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      There’s a fair way to ensure third-party candidates don’t ‘spoil’ the US election | David Daley

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr has suspended his presidential campaign and endorsed Donald Trump, in part because he did not want to be a spoiler across competitive swing states. The third-party “spoiler problem”, unfortunately, will not vanish with him.Three committed independents and third-party nominees remain: progressive activist Cornel West, Libertarian Chase Oliver, and Jill Stein of the Green party. They could still tip the balance: the White House looks likely to be won by the tiniest margins across just seven swing states, just as it was in 2016 and 2020.The next president should not be decided by whether Stein earns 0.4% in Michigan or 0.2%, or if Oliver claims 1.1% or 0.8% in Libertarian-friendly Georgia and Arizona. But under our current system, that’s very much possible.We need a modern fix that recognizes that third parties are here to stay, but also that a nation with a guiding principle of majority rule deserves winners who earn more than 50% of their fellow Americans’ votes. The best solution to the urgent “spoiler” problem – which we’ve been exhaustingly debating since Ross Perot’s run in 1992 – is ranked-choice voting (RCV).Two states – Maine and Alaska – have already adopted this common-sense, nonpartisan fix for fairer results and will vote for president this fall with RCV. Others should follow their lead. RCV has lots of benefits. But most crucially, by giving voters the power to rank the field, it fixes the spoiler effect that emerges in any race with more than two candidates.A RCV election works much like an instant runoff. If someone wins a majority of voters’ first choices, they win – like any other election. If not, the last-place finishers are eliminated, one by one, and their supporters’ second choices come into play to identify a majority winner.In other words, a Democrat in Michigan who wants a different approach in Gaza could feel free to rank West or Stein first, and Kamala Harris second. A Sun belt conservative who thinks the national debt grew too quickly under Trump could put Oliver first and the former president second. They could make their voice heard – without worrying that their vote would elect someone they fear could be worse on the issue most important to them.Currently, despite our political nuances and the increasing number of registered independents, the spoiler problem continues to be the prism through which every third-party run is considered. Kennedy never seemed likely to win, but pundits agonized for months over whether he drew more from Democrats or the Republican party. It’s no surprise that serious independent candidates or anti-Trump conservatives such as Larry Hogan and Chris Christie rejected entreaties to run this year, when such a run would be reduced to the question of who they’d “siphon” votes from.It’s too early to judge the effect that Kennedy’s exit will have on the race. His support had softened in recent weeks. Yet almost no matter how his supporters break, the most competitive states remain extremely close.As of 21 August, Harris leads Arizona by 1.2%, Pennsylvania by 1.6%, and North Carolina by 0.2%. Trump holds a lead of 0.8% in Georgia. Any of the remaining third-party candidates could easily exceed the margin of victory in competitive states. It’s not just Florida in 2000, when George W Bush carried the electoral college tipping-point by 537 votes, a margin far surpassed by Ralph Nader voters. In Wisconsin in 2020, the Libertarian Jo Jorgensen and conservative-leaning independents took more than twice as many votes as the margin between Joe Biden and Trump.It’s easy to imagine something similar this year, perhaps even an election night 2024 where the electoral college is knotted up. Harris and Trump each have 251 electoral votes. Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin remain too close to call, each separated by a handful of votes. A tense nation awaits the verdict.Wouldn’t the result have more legitimacy if everyone knew that the electoral votes in those states went to a winner with more than 50% of the vote?Kennedy might have left the scene, but third-party candidates are not going away. Nor should they be forced out. We can adjust to that reality, or we can dig in our heels, repeat this tired debate, blame Ralph Nader and Jill Stein for everything, forever, and – at a time when the country feels ever more polarized – risk electing a president without a majority in the decisive states, leaving us even more divided than we are now.There’s no silver bullet to everything that ails our civic spirit. Yet the road out of this toxicity might begin with embracing values that most of us hold dear: more individual choice is good, all of us should be heard and majorities must rule. Ranked-choice voting makes that possible.

      David Daley is the author of Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count and Unrigged: How Americans Are Battling Back to Save Democracy. He is a senior fellow at FairVote More

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      Democrats can win this election by championing the working class | Katrina vanden Heuvel

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      One of the most compelling speeches at last week’s Democratic national convention wasn’t followed by balloons. Delivered just a few hours before Kamala Harris’s primetime address, it came from a man with – until now, anyway – zero name recognition. John Russell is a mulleted tree-stump grinder turned activist journalist from rural Ohio. He seemed a bit of a misfit next to glamorous speakers like Oprah and the guy who played the president on Scandal. But on the final night in Chicago, Russell took the stage to give what my colleague Bhaskar Sunkara called “the most radical speech” in the convention’s history.His blistering remarks cut through the convention’s fever dream to deliver a necessary wake-up call. He warned about the working class’s political disillusionment. He demanded that Democrats reclaim their heritage as fearless defenders of labor. And he issued ambitious prescriptions for action on everything from a living wage to climate crisis. On that last issue, he reminded the gathered delegates that environmental degradation isn’t just a matter of coastal (elite) flooding, but of strip mining and poisoned water in flyover country. Perhaps most impressively, he spoke all this truth to power in only two minutes. As he said himself: “It is our moment to live up to. Let’s get after it.”This barn burner reminded the Democratic party that elevating voices like Russell’s for just one night in August won’t cut it: the Harris campaign needs to center heartland populism all the way through November.Such an emphasis has become even more imperative with JD Vance’s ascension to the No 2 spot on the Republican ticket. Though doughnuts may baffle him, this native son of Appalachia does have a knack for enticing Rust belt voters with a menu of faux-populist policies. From his support for unions to his endorsement of Lina Khan, the US Federal Trade Commission chair, Vance’s words make it seem like the only thing he despises more than cat ladies is corporations. But as Russell pointed out, Vance’s work for Peter Thiel and his fealty to Donald Trump prove his true loyalties lie with crypto miners, not coal miners.Authentic populists like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez can certainly counter-signal Vance’s siren song. Sanders, for his part, delivered a typically rousing address at the DNC, calling on his fellow Democratic leaders to “stand up to wealth and power and deliver justice for people at home and abroad”.The Democrats’ populist bench extends beyond elected officials, too. The night before Sanders’s remarks, Shawn Fain, the United Auto Workers president, appeared onstage in a red T-shirt that declared “Trump Is A Scab.” Though Sean O’Brien, the Teamsters president, had made a tentative courtship of the right by speaking at the Republican convention in July, Fain affirmed that labor’s true home remains with the left.But no one can rebut the Hillbilly Elegist more effectively than on-the-ground Appalachians like Russell. He reports on heartland labor issues for a progressive news outlet called More Perfect Union, enabling him to connect with the very workers who could swing races up and down the ballot. A video that played before his convention remarks showed him meeting with construction workers in rural Tennessee. They had just joined a union for the first time, but it may have also been the first time they met a Democrat who shared their tribulations.And Russell isn’t the only self-described redneck trying to build a grassroots movement. Beth Howard, for example, is organizing other coal miners’ daughters in eastern Kentucky on behalf of a program called Showing Up For Racial Justice. It aims to mobilize predominantly white communities in the south to combat racism and classism alike. And in the Central time zone, Midwest Academy continues to pump out progressive organizers who know what’s the matter with Kansas and how to fix it. Founded 51 years ago to check a different surge of rightwing populism, Midwest Academy has become the training ground for blue activists in red states. Its graduates would make mighty canvassers for Harris.Joe Biden has made headway in reclaiming the working class as the Democratic base. He has declared himself the most pro-union president ever, and his legislative accomplishments undoubtedly make him the best ally to labor in the White House since at least Lyndon Johnson. Last year, More Perfect Union even helped connect Biden with striking autoworkers, opening the way for him to make history as the first president to join a picket line. Harris would do well to follow her boss’s lead and embrace John Russell and his fellow activists – not just as surrogates, but advisers.To paraphrase Russell, this is Harris’s moment to live up to – or live down.

      Katrina vanden Heuvel is editor and publisher of the Nation, she is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and has contributed to the Washington Post, New York Times and Los Angeles Times. More

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      Harris and Walz to give first sit-down interview as Democratic ticket on CNN

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      Kamala Harris and Tim Walz will sit for their first interview as the Democratic ticket on Thursday, after weeks of demands from Republicans and members of the media for the nominees to open themselves up to questions.The interview, which will be conducted by CNN anchor Dana Bash from the battleground state of Georgia, is set for a primetime spot on CNN at 9pm ET.Despite a whirlwind of media coverage of the Harris campaign and a surge of support in the six weeks since Joe Biden ended his bid for re-election and endorsed her, the vice-president has yet to do a formal interview or hold a press conference.“There are a lot of questions that have been lingering out there for her to answer as we go into this fall campaign,” David Chalian, CNN’s political director, said after announcing the interview on the network Tuesday. “We have been waiting to see this next important hurdle for Kamala Harris and her campaign to jump,” Chalian added, noting that Harris and Walz successfully rallied the party, raised heaps of money, and pulled off the convention. “All of that is very scripted,” he said. “This is the first time she is going to take questions.”Harris laid out some broad policy agendas at the Democratic national convention last week, promising a middle class tax cut at home and a muscular foreign policy of standing up to Russia and North Korea. In recent weeks, Harris also shared some of the first glimpses into what her policy priorities might look like, including a proposal for $25,000 down-payment support programs for first-time home buyers and a call for cracking down on price-gouging companies.But while her campaign is busy spreading enthusiasm for her nomination, some details have been left scant. There still isn’t a dedicated policy page on the official campaign website and Harris has turned down interview requests, opting instead for less-risky campaign appearances and short conversations with pool reporters.“On the whole, Harris’s top communications aides are deeply skeptical, as Biden’s inner circle was, that doing big interviews with major TV networks or national newspapers offer much real upside when it comes to reaching swing voters,” Politico reported earlier this month, citing two unnamed people close to the campaign. An anonymous source claimed there is little incentive to change course: “She’s getting out exactly the message she wants to get out,” they said.Now, as time ticks down for Harris and Walz, the governor of Minnesota, to make their final appeal to anyone who might still be undecided, their campaign has embraced a slight shift in strategy.Harris and her opponent, Donald Trump, are scheduled to debate each other next month, even as a back-and-forth continues between the campaigns over what rules have been agreed.The dispute has centered on the issue of microphone muting, which Biden’s campaign made a condition of his decision to accept any debates this year. Trump said in a post on Truth Social on Tuesday that the parameters for the 10 September debate would be “the same as the last CNN Debate”, when both candidates’ microphones were muted except when it was their turn to speak.But Harris’s campaign said on Tuesday that specifics for the debate are still being worked out with the host, ABC News. A Harris spokesperson noted: “Both candidates have publicly made clear their willingness to debate with unmuted mics for the duration of the debate to fully allow for substantive exchanges between the candidates – but it appears Donald Trump is letting his handlers overrule him. Sad!”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMeanwhile, the Democratic ticket will make good on its promise to do an interview.“Now is the opportunity to hear her ruminate aloud,” Chalian said, “with Dana asking her about her policy positions, her plans for the future, her plans for the country, in an unscripted setting – and, of course, to see the Democratic ticket interacting with each other.”The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this story More

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      Trump appoints RFK Jr and Tulsi Gabbard to transition team

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      Donald Trump has appointed Robert F Kennedy Jr and Tulsi Gabbard, two former Democrats who have endorsed his bid for a second presidency, to the transition team that could shape his future administration.The pair will serve as honorary co-chairs of a body that will help him choose policies and personnel if he wins November’s presidential election, the New York Times reported.Kennedy’s appointment came after he suspended his own presidential campaign as an independent candidate last week and threw his weight behind an erstwhile opponent who, just four months ago, branded him a “radical-left lunatic”.He had already flagged up his new role in an interview with Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host and prominent Trump supporter, posted on X.Gabbard, a former member of Congress for Hawaii, unsuccessfully sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 and left the party shortly thereafter.She has rebranded herself as a pro-Trump celebrity and has been helping the Republican nominee prepare for a 10 September debate with Kamala Harris, his Democratic opponent, which is to be hosted by ABC.Gabbard and Harris clashed in a televised primary debate in 2019, footage from which was posted on social media on Tuesday.Gabbard, a former member of the national guard who served in the Middle East, criticised the Democratic party in the debate, saying it was “not the party that is of, by and for the people and continues to be influenced by the foreign policy establishment in Washington represented by [Hillary] Clinton … and other greedy corporate interests”. She also attacked Harris’s record as a prosecutor.Harris responded by describing Gabbard as “someone who during the Obama administration spent four years full-time on Fox News criticising President Obama”. She also accused Gabbard of “buddying up” to Steve Bannon, a key Trump supporter and adviser, to get a meeting with Trump after he won the 2016 presidential election.It is unclear what role Kennedy or Gabbard will play on the transition team, which also features two of Trump’s sons, Donald Jr and Eric, and his vice-presidential running mate, JD Vance.On Tuesday, the Wisconsin elections commission voted to keep Kennedy on the presidential ballot, despite requesting to be removed from the ballot in all swing states when he endorsed Donald Trump last week.US media reported that Kennedy would also remain on the ballot in another key swing state: Michigan. The presence of independent and third-party candidates on the ballots could be a key factor in states where four of the last six presidential elections have been decided by between 5,700 votes and about 23,000 votes.Kennedy, who has traded in debunked conspiracy theories about children’s vaccines and the causes of the Covid epidemic, has been touted as a potential member of a second Trump administration, and has said he would expect any role would involve healthcare and food and drug policy.Trump has supported some of Kennedy’s vaccine scepticism, but played down suggestions that he could appoint him as secretary of health and human services. That post would see him surmounting the potentially problematic hurdle of Senate confirmation.Marc Short, a former chief of staff to Mike Pence, who served as Trump’s vice-president, told the New York Times that the appointment of Kennedy and Gabbard was a setback to conservatives.“From the convention platform to the transition team, free-market, limited-government and social conservatives have been kicked to the curb,” he said. “Doubling down on big-government populists will not energise turnout among traditional conservatives.” More

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      Special counsel files new indictment against Trump over 2020 election

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      The justice department filed a new indictment against Donald Trump on Tuesday over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The maneuver does not substantially change the criminal case against him but protects it in the wake of a July supreme court decision ruling saying that Trump and other presidents have immunity for official acts, but not unofficial ones.“Today, a federal grand jury in the District of Columbia returned a superseding indictment, charging the defendant with the same criminal offenses that were charged in the original indictment,” lawyers for Jack Smith, the special counsel handling the case, said in a filing that accompanied what is known as a superseding indictment.“The superseding indictment, which was presented to a new grand jury that had not previously heard evidence in this case, reflects the Government’s efforts to respect and implement the Supreme Court’s holdings and remand instructions in Trump v United States.”The document retains the same four criminal charges against Trump that were originally filed last summer. But portions of the new indictment are rewritten to emphasize that Trump was not acting in his official capacity during his efforts to try to overturn the election.The new document, for example, removes mention of Jeffrey Clark, a former justice department official who aided Trump’s attempt to try to overturn the election. Clark was the only government official who was listed as an unnamed co-conspirator in the original indictment.“Trump is therefore absolutely immune from prosecution for the alleged conduct involving his discussions with Justice Department officials,” the supreme court wrote in its ruling in July.The supreme court also suggested that a president could be criminally immune in connection to acts between him and the vice-president. The superseding indictment reframes Trump’s interactions with Mike Pence, emphasizing that he was Trump’s running mate.At other points in the document, prosecutors emphasize that Trump was acting outside the scope of his official duties.“The defendant had no official responsibilities related to any state’s certification of the election results,” the document says.Prosecutors also highlighted that Trump used his Twitter/X account both for official and personal acts. They noted that the rally he attended on the Ellipse, near the White House, on 6 January 2021 was a “campaign speech”.Even if the case is still unlikely to go to trial before the 2024 election in November, and even if the Trump lawyers file motions seeking to excise more parts of the indictment, the decision to pursue a superseding indictment may have been to avoid more delay.Trump has been enormously successful in delaying his criminal cases, which came as part of a broader strategy to push his legal troubles past November, in the hopes that he wins and can appoint a loyalist as the attorney general who would then drop the cases entirely.In July, the supreme court’s conservative majority ruled that former presidents are immune from criminal prosecution for official actions that extended to the “outer perimeter” of their office, most notably any interactions with the justice department and executive branch officials.The framework of criminal accountability for presidents, as laid out by the ruling, has three categories: core presidential functions that carry absolute immunity, official acts of the presidency that carry presumptive immunity, and unofficial acts that carry no immunity.The court also ruled that the special counsel, Jack Smith, could not introduce as evidence at trial any acts deemed to be official, even as contextual information for jurors to show Trump’s intent. More

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      JD Vance asserts faith in Trump after admitting he once ‘didn’t fully believe’

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      JD Vance has admitted he once doubted Donald Trump’s abilities to be US president but insists he was won over by the policies and track record of a man he previously decried as “America’s Hitler” and “cultural heroin”.The Republican vice-presidential nominee obliquely referred to his former hostility at a campaign rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, as he attempted to blame Kamala Harris, the US vice-president, for the policies of the Biden administration at the same time as accusing her of preparing to steal Trump’s ideological clothes.His concession of past skepticism came after he accused Trump’s critics of wrongly forecasting his failure in office.“The same people who screwed this country up for 30 years said President Donald Trump would fail. Remember that?” Vance said. “But I remember, I was myself – I didn’t fully believe in the promises of Donald Trump. He persuaded me because he did such a good job.”He said Trump’s presidency was characterised by low petrol prices, affordable housing and rising wages, while inflation – which has become a political Achilles heel of Joe Biden’s presidency and, potentially, of Harris’s candidacy – was a non-issue.Vance’s brief allusion to his anti-Trump past follows widespread accusations of flip-flopping on his previous views on the former president and 2024 Republican nominee. Trump announced Vance – a first-term senator from Ohio – as his running mate at last month’s party convention in Milwaukee.The announcement drew widespread scrutiny of a litany of critical past comments by Vance, who described himself in 2016 as “a never Trump guy”, adding: “I never liked him.”In his speech, Vance threw the flip-flop accusation back at Harris, who has been accused of ditching previous leftwing stances when she campaigned unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination in 2020. “I’m not sure that this is a woman who knows what she actually believes she is,” he said. “If you think about it, she’s just a cog in the wheel of a very corrupt system.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionGoing further, he accused Harris of trying to steal Trump’s most successful policies, including his advocacy of a crackdown on illegal immigration at the southern US border.“I read a story this morning that her advisers are considering just copying all of Donald Trump’s policies,” Vance told supporters. “In fact, I’ve heard that for her debate in just a couple of weeks, she’s going to put on a navy suit, a long red tie, and adopt the slogan, ‘Make America great again’ [Trump’s signature slogan].” More

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      Trump raising money by selling pieces of suit he wore in Biden debate

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      Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that he is selling a new collection of digital trading cards, and that supporters who buy 15 or more cards will receive a physical card adorned with a piece of the suit he wore for the presidential debate against Joe Biden in June.The announcement was made on Tuesday in a video posted on Truth Social.The cards, named the America First collection, features 50 new images of Trump, including him dancing, holding bitcoins and more.The digital cards cost $99 each, he said, and supporters who purchase 15 or more (at a cost of $1,485 or more) will receive the physical card.“People are calling it the knock-out suit,” Trump said in the video, adding: “I don’t know about that but that’s what they’re calling it.”He continued: “We’ll cut up the knock-out suit, and you’re going to get a piece of it and we’ll be randomly autographing five of them, a true collector’s item, this is something to give your family, your kids, your grandchildren.”Supporters who buy 75 digital cards, at a cost $7,425, will get to attend a gala dinner with the former president at Trump National Golf Club in Jupiter, Florida, Trump said.“You know they call me the crypto-president,” Trump said. “I don’t know if that’s true or not but a lot of people are saying that, so don’t miss out, go to collecttrumpcards.com … and collect your piece of American history.”Perhaps unsurprisingly, the former president has released and sold digital trading cards in the past.In 2022, Trump introduced his first collection of digital trading cards, which included a picture of himself in a superhero costume. The cards sold out in less than a day, netting $4.5m (£3.39m) in sales.This is also not the first time Trump has sold parts of one of his suits. Last year, Trump began selling small cuts of the suit he wore when he was arrested and had his mugshot taken in an Atlanta jail. To receive a piece of that suit, supporters had to buy 47 digital trading cards, adding up to $4,653.The former Apprentice host also monetized the mugshot taken in the Atlanta jail last August, and sold it on coffee mugs, T-shirts and more items. More

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      RFK Jr faces call for investigation into claim he chainsawed whale’s head off

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      His independent White House campaign has fizzled, but the flow of bizarre stories of Robert F Kennedy Jr’s unorthodox handling of the carcasses of wild mammals has experienced no similar suspension.An environmental group is calling for a federal investigation into the former presidential candidate for an episode in which he allegedly severed the head of a washed-up whale with a chainsaw – and drove home with it strapped to his car’s roof.The episode has parallels with another extraordinary tale reported earlier in August in which Kennedy confessed to dumping a dead bear cub in New York’s Central Park and attempted to make it look like the animal was killed by a bicyclist.The latest grisly revelation, about the whale head, is not particularly new – it stems from a 2012 interview Kennedy’s daughter Kick gave to Town & Country magazine, in which she talks about a visit to other family members of the political dynasty in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, more than two decades prior.But the story’s re-emergence, following the bear tale and other off-the-wall declarations – including claims that part of RFK Jr’s brain was eaten by worms and that he had an apparent fondness for barbecued dog – has angered activists at the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund. The group previously denounced Kennedy’s candidacy and endorsed Democratic nominee Kamala Harris for president.In a letter to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) this week, Brett Hartl, the organization’s government affairs director and chief political strategist, demanded an inquiry.“Mr Kennedy’s apparent transport of the marine mammal skull from Massachusetts to New York, and therefore across state lines, also represented a felony violation of the Lacey Act, one of the earliest wildlife conservation laws enacted by [the] United States in 1900,” he wrote, adding that it was also illegal to possess part of any animal protected by the endangered species act.“Normally, an unverified anecdote would not provide sufficient evidence as the basis for conducting an investigation. The [bear] story made it seem like this was normal behavior for him, so he may also possess additional illegally collected wildlife parts.”The former Kennedy campaign’s press office did not respond to a request for comment. And Noaa has yet to publicly acknowledge receipt of Hartl’s letter.The somewhat unpleasant recounting by Kick Kennedy – granddaughter of Robert F Kennedy, the assassinated former US attorney general and Kennedy Jr’s father – remains the only documented account of the whale incident.Describing her father’s fascination with animal skulls and skeletons as “eccentric environmentalism”, she tells how the whale washed up on a beach near Hyannis Port and he sped to the scene.“[He] ran down to the beach with a chainsaw, cut off the whale’s head and then bungee-corded it to the roof of the family minivan for the five-hour haul back to Mount Kisco, New York,” she said.“Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet. We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day to day stuff for us.”Hartl, on X, called RFK Jr an “environmental criminal”. In his group’s denouncement of his candidacy, it said “his conspiracy theories go against the science-based foundation of all environmental protections”, and that he was no different from Donald Trump in terms of policy priorities “driven by what will benefit Big Oil and the greedy corporations that fund them”.Kennedy announced he was suspending his presidential campaign last Friday and immediately endorsed Trump. More