On a Tuesday morning in late October, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was in Brentwood at the 5,900-square-foot home he purchased for $6.6 million in 2021 with his wife, the actress Cheryl Hines of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Shaded by sycamore and fruit trees, the pad has six bedrooms, a backyard tiki bar, a pool with a waterfall, private security hovering at the gate (more on that later), and, parked out front, a Toyota minivan that he calls “the dog car” on account of its being unsuitable for passengers of any other species.

Bobby, as he’s known to friends, walked through the French doors dressed for his morning hike in blue jeans, a black hoodie, Keens, and an unfriendly expression. He said little as he led his three enormous canines to the van, though I don’t know what he could have said that would have prepared me for the sight of the thing. That the dog car survived a nuclear war maybe, or, even more frightening, the chicken-pox vaccine.

Rearview mirror smashed to bits, seat belts chewed off, cushions gnawed open, filth and dog hair covering every surface. The death machine smells so bad I thought I might pass out after about 15 seconds riding shotgun, and that was before the candidate hung a sharp left and sped off toward the trailhead, the dogs barking and toppling over in the area of the car that theoretically should contain back seats but instead holds a wooden bench. “Shut up, you idiots!” he told the dogs. At least I think he was talking to them. He swung the vehicle around to park on the side of the road, released the hounds, and started his ascent.

Now, Kennedy was talking about fear.

It was fear that drove the Democratic Party to box him out of his attempt to challenge Joe Biden in the primary because, in his estimation, it was fear that they were selling to voters. “I don’t hear Democrats ever say that we should vote for President Biden because he inspires them, or because he’s run the country with the kind of vigor or energy that we need in times of crisis,” he told me. “I hear them say that you should vote for Biden because you should be scared of Trump.”

It was fear behind the attacks from his critics on the left and the right of the political divide. Kennedy detects the hidden hand of the straight world’s power brokers manipulating those critics, who use fear to bend the public away from him and to their will.

These forces could not allow Kennedy to hang on to his good name while he pointed a finger at the CIA for the deaths of his uncle and father, or while he used his platform as an environmental lawyer to promote what he calls “vaccine skepticism” and what those who he believes wish to destroy him call anti-vaxx propaganda.

“I was subject to what I would characterize as a series of mischaracterizations and defamations that were allowed to define me,” he said. “Literally every story about me was negative.” An avalanche of bad press would threaten to bury him and then, suddenly, the press would quiet down until, out of nowhere, another avalanche. As a first resort, he suspected this strange phenomenon was by nefarious design. “It certainly feels like it’s orchestrated, but I have no way of knowing why dozens of leading liberals all attack me the same week. Are they on a phone tree? I don’t know why it comes in waves like that,” he said. “I do see patterns, but any effort by me to explain that would be speculative and I try not to speculate.”

Yet it was not fear that he was feeling now.

“Almost every time I’ve done something difficult, I’ve had those moments. Rock climbing or kayaking a very difficult stretch of white water, you get to a point where you say, What on earth did I get myself into? Get me out of here,” he said. “I haven’t had one moment. I’m pretty much free of anxieties. I feel peaceful.”

Good — for him. Kennedy’s chill disposition is now the rest of the political world’s simmering panic attack. Since announcing in October that he would end his campaign for the Democratic nomination to officially become a problem for both major parties as an independent, fear — and denial — is what Kennedy seems to inspire among the staid Washington Establishment supporting the incumbent president and the gangland anti-Establishment Establishment supporting the former president. Officials from both party apparatuses are certainly looking at metrics that confirm Kennedy is turning the presidential election upside down.

At this point, all that’s clear is that no one has any idea what will happen between now and November 2024 or how to respond to the threat Kennedy poses to the Biden-Trump binary. As it is, Kennedy is in some cases polling not far behind either likely major-party nominee and in all cases polling well enough that, were the election held today, his presence in the race would define what the next chapter of American history looks like. As he put it, “My intention is to spoil it for both of them.”

As Kennedy hiked up the dirt in the Santa Monica Mountains, he stopped every few yards to bend down with a small shovel to clear the path of litter or the astounding amount of waste produced by his dogs or, as he noted with some exuberance on one occasion, by another animal. “That’s coyote shit,” he said, as he flung the object in question off his shovel and into the trees.

Before Kennedy declared his candidacy in April, Biden had only one challenger, the best-selling author and spiritual philosopher Marianne Williamson, an anti–corporate greed and antiwar candidate who first sought the nomination in 2020, when she performed competitively in two debates. But Williamson struggled to gain traction in the face of a near-total media blackout (invitations to appear on television came mostly from Fox News, the only network with a vested interest in giving her a platform). To weaken Biden ahead of the general election, his enemies would need a candidate more likely to generate the kind of spectacle and outrage that tends to draw eyeballs. A candidate with qualities that were more, well, Trumpian. They found their answer in the biggest brand name in American politics since Roosevelt. As a bonus, the candidate held a set of idiosyncratic populist beliefs that would challenge Biden from the dovish left and from the libertarian right.

In the primary, Kennedy was a nuisance solely for Biden. Which made him a blessing for........

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