Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the suspension of his presidential campaign at a news conference Friday in Phoenix, denouncing his family's storied Democratic Party and throwing his support behind Republican nominee former President Trump.
Hours later, Trump introduced Kennedy at his own rally in Glendale, Arizona, where he asked Kennedy supporters to back his new “coalition.”
“We’re ahead now, but I think he will have a huge influence on this campaign,” Trump said. “Bobby and I will fight together to defeat the corrupt political establishment and return control of this country to the people.”
“Don’t you want a president who will make America healthy again?” said Kennedy, who is known for his anti-vaccine stances and has campaigned to end chronic diseases among children.
The event, where Trump’s crowd roared with applause for Kennedy and chanted “USA, USA!”, marked a stunning departure from generations-old American political norms and a stunning break with the Kennedy family legacy.
Trump said Kennedy's father, the U.S. senator from New York and U.S. attorney general, and his uncle, President John F. Kennedy Jr. — both staunch Democrats — were “looking down on us right now” and “very, very proud of Bobby.”
Five of Kennedy's siblings issued a statement calling his support for Trump a “betrayal” of the family's values.
Both Trump and Kennedy acknowledged they had criticized each other in the past, with Kennedy saying they still don't agree on everything but would come together for the good of the nation.
At his own event earlier in the day, Kennedy said he would work to remove his name from ballots in 10 key states where he believes he has no chance of winning but where his presence on the ballot could affect the outcome in favor of the Democratic ticket led by Vice President Kamala Harris, who has refused to speak with him.
He withdrew from the Arizona ballot on Thursday.
He said he would remain on the ballot in other states where the outcome is less in doubt, and encouraged his supporters to continue voting for him there, suggesting a far-fetched possibility that an electoral college tie between Trump and Harris could result in him being named president.
At the same time, Kennedy said he was “joining the Trump campaign” after Trump promised, if he wins, to bring him into his administration to combat chronic disease among American children — something Kennedy has long suggested is due to “Big Pharma” and “Big Ag” injecting “toxins” into the country’s food supply.
“President Trump has told me that he wants this to be his legacy,” Kennedy said. “I choose to believe that this time he will fulfill it.”
Kennedy also said Trump promised to address two of his other top priorities: immediately ending the war in Ukraine and confronting the political and media “censorship” that both he and Trump, famous wealthy men with powerful platforms, routinely claim to be victims of.
Kennedy's earlier announcement came in a nearly 50-minute, grievance-laden speech in which he claimed he would have won the presidency in a fair election, that the national media had become a “mouthpiece” for Democrats and that Harris' rise to the top of the Democratic ticket was the result of a “palace coup.”
The decision promised to have an immediate impact on the tight race between Trump and Harris, both hoping to benefit, or at least not suffer too much, from the impending realignment of Kennedy's supporters.
It is not yet clear how that change will play out.
A Pew Research Center poll this month suggests Harris has already picked up some potential Kennedy supporters. The support appears to have come in part from women and nonwhite voters who previously leaned toward Kennedy.
But Trump and his allies say Kennedy’s endorsement would be a victory for their candidate. “Fox & Friends” host Brian Kilmeade said Friday morning that Trump would win by two to three percentage points with Kennedy’s endorsement. That would be enough, Kilmeade said, to tip the race back in the GOP’s favor.
Kennedy, a 70-year-old Los Angeles resident, entered the race in April 2023 with a burst of media attention. He showed unusual strength in some early polls for a candidate with no experience in elected office. But his support waned after Harris emerged last month as the Democrats’ apparent front-runner.
Kennedy’s thoughts about dropping out of the race became public in recent days, when his vice presidential running mate, Nicole Shanahan, spoke about those conversations. She said Kennedy might accept a job in the Trump administration, particularly if he thought it could help combat what she called an epidemic of chronic diseases.
The veteran environmental lawyer initially ran as a Democrat, but in October 2023 Kennedy said he would run as an independent because the party's nominating rules made it too difficult to compete, particularly against an incumbent like President Biden.
Following her speech on Friday, five of her siblings — Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and Courtney, Kerry, Chris and Rory Kennedy — issued a joint statement reaffirming their support for Harris.
“Our brother Bobby’s decision to support Trump today is a betrayal of the values our father and our family hold most dear,” they said. “It’s a sad ending to a sad story.”
Kennedy suggested in his own remarks that his support for Trump might also not be well-received by other members of his family, including his wife, actress Cheryl Hines.
“This decision is distressing for me because of the difficulties it causes for my wife, my children and my friends, but I am certain that this is what I must do, and that certainty gives me inner peace, even in the midst of storms,” he said.
He did not say what those “difficulties” were.
Kennedy said his independent status would allow him to break the grip on power held by a virtual “one-party” coalition of Democrats and Republicans and would put him in a better position to cut out-of-control government spending, take on Big Pharma and other corporate interests and invest more in reversing America's chronic disease epidemic.
Even after his switch to an independent campaign, and as he sought support from smaller political parties, polls showed Kennedy unable to get within reasonable striking distance of his major-party rivals.
Kennedy argued that he should be allowed to participate in the June debate between Biden and Trump, but he was unable to persuade the other candidates or the networks that he had earned a place on the stage.
Kennedy's campaign also spent a lot of time and money trying to get his candidacy up and running in all 50 states. Last week, he suffered a setback when a New York judge ruled that he should not appear in that state's election because he had included a “false” address on nominating petitions.
Although he presented himself as a pragmatic problem solver who was not beholden to big interests, Kennedy’s views on some issues (notably vaccines) were extreme. One particularly problematic example was when he compared Biden’s vaccination policies to the Holocaust. He suggested that Jews, including Anne Frank, had more freedom under the Nazi regime than Americans living under COVID-19 restrictions.
That prompted criticism from many Jewish groups and even a complaint from Hines, who called the reference to Frank “reprehensible and insensitive.” Kennedy apologized.
Although born into what some consider an American political “Camelot,” Kennedy struggled as a young man, particularly with a 14-year heroin addiction. The candidate tried to use that experience to his advantage, saying his 40 years in recovery made him uniquely qualified to bring new solutions to the country’s addiction crisis.
But other aspects of his past, including his relationships with women, became fodder for fresh criticism.
That included the revival of a 2013 New York Post story, after the tabloid somehow acquired a diary that RFK Jr. allegedly kept in 2001. It included a record of 37 women he had sex with while he was married to Mary Richardson Kennedy, the Post and other outlets reported.
(Kennedy's wife had committed suicide the year before the story was published, but she had apparently found the diary at some point.)
Early last month, reports of the disturbing behavior resurfaced in a Vanity Fair profile, in which a former family nanny described how Kennedy groped her when she was in her early 20s and caring for Kennedy’s four children with Mary. Text messages revealed that the candidate apologized to the former nanny after the article was published, though he told reporters he had no recollection of the alleged misconduct.
In August, a New Yorker profile revealed a bizarre Kennedy prank. As an adult, the man known as Bobby (like his father) retrieved a dead bear cub from the side of a road and dumped the carcass in New York's Central Park. The corpse sparked a mystery that consumed the city a decade ago.
Kennedy criticized both Biden and Trump as he crisscrossed the country, trying to generate the same momentum his father generated in the 1968 race for the White House. But he increasingly lashed out at Biden and Democrats, angered by their challenges to his calls for participation in the election.
Last Wednesday, the candidate sent messages as if he were still in the spotlight. One of them came via a video posted on social media, in which he invoked Abraham Lincoln and said: “We must realign ourselves with the founding spirit of our nation.”
