Politics
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February 14, 2025
Is Kennedy’s name short for liberalism or Olita?
Elon Musk plays the de facto commander as chief. Keep high level photo ops Along with foreign leaders like Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, nominal President Donald Trump has a lot of time in his hands. Naturally, because he is a second-term president, Trump has been changing his energy towards building legacy. However, due to his instinct to master and renovate his real estate developer’s old properties, Trump doesn’t start from scratch, but he has a valuable brand that he can easily take over and create his own. Decided: the legendary name of the Kennedy family.
Over the past few weeks, Trump has been in his way to make Kennedy’s name appropriate as a derivative of his own brand. That was Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Thursday. Confirmed as Secretary of Health by the Senate It was a nearly party-based vote (all Democrats voted against the nomination, and the only Republican to vote was Mitch McConnell). RFK Jr. is now the most prominent political leader of a well-known Democratic family, the son of the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and nephew of the late President John F. Kennedy and the late Senator Edward Kennedy. , the partisan disparity is impressive. . Certainly, until last year, RFK Jr. was an anti-Trump Democrat himself.
Earlier this week, Trump chaired the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, creating it to celebrate JFK’s legacy as part of a larger partisan purge of the organization. Trump has ousted Democrats from existing bipartisan committees and replaced them with peers and rap dogs. As New York Times Report,
The board, until recently, was roughly divided between Biden and Trump’s appointees, but now consists of Trump’s appointees. The new board will include Trump’s loyalty communications, including the president’s chief of staff, Susie Wills. Dan Scabino, longtime Trump aide. Usha Vance, wife of Vice President J.D. Vance.
January 30th, Trump I signed an executive order We are asking the CIA and FBI to declassify all documents relating to the assassination of JFK, RFK, and Martin Luther King Jr.
Taken together, these three moves become a coordinated attempt by Trump to assert the Kennedy Mantle. It’s no surprise that Trump hopes that old Kennedy magic will rub him down, with love and false charm for Chintz. The violent deaths of JFK and RFK have given many Americans sacred memories across party lines. JFK Continuing investigation into the approval of modern president Gallup90% of the population sees him favorably. He’s 21 points ahead of second-placed Ronald Reagan.
All striped politicians have tried to argue that they continue Kennedy’s legacy. Bill Clinton and Nancy Pelosi Share photos Record them A youthful encounter with JFK. But right-wing Republicans play the same game, Often insist Tax cuts under JFK were the precursor to Ronald Reagan’s supply-side economy. Founder of Neoxalvativism.
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Other members of the Kennedy family, with the exception of RFK Jr., remained liberal Democrats, attempting to resist Trump’s appropriation of the Clan legacy. My family has Condemnation RFK Jr.’s support for Trump The transformation of the Kennedy Center Become a sponsored aircraft for the partisans.
However, it is not clear that the Kennedy family has exclusive claims about Kennedy’s legacy. Kennedy’s legacy is large, intricate and woven into American history. One reason Trump can play to take over the Kennedy brand is that after Edward Kennedy’s death in 2009, the family itself has become much more prominent as an icon of American political liberalism (although JFK’s daughter Caroline Kennedy Schrossberg served. She was appointed as the Japanese ambassador by President Biden (as of the Obama administration). In 2020, something unthinkable happened. RFK’s grandson, Joseph Kennedy III, was defeated in his bid to win a Massachusetts Democratic Senate nomination. Kennedy, who lost in Massachusetts, would have once stumbled, but his family clearly lost political juices.
Kennedy’s name belongs to myths more than electoral politics that allowed both RFK Jr.’s adventurism and Trump’s ironic appropriation of the brand.
In fact, there is no consistent political content in Kennedyism. The family has been well-known on the national stage for over a century, during which the prominent members took all sorts of contradictory stances. Patriarch Joseph Kennedy was a conservative Democrat who opposed the New Deal. He was also America’s first nationalist, and certainly suggests an affinity for Trumpism. JFK was a Cold War liberal and was in the position to make him a plausible ancestor of many American politics. Do we relate him to the warming of the pig bay, or to suppress his call for nuclear negotiations? Is his legacy a civil rights law that brought fruit to his name after his death or after Dr. King’s eavesdropping? The RFK and Edward Kennedy opposed the Vietnam War. Which part of this legacy is the real part?
What’s disturbing about Trump’s appropriation is that he can actually make plausible claims to some of JFK’s legacy. JFK was a pioneer who transformed wealth and media fame into political capital. JFK sold himself as an outsider who was not ruled by the elite and was willing to defeat the New Deal bureaucracy. This is a political profile that can be easily adopted by more clearly right-wing figures like Trump as their own.
Historian Garry Wills wrote in his research Kennedy’s imprisonment (1982), JFK’s political brand correctly emphasizes that it is deeply personal and personal, with policies implemented by the loyalist band (including family) based on charisma rather than ideology. . Again, there is inevitable commonality with Trump. Describing Kennedy’s mode of governance, Wills stated:
Kennedy concluded that if the conflict completely fails, it must depend on the rotation of the process. They concluded that instead of the law, they should rely on an extension of team players’ authority and an extension of quarantine in the less responsive portion of the government. Let’s atrophy of non-cooperative institutions. Meanwhile, several active men have taken on increasingly common jobs… More importantly, he saw his administration as a mobile “outsider” attack on the settled US government. He formed a hit-and-run team to cut out enemy resistance, go out of the channel, back up the committee, and dismantle the structures. Democracy requires such strong (and often secret) leadership by an enlightened minority who opposes the dullness of many of the bureaucrats.
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This passage may be largely useful as a blueprint for Elon Musk’s current overthrow of the current federal administrative state.
All of this does not suggest that JFK and Trump are the same. Rather, it reminds me that Kennedy’s legacy is so mixed that it doesn’t provide a real basis for resisting Trumpism. You can point out the good things that JFK and other Kennedys were standing there. This is not an extension of welfare state and civil rights protections, but it is a good thing in itself, not because certain wealthy families defended them.
Kennedy’s name is relevant, as a warning. Kennedy reminds us of the dangers of elite immunity, the dangers of wealthy individuals protected from the consequences of deferred politics and sanitary hygiene actions. Trump embodies the worst aspects of Kennedy’s legacy, reminding us that American issues extend beyond the partisan misdeeds of individual presidents.
Kennedy’s name also stands out for the Oli-head, a fundamental issue of Trumpism.
Fix: Previous versions of this article misinterpreted the grandfather of Joseph Kennedy III.
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