Every once in a while, you read a line in a news story that is so plainly self-evident, so thuddingly obvious, that it takes you aback — as if you turned on the evening news to see that the lead story is “Water Remains Wet.” The New York Times’s scoop Tuesday night that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had reached out to Aaron Rodgers about the possibility of being his Vice Presidential candidate included one of those lines. According to the Times, Rodgers has “welcomed the overtures.” In the words of a great philosopher, no shit, Sherlock.
If there’s one thing that Aaron Rodgers has consistently done over the last four years of his stoned-guy-in-the-dorm-you’ve-learned-to-avoid red-pilled Covid era, it’s “welcomed the overtures,” even if many of those overtures have come from within his own brain. As his football career has flattened out (he was mediocre for a losing team in 2022 and threw exactly one pass for the Jets in 2023 before going down with an Achilles injury), Rodgers has filled his time by trying to drag himself back into the spotlight, mostly in outlandish fashion. He has accused Jimmy Kimmel of having ties to Jeffrey Epstein; insisted that Joe Biden didn’t really win the election; claimed the Epstein case was really just a distraction from UFOs; derisively called Travis Kelce “Mr. Pfizer” because Kelce supports the Covid vaccines; and pretended he was going to return to football last year even though there was never a chance he actually would. That last one was the big tell. Thanks to Kelce’s megawatt relationship with Taylor Swift, the public was talking about a football player not named Aaron Rodgers, and that hurt. The man will listen to every overture you’ve got.
Rodgers, who was once so respected by thinking people that it wasn’t absurd to think he had a shot of permanently hosting Jeopardy, has little football career left. So if he did join RFK Jr’s ticket, it’s not like it would cost the Jets a shot at the Super Bowl. (The team is reportedly already making backup plans if Rodgers runs, something they have practice doing after last year.) If anything, this would be the second act Rodgers has been so desperate for, the culmination of all his smug and snide appearances on The Pat McAfee Show.
But one suspects that Rodgers, if he does sign on for the ticket, may regret it. He has spent the last 20 years in the comforting caress of sports media, which proved willing to forgive his constant lies and manipulation, as well as gloss over his increasingly insane beliefs, as long as he produced on the field. This obviously would not be the case in politics. If Rodgers ends up as a veep candidate, he’s likely to learn that the media scrutiny that comes with a political campaign dwarfs anything he has ever faced in the athletic arena. His controversies didn’t start with vaccine denialism; now, they could be reopened and reinvestigated by a political press that will feel no fealty or reverence for him or his football career. Rodgers might think he’d be getting a clean slate in the political realm, but he will be very wrong.
However, people will be looking at him, and that — more than, say, a win in the NFC Championship game (he has lost four in a row) — is what it’s clear Rodgers wants more than anything. And you have to give him this: If Kennedy picks him to be his running mate, Kennedy’s he’d be the most qualified person on the ticket. Rodgers was, after all, once good at something.
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