As Daily Kos noted Tuesday, new polling from NBC News shows Kennedy support at 13 percent—but notably, he “picks up 15 percent of Trump's support in the head-to-head while attracting only 7 percent of Biden's original voters.” But that’s not all! In the Marist poll, Kennedy gains a point; and “17 percent of Trump voters threw their support behind Kennedy in this poll, compared to 11 percent of Biden voters.”

Which brings us to Friday’s panic.

“RFK Jr. is a Democrat ‘Plant,’ a Radical Left Liberal who’s been put in place in order to help Crooked Joe Biden, the Worst President in the History of the United States, get Re-Elected,” Trump groused, while accidentally acknowledging that Biden won the 2020 election. “A Vote for Junior’ would essentially be a WASTED PROTEST VOTE, that could swing either way, but would only swing against the Democrats if Republicans knew the true story about him. Junior’ is totally Anti-Gun, an Extreme Environmentalist who makes the Green New Scammers look Conservative, a Big Time Taxer and Open Border Advocate, and Anti-Military/Vet…”

Ah, but he wasn’t done. There were more meticulously crafted bons mots to come.

“Page 2: His Radicalized Family will never allow him to be a Republican, and his Chief ‘Funder’ is the V.P. Candidate that nobody ever heard of, except her ex-husband, who’s been stripped of a big chunk of cash. She puts herself down as a businesswoman, or maybe a doctor, and actually, I guess you could say that she’s right. Her business was doing surgery on her husband’s wallet! She’s more Liberal than Junior’ by far, not a serious person, and only a Pot of Cash to help get her No Chance Candidate on the Ballot…”

In other words, “You’re not the bonkers conspiracy candidate—I am!”

Trump wrapped things up by noting a preference for Biden over Kennedy, with the closer “Let the Democrats have RFK Jr. They deserve him!”

Trump’s latest rants represent a stark departure from what he was saying just last year, after it was revealed that former Trump adviser Steve Bannon had spent “months” recruiting RFK Jr. to run against Biden and serve as a “useful chaos agent.” In June of last year, when RFK Jr. was still running as a Democrat, Trump said he was a “very smart guy,” a “good guy,” and a “common sense guy.” He even lauded the Kennedy scion’s allegedly robust poll numbers, saying, “He’s a very good man and his heart is in the right place, and he’s doing really well! I saw a poll, he’s at 22. That’s pretty good.”

But what a difference a year makes.

POLITICO:

[R]ecent polling broadly shows Kennedy drawing evenly from both of the major party candidates’ 2020 supporters. And Kennedy’s significantly higher favorable ratings among Republican voters suggests he has more room to eat into Trump’s vote share than Biden’s.

In addition, a POLITICO analysis of campaign finance data shows far more interest in Kennedy from former Trump donors than people who previously contributed to Biden.

“If the Trump campaign doesn’t see this as a concern, then they’re delusional,” Republican consultant Alice Stewart said. “They should be looking at this from the standpoint that they can’t afford to lose any voters — and certainly not to a third-party candidate that shares some of [Trump’s] policy ideas.”

Meanwhile, according to a POLITICO analysis, RFK Jr. has already poached at least $1.6 million from more than 1,700 donors who gave to Trump’s campaign in 2020.

As we all know, Trump will say—or do—literally anything to get elected and stay out of prison. Actually—who are we kidding?—he’d do literally anything for an extra slice of chocolate cake. After all, this is the guy who put the “lip” in “solipsist.” For instance, he’s been whingeing about the temperature in the courtroom where his hush-money “I-fucked-America” trial is being held. So now, in addition to having an incorrigible deadbeat client, his lawyers have to worry about being cut open like tauntauns and worn for the duration of the trial like one of Liberace’s chinchilla capes.

You’d think the media would pick up on this pattern and report on it accurately, but they need to pretend the Republican nominee somehow isn’t the worst sentient being in the history of the mulitverse. For instance, they might want to make it crystal clear to the electorate that this exact absurd lie from 2016 has now been proven false, based on former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker’s testimony in court this week:

Of course, even Trump knows better than to claim RFK Jr.’s dad partied with Lee Harvey Oswald, only because it would be too unbelievable, even for MAGAs—not because it would be so gobsmackingly gauche. But we’d be forgiven for thinking he’d do it if he thought it would help his campaign.

Fortunately, Trump may not be able to gaslight his way to the presidency this year—at least if you believe renowned election oracle Allan Lichtman, the American University professor who put us all off our oats in 2016 when he (correctly, it turned out) predicted Trump would defeat Hillary Clinton. Lichtman, who’s correctly predicted the results of nine of the past 10 presidential elections (and would have predicted Bush vs. Gore correctly if Republicans weren’t such big fans of cheating), now says Biden has the inside track on 2024.

While Lichtman hasn’t made his prediction official yet, he now says that based on his model, “a lot would have to go wrong for Biden to lose.”

So there you go. Sanity—and Biden—might just prevail again. Especially if the not-quite-so-sane vote gets split between those other two dudes.