presidential self-enrichment without precedent in U.S. history. His net worth has increased by billions this term, compounded by frenetic stock trading. The Trump family made at least $2.3 billion from crypto ventures while investors lost a combined $2.3 billion, in an industry his administration regulates. He pardoned the founder of Binance after a UAE fund used the family’s stablecoin to buy a $2 billion stake in that company.
Trump even tried to shake down $230 million in taxpayer dollars from his own Justice Department. The White House asked the Pentagon for a record $620 million loan to a company Donald Trump Jr.’s venture firm had invested in three months earlier. Despite that windfall, a Putin-allied oligarch helped pay for Trump Jr.’s wedding celebrations. The administration accepted a luxury 747 from Qatar, with ownership slated to pass to Trump’s library. All this makes the case of Trump’s border czar, who was recorded in an FBI sting accepting $50,000 in cash in a takeout bag, seem like a sin of small ambition.
As I’ve written before in Rolling Stone, presidential pardons are being sold. A nursing-home owner whose collapsed chain left grieving families with tens of millions in unpaid judgments spent more than $1 million on lobbyists and then received a full pardon. This month, The New York Times reported that a billionaire banker’s family hired Trump’s former lawyer Alina Habba under a contract worth more than $50 million. Trump pardoned him weeks after she started. The dizzying full list includes pardons of corrupt partisan cronies and several violent drug dealers.
The one promise Trump kept was “I will be your retribution.” The January 6 pardons were just the start. A Pulitzer Prize-winning Reuters analysis documented at least 470 targets of retribution in Trump’s first 10 months alone.
Your Safety
In his inaugural address, Trump said his success would be measured by the wars America ends and, most importantly, the ones it never gets into. But the president who petulantly demands a Nobel Peace Prize has ordered military strikes on at least seven countries in his second term, including Venezuela, Yemen, and Iran. He even threatened to seize Greenland from our ally Denmark at a NATO conference.
At the same time, Pete Hegseth is purging the U.S. military leadership with a political agenda, boasting to troops that he had fired 10 percent of the military’s generals and admirals, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the top uniformed officers of the Army, Navy and Air Force. Five weeks into the war with Iran, he fired the Army’s chief of staff. Defenestrating decades of military expertise during a war does not make America safer.
While Trump bragged that he could end Russia’s war on Ukraine in a day, he has not only failed to deliver peace but seems intent on rewarding the aggressor. The United States shamefully voted with Russia and North Korea against a UN resolution condemning the Russian invasion. Then Trump and JD Vance berated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, and days later the administration paused all military aid. Putin got a blood red-carpet welcome in Alaska, while Trump keeps on insisting that it is “time for Ukraine to get a new president.”
While Russia has been struggling on the battlefront, this month Trump threw Putin a lifeline by listing sanctions on the sale of diesel which The Economist described as “scandalous” and “shameful for America,” explaining: “Putin terrorises his own people, kills Ukrainian civilians, and is helping Iran fight America. Mr Trump’s repeated acts of indulgence towards him, supposedly in pursuit of peace, undermine deterrence, hastening further crimes.” Six Republican senators, including Mitch McConnell, joined six Democrats in calling it “a gift to our adversary and a betrayal of our allies.” Trump responded by waiving every Russian provision of a new sanctions law named for the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, finding a way to betray an ally beyond the grave.
Trump’s team often sold his softness on Russia with a promise to be tough on China in return. But the long-promised toughness never arrived. He also announced that he would ignore the bipartisan law banning the CCP-controlled TikTok that the Supreme Court had unanimously upheld. Trump cut sanctions put in place to punish China for the flow of fentanyl into the U.S. and suspended Radio Free Asia, which for decades brought uncensored news to Chinese audiences. China has benefitted economically from Trump’s tariff wars with U.S. allies, and despite arguing that the AI race requires no guardrails on development as a way to block China’s advances, Trump let Nvidia and AMD sell advanced AI chips to China in exchange for a 15 percent cut of the revenue. The administration blocked Taiwan’s president from a New York stopover after Beijing objected and Trump called a pending $14 billion arms package for Taiwan “a very good negotiating chip.” And amid increasing cyber-attacks, especially from China, Trump has inexplicably cut America’s cyber-defenses when we need to be ramping them up.
At home, “law and order” has too often meant order without law. Trump sent National Guard troops into American cities, and the courts repeatedly blocked him. The government deported a Maryland man to a Salvadoran prison in violation of a court order, called it an “administrative error,” and then resisted a Supreme Court order to facilitate his return. In Minneapolis this January, federal agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens in 17 days: Renee Good, a mother of three, and Alex Pretti, an intensive-care nurse at the Minneapolis VA. When federal prosecutors in Minnesota began investigating the killings, Washington told them to stop and the Trump Justice Department cut off access to the evidence.
But perhaps the most dangerous violation of basic safety occurred on day one of this term, when Trump legitimized political violence by pardoning roughly 1,500 of his followers charged in the January 6 attack on the Capitol, including some convicted of assaulting police officers.
Your Values
Character is the single most important quality in a president. But Trump’s contempt for the truth, evidenced in his singular impulse to lie all the time, has translated into a sustained assault on the basic values of our democracy.
Every patriot ought to flinch when confronted with the photos of a wrecking ball being taken to the East Wing of the White House. Trump did the demolition without the independent reviews, congressional approval and public comment required for even minor changes to historic buildings in Washington. He does not believe that rules apply to him.
But that was just the start: His administration gutted the U.S. Institute of Peace, fired its board and seized its building, bolting Trump’s name onto the facade while the legal fight was still underway. Trump purged the Kennedy Center board and his lackeys voted to rename it the “Trump-Kennedy Center,” attaching his name to a living memorial to a slain president. Blocked by the courts, now he is threatening to tear the Kennedy Center down.
The narcissistic impulse extends to Trump putting his face on our money as well. One-dollar coins bearing his likeness are now in circulation, and the Treasury has prepared a $250 bill with his portrait. Nearly every country that isn’t a monarchy declines to put its sitting leader on its money. The U.S. is in the ugly company of a rogue’s gallery of regimes including Marcos, Assad, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, and Mobutu.
Speaking of ugly company, let’s talk about Trump’s longtime friend, Jeffrey Epstein. Trump promised to release the Epstein files as a candidate. But as president, he spent months fighting it. His team even summoned a Republican congresswoman to the White House Situation Room to pressure her to drop her support for releasing the files. The Trump Justice Department then withheld or redacted some 200,000 pages, which a federal judge found likely violated the law. Once Trump had the power to deliver the truth to the victims of a convicted child sex trafficker he used to pal around with, he tried to bury it.
That tracks with his promise to “bring back free speech to America.” Out of the gate, the White House barred the Associated Press from the Oval Office for refusing to say “Gulf of America.” It kept the ban in place after a federal judge called it unconstitutional retaliation. He has since tried to ban CNN, Politico, and MS NOW from the White House, while repeatedly suggesting negative coverage of him and his administration should be illegal.
At the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth demanded that reporters pledge not to publish even unclassified information without approval, and nearly the entire press corps, Fox News included, walked out rather than sign. In just one chapter of Trump’s war on media, hours after Trump’s hyper-partisan FCC chairman warned ABC that “we can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Jimmy Kimmel was briefly pulled off the air. Even Ted Cruz called it “dangerous as hell.” Trump sued The New York Times for $15 billion, and a Bush-appointed judge threw it out. He issued executive orders punishing law firms that had represented his opponents, and three federal judges struck them down as unconstitutional. The United States has now fallen to a record-low 64th in the World Press Freedom Index.
But perhaps the weirdest window into Trump’s twisted psyche comes in the form of the 80-year old’s unhinged late night social media revenge benders, where he posted 2,249 times in the first four months of this year. One night, he posted more than 160 times, including a post branding Sen. Mark Kelly, a Navy combat veteran and astronaut, a “traitor” who deserved death. His account also shared a video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. Amid a feud with Pope Leo, he posted AI images of himself as a Christ-like figure. Finally, after millions of Americans joined peaceful “No Kings” protests, he posted an AI video of himself in a crown, flying a jet labeled “King Trump” and dumping feces on the marchers.
If an aged family member behaved this way, you’d schedule an intervention. If a CEO did, the board would remove them. The presidency deserves to be held to at least the standard of conduct we expect in daily life, and patriots of every party should insist on it.
The Choice
This is nowhere near a complete list of Trump’s assaults on American democracy. This election has provided a constant stream of insults to the integrity of the office, from Trump’s call for red states to do a mid-decade redistricting so Republicans could hold onto Congress, to his endorsement of buffoonishly corrupt Texas AG Ken Paxton over conservative incumbent Jon Cornyn, to using $22 million taxpayer dollars for campaign ads, to his absurdly propagandistic videos at rallies about how “God Made Trump,” to ogling “asses” on the campaign trail to his latest gambit of offering a bribe of $5,000 for each vote — are all just signs of how deep the rot has gotten a decade into the Trump era. This year’s midterms are the only chance we have to restore some basic guardrails on this unhinged president and redeem our country’s once-respected leadership in the free world. The question for independent voters is whether you will now hold Trump to the same standard you’d apply to any other president, regardless of party. You don’t have to join a team. You just have to remember the damage Trump has done over the past two years back in office and vote. Don’t let the memory hole win.