When Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) announced his last hurrah in September, that created a vacuum in midtown Manhattan in NY-12, a D+33 district. Given how high-profile such an election would be, it was bound to draw some pretty high-profile candidates. It just got one: John Bouvier Kennedy Schlossberg. If the names "Bouvier" and "Kennedy" sound familiar, it is because Jack, as he is known, is the son of President Kennedy's daughter, Caroline Kennedy. He is John F. Kennedy's only grandson.
I don't post about most congressional races. But my blog is called No Dynasty 4 Us, so I have to mention it when a member of the Kennedy family runs for office again.
The newly minted adult has cultivated a bizarre following of royalists and fangirls who project their weirdest fantasies onto him.
From the May 15, 2024 story:
Barron has become a locus on which some of the more psychedelic fronts of MAGAdom can project some of their royalist inclinations, which matches up with the overall deprioritization of democratic procedure within an increasingly aberrant Republican Party. Kelly Weill, who wrote a book about conspiracies called Off The Edge, notes that some of the loudest and most apocalypse-oriented deadenders in this contingency also tend to be enthralled with the concept of superior bloodlines—which is leveraged toward anti-immigration policy and pulp-political phantasmagoria alike. (Here is where I remind you that during the Trump alpha wave in 2016, many of his supporters referred to him as the “God Emperor.”)
“[It’s] a right-wing eugenicist tendency,” continued Weill. “This plays out in QAnon-ish spheres that claim Trump is part of Jesus’ ‘bloodline,’ and in Trump’s own comments about immigrants ‘poisoning the blood of our country.’ It’s pretty easy for these ideologies to coalesce into something like American royalism, centered around the Trumps.”
Trump goes into the November election knowing that he can only serve for four years.
From the opinion piece by Eliot Wilson:
At the beginning of March, Lara Trump, Eric Trump’s wife, was elected co-chair of the Republican National Committee. She is a communications graduate from North Carolina State University who worked as a television producer before becoming a Fox News contributor, but felt capable of mulling a run for the Senate in North Carolina in 2022.
Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump have also been active as their father’s cheerleaders and proxies. Both spoke at the rally that preceded the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, and their motivation was explicit. Don Jr. said of the GOP hierarchy, “this isn’t their Republican party anymore, this is Donald Trump’s Republican party.” Eric looked to the longer term: “My father has started a movement, and this movement will never, ever die … [it] will transcend him, it will transcend all of us.”
Back in 2020, when reelection for the senior Trump seemed a forlorn hope, Don Jr. teased the media with hints of his own presidential bid in 2024, and his name was bruited as a candidate for the Senate seat in Pennsylvania vacated by Pat Toomey in 2022; he had already decided against a senatorial run in Wyoming.
...
Trump goes into the November election knowing that he can only serve for four years. More acutely than most, as a result, he must think about his succession and legacy. How does “Trumpism,” if one can even identify such a coherent movement, continue beyond 2028 and Donald’s eventual departure from the national scene?
Political pattern recognition has a moment with President Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 race.
Columnist Philip Bump builds on the common observation that this will be the first election since 1976 where no Bush, Clinton, or Biden will be a presidential or vice presidential candidate.
He goes through election history to point out other eras where a long string of races always included one of 3 individuals or 3 families. The longest stretch was from 1884 to 1944, where 14 of the 16 elections featured Grover Cleveland, William Jennings Bryan, or one of the Roosevelts.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist, filed paperwork Wednesday to run for president as a Democrat. Kennedy filed a state
“If I run, my top priority will be to end the corrupt merger between state and corporate power that has ruined our economy, shattered the middle class, polluted our landscapes and waters, poisoned our children, and robbed us of our values and freedoms. Together we can restore America’s democracy.”
If they do lose Congress, the Democrats will have to overcome another structural failure of theirs--their reliance on vice presidents and family members as presidential candidates. They are already suffering from this right now. No one ever took Joe Biden seriously as presidential timber for his 36 years in the Senate, and his two attempts to win the Democratic nomination went nowhere. When Barack Obama chose him as running mate, however, he got the name recognition and access to key donors that candidates depend on. He yielded the field in 2016 to another candidate who had become a national figure thanks to her marriage, but returned to win the nomination in 2020 with the help of the party establishment.
