Few would deny that this has been an extremely strange election campaign in the United States. The last couple of months have been particularly surreal — highly enjoyable for connoisseurs of imperial decline and hallucinatory strangeness, perhaps, but less so for everybody else.

First came June’s presidential debate and the panic as a campaign built on an obvious lie collapsed in real time. There was the failed assassination attempt on Donald Trump, followed by the defenestration of a half-alive Joe Biden, and then the overnight retconning of a deeply unpopular Vice President as the living embodiment of “joy”. Indeed, there was so much irrational exuberance at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this week that it wouldn’t have been all that surprising if they had ended it by climbing on the roof to await the descent of electoral victory from the heavens after selling all their possessions.

On Friday we were treated to another twist in this bizarre saga, as Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Democrat royalty turned despised apostate, committed the ultimate heresy by endorsing Trump. There have been stranger political journeys: the Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver went from singing the praises of North Korea to endorsing Ronald Reagan (before ultimately succumbing to crack addiction). Kennedy’s isn’t that strange, but it’s out there.

His campaign was quixotic, as third-party campaigns always are. But Kennedy’s came at a serious personal cost. Unlike the pseudo-rebel Bernie Sanders, who was welcomed back into the fold and stopped attacking millionaires as soon as he became one (today his schtick is aimed at billionaires), Kennedy was denounced first by his party and then by his family members. The Democrats’ stenographers in the media either ignored him or turned him into an object of ridicule: he was traduced as a conspiracy theorist, a weirdo, a kook. There was all that stuff about the parasite in his brain and the dead bear in Central Park — hallucinatory strangeness, indeed.