Donald Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, and the Return of King Arthur
By Dr. Ellie Crookes
On January 23, 2025, President Donald Trump ordered the declassification of government documents pertaining to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy (JFK), Robert F. Kennedy (RFK), and Martin Luther King Jr. The reason given for doing so was: ‘Providing Americans the truth after six decades of secrecy.’[1] An extension of Trump’s desire to project the image of a ‘no-nonsense’ political ‘outsider,’ the highly publicised executive order also catered to a loud and virulent portion of his base, namely, those aligned with far-right conspiracy theories about shadowy government operatives and a ‘deep state.’
One of the most notable of these conspiracies, and one that is directly connected to the mythology of Donald Trump as government outsider, is QAnon. While not in the media as prominently since the end of Trump’s last presidency, QAnon endures in far-right spaces. QAnon invovles a series of interlocking (and at times contradictory) conspiracy theories that, at their core, view Trump as a messianic figure. One of the more infamous strands of the conspiracy argues that President JFK, who was assassinated in 1963, or his son, John F. Kennedy, Jr. (JFK Jr.), who died in an airplane crash in 1999, had not really died and that one, or both, would return from the dead as ally/ies to Trump. Believers often allege that Trump and JFK Jr. have banded together to fight an underground cabal of pedophile and/or cannibal and/or Satanist ‘Deep State’ Democrats and left-leaning celebrities. This would unleash a ‘Storm’ of retribution, the perpetrators would be sent to Guantanamo Bay,[2] and the result would be a ‘promised golden age’; essentially, that America would be made ‘Great Again.’
Though JFK Jr.’s miraculous return never eventuated, QAnon conspiracies are still espoused, including by Trump himself. Trump continues to engage with the conspiracy by amplifying QAnon social media posts, often using QAnon slogans; refusing to disavow the conspiracy in press conferences, even with an FBI bulletin naming it a domestic terrorism threat;[3] allying himself with QAnon-sympathetic politicians (including Colorado Representative, Lauren Boebert); and nominating cabinet members who have actively espoused the ideology (including his nominee for FBI director, Kash Patel).[4] Most recently, this impulse manifested in Trump’s push to release government documents pertaining to JFK’s and RFK’s assassinations, which works as a subtle nod to QAnon conspiracies by aligning Trump with the Kennedy family, playing into the idea of a nefarious and secretive ‘deep state,’ and supporting the myth of the ‘Kennedy Curse.’[5]
In 2021, I published an article in Arthuriana that mapped this facet of the QAnon conspiracy back to JKF’s assassination and discovered a distinctly medievalist bent to the discourse surrounding the Kennedys. I found that the myth of JFK faking his death and/or his return had been bolstered by framing JFK’s presidency as an idealistic ‘Camelot,’ drawing on the mythmaking around King Arthur as an imminently-returning saviour figure, traceable to the medieval works of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chrétien de Troye, Layamon, Thomas Malory, and most overtly, Étienne de Rouen’s 12th century Draco Normannicus. The myth of JFK’s return, tied up with idealistic mythmaking around his presidency, flourished from the 1960s onwards and was buoyed by the ‘paranoid style’ of American politics. Historian Richard J. Hofstadter was the first to voice an observation about the prevalence of conspiracy theory in mid-twentieth-century America. In an article published in Harper’s Magazine in 1964, he called this new phenomenon ‘the paranoid style,’ stating that ‘no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.’[6] Moreover, the Camelot myth and the legend of JFK’s resurrection, infused with conspiratorial fantasy, has been shaped by and continues to shape the careers and public personas of American politicians and public figures from both sides of the aisle, including the QAnon legend of JFK Jr.’s return from the dead.
In the wake of Trump’s January 23rd executive order, it is clear that this medievalist myth continues to affect American politics, arising in the presidential bid of another Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK Jr.). Throughout his campaign for president, RFK Jr. often took up the Camelot myth to present himself as the second coming of his much-revered uncle. He then suspended his presidential bid in August 2024, simultaneously throwing his support behind Trump, who in kind flagged his intention to nominate RFK Jr. as a member of his administration. Trump undoubtedly sought out RFK Jr.’s endorsement to amalgamate RFK Jr.’s voting base with his, but Trump’s desire to align himself with RFK Jr. was also perhaps driven by his desire to play into the QAnon myth of Trump’s powerful, at times supernatural, association with the Kennedy dynasty. Trump could not count on the ghost of JFK, but he could get the next best thing: an unprincipled and mercenary conspiracy theorist with the Kennedy name.
My piece here revisits the development of this medievalist conspiracy, (outlined in detail in my article ‘The Second Coming of King Arthur: Conspirituality, Embodied Medievalism, and the Legacy of John F. Kennedy’) from the 1960s to the end of Trump’s first presidency, before turning its attention to new developments in the myth regarding RFK Jr. and Trump.
JFK, Camelot, and King Arthur
When JFK’s assassination was broadcast via television and radio into the homes of the American people in November 1963, it immediately ignited several conspiracy theories, including one that JFK was not actually dead and/or that he would one day return. These myths around the survival and resurrection of JFK were, I contend, buttressed by the widespread and enduring bestowal of the appellation of ‘Camelot’ to Kennedy and his administration. It was in a 1963 interview published in Life magazine that a newly-widowed Jacqueline Kennedy sparked what became the popularly mythologized intersection of JFK and Arthur. In that interview, Jackie Kennedy mused on the life of her late husband. At one point she stated that she kept ruminating on a quote from the Broadway musical Camelot, based on T.H. White’s Arthurian novel The Once and Future King, which she asserted her late husband often repeated: ‘Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.’[7] The interviewer noted that Jackie Kennedy ‘wanted to make sure that the point came clear,’ stating that she went on to explain, ‘There’ll be great Presidents again, and the Johnsons are wonderful, they’ve been wonderful to me, but there’ll never be another Camelot again.’[8] Whether it was a genuine example of a wife honoring her late husband or a calculated manoeuvre by Jackie Kennedy to control the narrative around JKF’s political career, the effect of this interview was far-reaching and the message was clear: JKF, like Arthur before him, was a great and egalitarian leader cut down in his prime, not by any fault of his own, but due to the actions of others. This characterisation draws on the image of Arthur, popular in medieval literature from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (c.1136) onwards, which imagines him as an heroic figure, an astute political operative, a near-perfect paragon of courtliness and largesse, and as ‘the centripetal force of his court.’[9] Jackie, in rendering her husband as akin to King Arthur, essentially deified him.
The practice of aligning JFK with Arthur quickly caught on in the U.S. ‘Camelot’ was, and still is, widely referenced in common parlance and scholarship around Kennedy and his presidency.[10] Simultaneously, conspiracy theories around JFK’s assassination popped up like mushrooms in this era of the ‘paranoid style.’ One legend, clearly spurred on by the Arthurian mythmaking wrought by Jackie Kennedy, intimated that the late president, like Arthur, had not really died and might someday return. The writer Truman Capote is often implicated when discussing the way this rumor was spread, though his role was wholly involuntary. On April 3, 1969, an issue of the Milwaukee Metro-News ran a headline story falsely attributed to Capote that asserted that JFK was in fact still alive.[11] Theories which claimed that JFK was not really dead, that he was secreted on an island, and/or that he might one day return, subsequently spread. The ultimate effect of these persistent rumors was the development of a medievalist myth, one often imbued with the supernatural, arising around the memory of JFK. Like King Arthur secreted on the isle of Avalon, JFK too would re-emerge from hiding to save a decaying kingdom. JFK’s great resurrection obviously never happened but, as examined in my article, the trope of JFK as a near-mythic ‘king,’ a leader whose idealism and influence endures even if his physical body has not, has lived on. It has done so through several of his successors in the Democratic Party, through the Kennedy familial and political dynasty, and as of 2017, through QAnon conspiracy theories.
QAnon, Trump, and the promise of a returning saviour
The idea of a return to a ‘golden age’ and of a resurrected Kennedy—key to the QAnon myth—has clear parallels with the Arthurianized Kennedy conspiracy that emerged in the 1960s. QAnon appeared in June 2017 in forums on the website 8chan.[12] In certain subgroups, examined by reporter Avi Selk, QAnon members believe that Q is in fact JFK Jr.[13] This strand of the conspiracy, according to Rolling Stone reporter E.J. Dickson, ‘gained further credence thanks to Liz Crokin, a right-wing conspiracy theorist, who referred to JFK Jr.’s role as Q during a 2018 interview.’[14] The origins of the JFK Jr./QAnon myth can be linked to memes widely shared on social media beginning in 2018, which include a photo of JFK Jr. and Trump with an accompanying statement credited to the former:
If my dear friend Donald Trump ever decided to sacrifice his fabulous billionaire lifestyle to become President he would be an unstoppable force for ultimate justice that Democrats and Republicans alike would celebrate.[15]
The quote was purportedly published in JFK Jr.’s George Magazine a month before his death, in June 1999.[16] The fact-checking website PolitiFact, however, later found that no such quote existed, from George or any other source, though the image of the two men has been verified.[17]
Why JFK Jr. was chosen for this role, rather than JFK himself, is not immediately obvious, but I argue that perhaps misidentification (exacerbated by their shared name), has something to do with the proliferation of the myth. QAnon’s decision to resurrect JFK Jr. instead of his father could also be due to the fact that in 2019, JFK would have been 102 years. The fact that JFK was unequivocably a Democrat could also be a factor. JFK Jr., a younger man who never served as a member of the democratic party but who is still steeped in the Kennedy legacy and thus in the legend of ‘Camelot,’ was clearly the better choice. The senior JFK does, however, make an explicit appearance in the conspiracy. Some QAnon followers believed that JFK Jr. would re-emerge at a Trump rally on November 22, 2019, the the 55th anniversary of his father’s death, or on November 2, 2021 at the location of JFK’s assassination.[18] There is also the case of the popular motto of ‘Where We Go One, We Go All,’ often abbreviated to ‘WWG1WGA,’ emblazoned on QAnon memorabilia and rife in their online communities, which has been attributed to JFK.[19] Some members of QAnon erroneously contend, as reported by Amarnath Amarasingam, that this motto adorned JKF’s boat. The maxim, in fact, seems to come from the 1996 Ridley Scott movie White Squall, in which the motto is engraved on a brass sign. The conflation of JFK and JFK Jr., of which the senior is notoriously bound up in myths of resurrection, reinforces the supposed validity of this specific QAnon conspiracy, which for members supports the legitimacy of Donald Trump’s presidency more broadly. As Roderick P. Hart eloquently stated in 2016, ‘Donald Trump flew to the White House on the wings of conspiracy and used them to stay aloft during his presidency.’[20] In the lead up to, and in the first months of, his second term in office, Trump has continued to do so.
RFK Jr. and the Co-option of Camelot
George, the magazine co-founded by JFK Jr. in 1995, was reestablished by Trump supporter and QAnon acolyte Thomas D. Forster in 2022. Fascinatingly, it was to George magazine that the quote of JFK Jr. speaking in support of a Trump presidency was erroneously ascribed. In October 2023, RFK Jr. was interviewed by the magazine. He answered questions about his presidential run as an Independent and spoke at length on his belief in the importance of what he called ‘free speech’ and ‘commercial censorship’ (i.e. conspiracy theories, including his unsubstantiated assertions around vaccine safety and other ‘wellness’ myths that have been disproven by health professionals).[21] RFK Jr.’s decision to give a long form interview to an essentially amateur magazine at the height of his presidential campaign reveals that even before publicly throwing his hat in the ring with Trump as he did in August 2024, RFK Jr. was not averse to aligning himself with QAnon. It is also important to note that the re-released George magazine repeatedly features articles on conspiracies around JFK’s and RFK’s assassinations, an interest shared by RFK Jr. himself. The interview is an early hint of what became RFK Jr.’s team repeatedly playing into the ‘paranoid style,’ and in particular QAnon, to build momentum around the idea of a Kennedy ‘returning’ to power.
One of the clearest examples of RFK Jr.’s team attempting to depict RFK Jr. as the reincarnated JFK is a campaign advertisement that ran during the Superbowl in February 2024. The ad is a facsimile of one of the most famous political ads in U.S. history, aired in support of JFK in 1960.[22] The 2024 ad is almost identical to the original, from the graphics to the jingle, but with RFK Jr.’s image superimposed over his uncle’s.[23] Another example is a campaign video posted to YouTube in November 2024, where RFK Jr. speaks of his life-long love for falconry:
I started doing hawking when I was nine years old. My uncle, President Kennedy, was in the White House at that time, and a lot of people were talking about Camelot and I read a book about Camelot, about a young King Arthur, called The Once and Future King, by T.H White. And T.H White was a British falconer and […] he had a chapter in that book about a young King Arthur and learning falconry […] that to me was absolutely riveting. I told my dad and mom that was what I wanted to do. I became obsessed with it after reading that book.[24]
He goes on to describe hawking as an ‘atavistic’ and ‘spiritual experience,’ reframing this activity, closely aligned with modern conceptions of medieval royalty, as something ancient, something mythic. In another video, RFK Jr. describes falconry as ‘the sport of kings.’[25] The framing of RFK Jr.’s relationship to this rather obscure and medieval-coded activity is designed to connect him with his uncle, the legend of Kennedy/Camelot, and to the medieval ruler, King Arthur, which bears with it the weight of mysticism, of history, and of familial legacy and inheritance. An alignment with the myth of Camelot also appears in a speech given by RFK Jr. in October 2023, when he declared at a press conference in Philadelphia that he was ending his campaign for the Democratic party and becoming an Independent, saying ‘We’re all going to go over the castle walls together.’[26] There is little doubt in my mind that this was intended to conjure up the image of the medieval kingdom of Camelot and its egalitarian round table. RFK Jr.’s politics are distinctly anti-establishment, anti-‘mainstream’ and thus is makes sense for him to draw on this aspect of Arthurian legend. Picking up on and dismissing the medievalist rhetoric of this statement, journalist Andrew Miller, in an April 2024 article for The Economist, spoke of the irony of this egalitarian mission coming from ‘someone who grew up in Camelot,’ [27] i.e. from someone who grew up in the lap of luxury as a Kennedy.
This impulse to forge a connection between RFK Jr. and his uncle, through framing him as successor to the idyllic and egalitarian kingdom of Camelot, moreover, reached beyond JFK Jr. and his team to become widely wielded by his supporters. At a speech made in October 2023 an audience sign reportedly read, ‘I want Camelot’;[28] George Galloway, British politician and broadcaster put forward his support for RFK Jr. as candidate for president on his podcast in September 2023 in an episode called ‘Recapturing Camelot’;[29] and a self-published book from December 2024 celebrates RFK’s politics using the title The Camelot Crusader: How RFK Jr. Found Common Ground With Trump.[30] The book repeatedly draws on the legacy of JFK’s Camelot to celebrate RFK Jr. as a paragon of fearless advocacy, bold vision, and bipartisan collaboration, asserting that he ‘honors the shadow of Camelot while proving that the Kennedy legacy is not a relic of the past but a living, evolving force for good.’[31]
The trend of aligning RFK Jr. with his uncle’s Arthurian legacy has, however, received push back, with one reporter calling his use of the myth ‘the dark side of Camelot,’[32] and others bemoaning that he is ‘tarnishing […] Camelot’s legacy,’[33] or that he is bungling his birthright as ‘heir to the Camelot dynasty.’[34] Jack Schlossberg, JFK’s grandson, said of RFK Jr., in an Instagram post in January 2025: ‘He’s trading in on Camelot, celebrity, conspiracy theories and conflict for personal gain and fame.’[35] A Washington Post article published in November 2023 took up medievalist imagery directly to critique RFK Jr.’s cooption of the Camelot myth, comparing JFK’s version —'like an actual castle: sturdy stone walls, beautiful gardens and admirers strolling on hallowed grounds tended by generations of Kennedys’—to RFK Jr.’s, which he describes as represented ‘not by a turreted castle but by a squat nightclub,’ the site of one of the stops on his campaign tour where, against a backdrop of disco balls and a neon sign reading ‘B*tch Don’t kill My Vibe,’ RFK Jr. spoke to the crowd.[36] The Washington Post article comes with an accompanying illustration, a hazy painting of the White House topped with turrets, surrounded by pillowy clouds holding the heads of great and dead Kennedys while the comparatively less-dignified image of a bus wrapped in an American flag with the motto Kennedy 2024 rides up the winding driveway.
Illustration by Chris Buzelli for The Washington Post
Another particularly striking example of RFK Jr.’s attempts to align himself with the medievalist legacy of Camelot being commented on is this tweet from November 2024: [37]
Screenshot of Frank Conniff’s post to Twitter/X (15 Nov. 2024)
RFK Jr. storming the walls of Camelot and assuming his place as a modern-day Arthur would not, according to this X user, result in a return to fantasy of a lost golden age but rather to a Dark Age of disease and superstition.
Camelot, RFK Jr. and the Second Coming [Administration] of Trump
Despite widespread backlash to RFK Jr.’s misappropriation of the Camalot legacy, including by many members of the Kennedy family, in August 2024 while announcing his endorsement of Trump, RFK Jr. drew on both his late father (the politician RFK) and his uncle JFK to validate this new alliance, proclaiming that both ‘are looking down right now and they are very, very proud.’[38] It was this endorsement, raining down from the heavens, that Trump and his team undoubtedly coveted as much, if not more than RFK Jr.’s, bringing to fruition the QAnon prophecy of an otherworldly Kennedy/Trump alliance. Through RFK Jr., Trump could reach through the clouds and back in time to the myth of an idyllic 1960s America, and even further back to the legend of the idealised Arthurian court.
One of the more sinister elements undergirding Trump’s push to align himself with the myth of a returned, idealised, and deified king is the way it might be employed to justify—politically, dynastically, supernaturally—a kingly reign; to push for his presidential term, as he has repeatedly hinted at,[39] beyond January 2029. Indeed, Trump and his administration overly pushed this rhetoric in a social media post on February 19, 2025:[40]
Screenshot of a White House post to Twitter/X on 20 Feb. 2025. The post features an image that echoes the style of a Time Magazine cover, but which says “Trump” (instead of Time) and which features a faux painting of Trump in a crown with the New York City skyline behind him. The text at the bottom of the photo reads “Long Live the King”
The AI-generated image of Trump as king functions as yet another example of his and his administration’s repeated claims at jocularity when expressing outrageous, sometimes even dangerous, ideologies. Trump’s common refrain – including in response to backlash around him saying on Fox News in December of 2023 that he planned to be a dictator, but just on ‘day one’[41] – is that comments like these are not to be taken seriously; that he is just ‘joking.’ But if the past few months are anything to go by, it would be wise not to discount this administration’s jokes, especially those bolstered by influential conspiracies and the powerful legacy of JFK’s Camelot.
Author Bio:
Dr Ellie Crookes is a lecturer in English Literatures at the University of Wollongong. She specialises in the field of ‘medievalism’: examining how texts, legends, and characters of the medieval past have been adopted, adapted, and manipulated to suit the needs of artists, writers, and activists globally in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Her research focuses primarily on issues of gender, race, empire, and the occult. Her co-edited collection Medievalism and Reception was published in 2024, and her first monograph The Many Joans of Arc was published in October of this year.
Notes:
[1] ‘Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Orders Declassification of JFK, RFK, and MLK Assassination Files’ (The White House Fact Sheets, 2025), https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/01/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-orders-declassification-of-jfk-rfk-and-mlk-assassination-files/ (accessed January 25, 2025).
[2] E.J. Dickson, ‘QAnon Followers Think JFK Jr. Is Coming Back on the 4th of July,’ Rolling Stone, July 3, 2019, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/qanon-jfk-jr-conspiracy-theory-854938/ (accessed March 15, 2021).
[3] For reports on the continuing online presence of the QAnon conspiracy theory and its powerful influence on American politics, see: Jude Joffe-Block, ‘Four years after the Capitol riot, why QAnon hasn't gone away,’ NPR, December 30, 2024, https://www.npr.org/2024/12/30/nx-s1-5230801/qanon-capitol-riot-social-media (accessed February 10, 2025); Devlin Barrett, ‘Trump’s F.B.I. Pick Sees ‘Deep State’ Plotters in Government, and Some Good in QAnon,’ The New York Times, January 23, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/23/us/politics/kash-patel-conspiracy-theories-qanon.html (accessed February 10, 2025); David Gilbert, ‘Kash Patel Is the Hero QAnon Has Been Waiting For,’ Wired, December 23, 2024, https://www.wired.com/story/kash-patel-is-the-hero-qanon-has-been-waiting-for/ (accessed February 1, 2025).
[4] Barrett, ‘Trump’s F.B.I. Pick Sees.’
[5] By which I mean, conspiracy theories that surround the deaths, accidents, and misfortunes of the Kennedy family.
[6] The Paranoid Style in American Politics,’ Harper’s Magazine, November 1964, 77, https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/ (accessed February 10, 2025).
[7] Theodore H. White, ‘For President Kennedy: An Epilogue,’ Life, December 6, 1963, 158–59, https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/THWPP/059/THWPP-059-009 (accessed February 10, 2025).
[8] White, ‘For President Kennedy,’ 159.
[9] Matthias Meyer, “The Arthur-Figure,” in Handbook of Arthurian Romance: King Arthur’s Court in Medieval European Literature, edited by Leah Tether and Johnny McFayden, 79–86. (Berlin: De Grutyer, 2017): 82.
[10] The extent of this trope’s popularity is examined in Linda Czuba Brigance, ‘For One Brief Shining Moment: Choosing to Remember Camelot,’ Studies in Popular Culture 25.3 (2003): 1–12.
[11] Reported on in Bruce A. Rosenberg, ‘Kennedy in Camelot: The Arthurian Legend in America,’ Western Folklore 35.1 (1976): 52–59. I go into detail about this strange turn of events in my article.
[12] As examined in Avi Selk, ‘JFK Jr. didn’t die! He runs QAnon! And he’s No. 1 Trump fan, omg!!!,’ The Washington Post, August 6, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/08/05/jfk-jr-didnt-die-he-runs-qanon-and-hes-no-1-trump-fan-omg/ (accessed February 10, 2025); Avi Selk and Abby Ohlheiser, ‘How QAnon, the conspiracy theory spawned by a Trump quip, got so big and scary,’ The Washington Post, August 2, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2018/08/01/how-qanon-the-conspiracy-theory-spawned-by-a-trump-quip-got-so-big-and-scary/ (accessed February 10, 2025).
[13] Selk, ‘JFK Jr. Didn’t Die!’
[14] Dickson, ‘QAnon Followers Think JFK Jr. is Coming Back.’
[15] Quoted in Dickson, ‘QAnon Followers Think JFK Jr. is Coming Back.’
[16] Dickson, ‘QAnon Followers Think JFK Jr. is Coming Back’; Evans, ‘Why did conspiracy theorists believe.’
[17] Ciara O’Rourkem, ‘No, John F. Kennedy Jr. didn’t tout a Donald Trump presidency in George magazine,’ Politifact, April 8, 2019, https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/apr/08/viral-image/no-john-f-kennedy-jr-didnt-tout-donald-trump-presi/ (accessed March 3, 2025).
[18] Mark Rothschild, ‘Why QAnon believers think JFK Jr. is going to reappear today,’ Daily Dot, April 10, 2019, https://www.dailydot.com/debug/qanon-jfk-jr/ (accessed February 10, 2025); and Evans, “Why did conspiracy theorists believe.’
[19] Amarasigam and Argentino, ‘The QAnon Conspiracy,’ 42.
[20] Roderick P. Hart, ‘Donald Trump and the Return of the Paranoid Style,’ Presidential Studies Quarterly 50.2 (2020): 348.
[21] Rachel Writeside Blonde, ‘Spoiler Alert: Robert Kennedy Announces His Run as an Independent,’ George Magazine, October 2023, 34-47, https://georgemagazine.com/read-george-online/?page_no=6 (accessed February 10, 2025).
[22] American Values, ‘Robert Kennedy Jr Super Bowl Ad 2024. American Values RFK JR,’ YouTube, February 11, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvXJJRjGVT4 (accessed February 10, 2025).
[23] As examined in Adam Nagourney, ‘A 30-Second Kennedy Ad Collides With a Decades-Long Family Legacy,’ The New York Times, February 13, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/13/us/politics/rfk-jr-super-bowl-ad-kennedy.html (accessed February 10, 2025).
[24] Robert F. Kennedy Jr., ‘RFK Jr. Describes His Lifelong Love of Falconry,’ YouTube, November 25, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeuBa9XRQNo (accessed February 10, 2025).
[25] Prizeo, ‘Spend a Day with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Learn the Art of Falconry,’ YouTube, December 24, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PAmsuP7zBw (accessed February 10, 2025). A video advertising a fundraiser in support of ‘Children’s Health Defense,’ the leading anti-vaccine organisation in the U.S.A, for people to ‘spend a day with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr and Learn the Art of Falconry.’
[26] Andrew Miller, ‘Robert F. Kennedy Junior doesn’t care if he condemns America to Trump,’ The Economist, April 10, 2024, https://archive.md/yslrm#selection-1495.151-1495.424 (accessed February 10, 2025).
[27] Miller, ‘Robert F. Kennedy Junior.’
[28] Alex Seitz-Wald, Katherine Koretski, and Jake Traylor, ‘Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ends Democratic presidential bid, launches independent campaign,’ NBC News, October 10, 2023, https://www.aol.com/news/robert-f-kennedy-jr-ends-174259673.html (accessed February 10, 2025).
[29] George Galloway, ‘Interview: Recapturing Camelot,’ YouTube, September 29 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwsIH7hR7eY (accessed February 10, 2025).
[30] Joshua C. Combs, The Camelot Crusader: How RFK Jr. Found Common Ground with Trump (Online: Self-published, 2024).
[31] Combs, The Camelot Crusader, 11.
[32] Jet Heer, ‘By His Endorsement of Donald Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Shows the Dark Side of Camelot,’ The Nation, August 28, 2024, https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/rfk-endorsement-trump-camelot/ (accessed February 10, 2025).
[33] Barbara A. Perry, ‘Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Stain on Camelot Won’t Last Forever,’ NewsWeek, August 29, 2024, https://www.newsweek.com/robert-f-kennedy-jrs-stain-camelot-wont-last-forever-opinion-1945824 (accessed February 10, 2025); similar sentiment in Peter Baker, ‘Anguish in Camelot: Kennedy Campaign Roils Stories Political Family,’ The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/06/us/politics/rfk-campaign-kennedy-family.html (accessed February 10, 2025); and in Miller, ‘Robert F. Kennedy Junior.’
[34] Anonymous, ‘How RFK Jr. Went from Camelot Heir to Kennedy Outcast,’ The Daily Beast, August 23, 2024, https://www.thedailybeast.com/in-photos-how-rfk-jr-went-from-camelot-heir-to-kennedy-outcast/ (accessed February 10, 2025).
[35] The Instagram post has since been deleted, but it is quoted in Baker, ‘Anguish in Camelot.’
[36] Maura Judkis, ‘What Does the Kennedy Name Mean Now?’ The Washington Post, November 20, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/power/2023/11/15/rfk-jr-president-kennedy-family-legacy/ (accessed February 10, 2025).
[37] Frank Conniff (@FrankConniff), ‘Robert F. Kennedy Jr evokes Camelot,’ X, November 15, 2024, https://x.com/FrankConniff/status/1857209046954127585?mx=2 (accessed February 10, 2025).
[38] Quoted in Heer, ‘By His Endorsement.’
[39] Neil Vigdor, ‘No, Trump Cannot Run for Re-election in 2028,’ The New York Times, January 28, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/article/trump-third-term-2028-constitution.html (accessed February 10, 2025); David Moye, ‘Trump Once Again Suggests He Might Try to Run for Third Term in 2028,’ HuffPost, February 6, 2025, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-third-term-2028_n_67a52b0ae4b051682f2acc3b (accessed February 10, 2025).
[40] The White House, ‘Congestion Pricing is Dead,’ X (Febrary 19, 2025), https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/1892295984928993698 (accessed March 4, 2025).
[41] As examined in John Bowden, ‘Trump resorts to old excuse over his ‘dictator’ comments – he was “joking”,’ Independent UK, December 12, 2023, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-dictator-joking-truth-social-b2462848.html (accessed March 4, 2025).
