Since Election Day, the Trump transition has been copying and pasting the same quote again and again into emails to reporters seeking comment on this or that presidential appointment.

“President-Elect Trump will begin making decisions on who will serve in his second Administration soon,” Trump transition spokesperson Karoline Leavitt always writes without fail. “Those decisions will be announced when they are made.”

The boilerplate delivers an obvious truth that many in Washington, D.C., find uncomfortable or, in some cases, unimaginable: The president-elect alone, not his senior staff, and certainly not any outside organization, is calling the shots.

Enter Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The famous vaccine skeptic is a new addition to the Trump orbit. He abandoned his own presidential campaign over the summer before backing the Republican candidate, delivering an unusual but no less invaluable endorsement in the final stretch of the election season. “It is a realignment,” Tucker Carlson later said of the coalition that included RFK Jr., whose addition he helped facilitate. “It is unbelievable.” The Kennedy apostate, it seemed at the time, was only there to deliver a bit of political capital.

Kennedy is an environmental lawyer who believes in climate change and who sued oil companies. He is a Catholic but also a liberal who believes in abortion rights. He is a crusader against what he has described as “Big Banks” and “Big Data”........

© RealClearPolitics