Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he was “suspending” his independent presidential bid and endorsed Republican nominee Donald Trump on Friday, a day after Kennedy withdrew from the ballot in Arizona.
Kennedy was expected to announce he was withdrawing from the race at a speech in Phoenix on Friday afternoon, but a Pennsylvania court filing earlier in the day confirmed he would withdraw from that state’s ballot and endorse Trump.
In a bit of a twist, Kennedy said he was not “terminating” his campaign, only “suspending” it, and encouraged his supporters who are not in battleground states to nevertheless vote for him.
In 10 battleground states, however, including Arizona and Pennsylvania, he’s removing his name from the ballot and urged voters not to vote for him, fearing he would play the role of a spoiler candidate by siphoning votes away from Trump.
“In an honest system, I believe I would have won the election,” Kennedy told the crowd. “In a system with open debates, with fair primaries … and with a truly independent media untainted by government propaganda and censorship, everything would be different.”
Kennedy thanked the campaign’s volunteers for helping the ticket make the ballot on a state-by-state basis, navigating an “insurmountable tangle of arbitrary rules for collecting signatures.”
Then, veering into conspiracy, Kennedy embarked on a long attack accusing the Democratic Party of colluding with the media to undertake a ”systemic attack on democracy.”
Kennedy also returned to familiar themes from his campaign, criticising ultra-processed foods and toxic chemicals for causing a wide variety of physical and mental health issues, from diabetes to various cancers to attention deficit disorder.
“We are mass-poisoning all of our children and adults,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy’s endorsement was immediately disavowed by his extended family, who called it “a betrayal” and endorsed the Democratic ticket of Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Govenor Tim Walz.
“We believe in Harris and Walz,” Kennedy’s siblings said in a statement. “Our brother Bobby’s decision to endorse Trump today is a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear. It is a sad ending to a sad story.”
Rumors about the campaign had swirled since Tuesday, when RFK Jr.’s running mate, Nicole Shanahan, said on a podcast that the two were exploring their options for the race.
“One is staying in, forming that new party but we run the risk of a Kamala Harris and Walz presidency because we draw votes from Trump or we draw somehow more votes from Trump,” Shanahan told Tom Bilyeu, the host of “Impact Theory.”
“Or we walk away right now and join forces with Donald Trump, and we walk away from that, and we explain to our base why we’re making this decision,” she continued.
The Washington Post previously reported that Kennedy asked for a high-level role in the Trump administration in exchange for his endorsement. Trump signalled an openness to the possibility in a CNN interview earlier this week.
Kennedy tried to negotiate a similar agreement with Harris but the vice president’s team showed no interest, he told The New York Times.
The long-shot candidate saw national polling numbers as high as 16% this spring, though they’ve fallen below 5% in recent months as the campaign failed to find purchase.
Kennedy’s campaign wasn’t helped by numerous reports of past behaviour that led him to respond to accusations of sexual assault from the family’s former nanny, deny a Vanity Fair story about having eaten a dog (he says it was a goat), breathe life into 9/11 conspiracy theories, own up to having dumped a dead bear cub in Central Park, and confirm a parasitic worm ate a portion of his brain.