The following year, Kraus recalled, Courtney Love, whom she had met during the Depp trial, told her that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was planning to announce a run for President. (A representative for Love said that this was inaccurate.) “She’s friends with his daughter,” Kraus said of Love. “She always knows what’s happening before it’s happening.”

Kennedy, who, during the pandemic, had been deplatformed for spreading misinformation about vaccines on social media, was a classic Kraus character: a punch line in élite circles who had become a prophet in conspiracy-minded corners of the internet. Kraus was immediately intrigued: “I was, like, ‘Oh, that’s the guy that my friends all liked during COVID.’ ”

In April of 2023, when Trump was indicted in Manhattan for falsifying business records in connection to hush-money payments to the former adult-film star Stormy Daniels, Kraus travelled to New York City. “I’m, like, ‘I should cover politics, because it’s going to be crazy if a Kennedy’s running and we have Trump,’ ” she said. “I was going to apply the same formula that worked for these trials to politics.”

That June, Kraus posted an old photo of Kennedy standing in front of his family’s Cape Cod compound, holding an owl. “Someone’s working hard for my vote,” she wrote, adding an owl emoji. During the Maxwell trial, she told me, “I started reading about owls, and it was, like, a sign of intuition and following your intuition.” The post got more than nineteen thousand likes. Kennedy himself reached out. “Nobody liked him at this point,” Kraus said. “He was so happy.”

Kennedy’s team invited her to his home in Los Angeles. Kraus, who has a photo album on her phone devoted to what she calls “shirtless Kennedys showing off toned torsos in various boating scenes around Cape Cod,” was starstruck. But she soon realized that the purpose of the meeting was to get her to film an endorsement video. When she resisted, Kennedy grew annoyed and scolded his campaign staff. “He’s, like, ‘I thought you said she knew what she was doing!’ ” Kraus recalled. “And they’re, like, ‘She does know what she’s doing. This isn’t what she does!’ ” Finally, Kennedy asked about her audience—did they like his wife? “He’s, like, ‘Cheryl! Cheryl!’ walking around the house,” Kraus said. “And I’m, like, ‘This guy is really weird. I don’t like him.’ ” (A spokesperson for Kennedy did not respond to a request for comment.)

But the campaign kept inviting her to events. “I’m, like, ‘O.K., I’ll just go on the road and I’ll follow him for now, because he’s the only one offering access,’ ” Kraus said. “And then that was popular right away.” A photo of Kraus and Kennedy got forty-two thousand Instagram likes, and her three-part Substack recap of their first few meetings received hundreds of comments. (“Literally silent screaming for you right now!” one reader wrote.) In November, Kraus was a guest at the Kennedy compound on Cape Cod, along with Mike and their nine-year-old son, Hayes. “It’s like all of a sudden I woke up one day and said, ‘I’m doing politics,’ and then I was on the road,” Kraus said. “I just never came home.” Tang, her assistant, estimated that Kraus had taken fifty trips in the past year.

Kraus’s campaign coverage was, in many ways, one long party report. In 2024, she spent New Year’s in Aspen with the Kennedy family. That January, she was in Hawaii, where Bovee photographed the candidate and his son Finn posing playfully underwater. “He’s very likable,” Kraus said of Kennedy. “He’s seventy-one, but he can seem very young and like he’s seeing the world through young eyes.” She grew close to the campaign staff, and her posts became more adulatory. After joining Kennedy for a San Diego sailboat outing, which she called “poetically endearing,” she wrote, “Of all of his appearances, it’s events like these that serve as a scenic metaphor for Kennedy’s vision, turning the tide on current politics, shifting the course away from corporate greed, and hoping people will vote out of hope—not fear.”

The Trump campaign began to notice that Kraus’s posts offered a way to charm a certain kind of swing voter. In February, nine months before the election, she and Bovee were invited to Mar-a-Lago. They stayed in the Tower Suite and attended Trump’s Super Bowl watch party, a private event where Kraus archly observed what she called MAGA’s “dedication to beauty.” “I’m an aesthetic snob,” she told me. “I think Republicans need a lot of help with their image.”

But Kraus increasingly agreed with their politics. She started posting more often about the Trumps, publishing text messages from Don, Jr., that refuted claims that Trump had never attended his children’s graduations. That May, she made a pilgrimage to Trump’s childhood home in Queens, with Nuzzi as her guide.

Kraus’s coverage unlocked a new level of access. Previously, she and her family had met Tulsi Gabbard, who has since become Trump’s director of National Intelligence, for acai bowls on the north shore of Oahu. Now Kraus was visiting the former Disney C.E.O. Michael Eisner’s property in Malibu and Lachlan Murdoch’s home in Beverly Hills. “He was so nice,” Kraus said of Murdoch. “It was, like, some event, and it was off record, so I couldn’t say I was there.” Kraus and Bovee often tag-teamed parties. “People trusted us together,” Bovee said. “I was a fly on the wall. I would just snap pictures of who we were talking to and what we were doing.” Kraus would discreetly take notes on her phone. “People, for the most part, they just forgot—they didn’t think of me as media,” she said. “So I got away with a lot. I realized I was at a lot of events where media wasn’t allowed.”

For months, pundits had debated whether Kennedy’s campaign would spoil things for the Democrats or for the Republicans. Kennedy himself had found his way to anti-vaccine activism through his work as an environmentalist, advocating to keep water clean from mercury and other pollutants. But by August, when Kennedy dropped out, it had become clear that vaccine skepticism was a more comfortable fit within the Trump coalition. The Kennedy campaign’s website had sold “MAKE FRYING OIL TALLOW AGAIN” hats, a reference to the movement to avoid supposedly toxic seed oils—canola, corn, sunflower—commonly used in American cooking. Now green hats bearing the “MAHA” logo were rolled out.