How Jessica Reed Kraus Went from Mommy Blogger to MAHA Maven

The following year, Kraus recalled, Courtney Love, whom she had met during the Depp trial, told her that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., planned to announce a race for the presidency. (A representative of Love said that it was inaccurate.) “She is friends with her daughter,” said Kraus about love. “She always knows what’s going on before it happens.”

Kennedy, who, during the pandemic, had been replaced for the disinformation of disinformation on vaccines on social networks, was a classic Kraus character: a line of punch in elite circles who had become a prophet in the minds of internet conspiracy. Kraus was immediately intrigued: “I was, like:” Oh, it was the guy my friends all liked during Covid. “”

In April 2023, when Trump was charged in Manhattan for falsifying commercial files in connection with the payments of money at half-time the former star of the adult film Stormy Daniels, Kraus went to New York. “I am, like” I should cover politics, because it will be crazy if a Kennedy is being executed and we have Trump “,” she said. “I was going to apply the same formula that worked for these tests to politics.”

In June, Kraus published an old photo of Kennedy standing in front of the compound of his Cape Cod family, holding an owl. “Someone works hard for my vote,” she wrote, adding an emoji of owl. During the Maxwell test, she said to me: “I started reading on the owls, and it was, like, a sign of intuition and follow your intuition.” The message obtained more than nineteen thousand likes. Kennedy himself holds out. “No one loved her at this stage,” said Kraus. “He was so happy.”

The Kennedy team invited her to his home in Los Angeles. Kraus, who has a photo album on her phone dedicated to what she calls “Kennedys shirtless showing tonic torsos in various navigation scenes around CAPE COD”, was Starstruck. But she quickly realized that the goal of the meeting was to make him film an approval video. When she resisted, Kennedy has annoyed herself and scolded her campaign staff. “He is, as,” I thought you said she knew what she was doing! “” Remember Kraus. “And they are, as” she knows what she is doing. That’s not what she is doing! “” Finally, Kennedy asked his audiences – they loved his wife? “It is, like,” Cheryl! Cheryl! “Walking in the house,” said Kraus. “And I am, as” this guy is really weird. I don’t like him. “(A Kennedy spokesperson did not respond to a request for comments.)

But the campaign continued to invite him to events. “I am, like” ok, I’m just going to go on the road and I will follow him for the moment, because he is the only one to offer “” said Kraus. “And then it was popular right away.” A photo of Kraus and Kennedy obtained forty-two thousand Instagram likes, and his summary in three parts of their first meetings received hundreds of comments. (“Littlely silent, shouting for you right now!” A reader wrote. “It’s like suddenly I woke up one day and I said:” I do politics, “then I was on the road,” said Kraus. “I never got home.” Tang, his assistant, said Kraus had made fifty trips in the past year.

Kraus’s campaign cover was, in many ways, a long party report. In 2024, she spent the New Year in Aspen with the Kennedy family. In January, she was in Hawaii, where Bovee photographed the candidate and her son Finn posing with playfulness. “It is very friendly,” said Kraus about Kennedy. “He is sixty and eleven years old, but he may seem very young and as if he saw the world through young eyes.” She approached the campaign staff and her messages became more adulating. After joining Kennedy for an exit from San Diego sailboat, which she called “poetically endearing”, she wrote: “Of all her appearances, they are events like these which serve as a panoramic metaphor for the vision of Kennedy, turning the tide of current politics, to withdraw the course of the greed of the business and to hope that people will voted.

The Trump campaign began to notice that Kraus’s publications offered a way to load a certain type of voter swing. In February, nine months before the elections, she and Bovee were invited to Mar-A-Lago. They stayed in the Tower suite and attended the Trump Super Bowl surveillance celebration, a private event where Kraus observed what she called Maga“Dedication to beauty”. “I am an aesthetic snob,” she told me. “I think the Republicans need a lot of help with their image.”

But Kraus is increasingly agreeing with their policy. She started publishing more often on the Trumps, publishing text messages from Don, Jr., who refuted the claims that Trump had never attended the diplomas of his children. That May, she made a pilgrimage to Trump’s childhood house in Queens, with Nuzzi as a guide.

Kraus coverage has released a new level of access. Previously, she and her family had met Tulsi Gabbard, who has since become director of national intelligence at Trump, for the Bols d’Açai on the north shore of Oahu. Now Kraus visited the property of the old Disney CEO, Michael Eisner, Malibu and Lachlan Murdoch in Beverly Hills. “He was so kind,” said Kraus about Murdoch. “It was, like, an event, and it was a record, so I couldn’t say that I was there.” Kraus and Bovee have often been teamed up. “People have trusted us together,” said Bovee. “I was a fly on the wall. I would just take pictures of who we were talking about and what we were doing. ” Kraus would discreetly take notes on his phone. “People, for the most part, they just forgot-they didn’t consider me media,” she said. “So I fled with a lot. I realized that I was at many events where the media were not allowed.”

Cartoon by Harry Bliss and Steve Martin

For months, experts had debated the question of whether Kennedy’s campaign would spoil things for Democrats or for Republicans. Kennedy himself had found his way to anti-vaccine activism through his work as a ecologist, advocating to keep the clean water of mercury and other pollutants. But in August, when Kennedy abandoned, it had become clear that vaccination skepticism was a more comfortable adjustment within the Trump coalition. The Kennedy campaign website had sold “Read the frying oil again“Hats, a reference to movement to avoid supposedly toxic – canola, corn, sunflower – commonly used in American kitchen. Now the green hats carrying the “Maha“The logo has been deployed.