Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has officially scrapped his free-falling campaign as an Independent and endorsed Donald Trump for president.
The Kennedy scion made the announcement around lunchtime in Arizona, a key battleground state. The endorsement ends a week of speculation that he’d finally end his White House fever dream amid a spell of wonky stories, plummeting poll numbers, and a depleting campaign fund.
Kennedy filed paperwork to withdraw from presidential ballots in Arizona on Thursday and did the same in Pennsylvania on Friday afternoon. In a motion there, the Associated Press reported that Kennedy indicated he was dropping out to endorse Trump.
That report was published mere minutes before Kennedy took to a podium in Arizona and made that endorsement official. There, he explained his decision, asked his supporters to not vote for Kamala Harris this fall, and decried that he would’ve won the presidency in a just system.
“In an honest system, I believe that I would have won the election,” he said, his voice coarse.
Kennedy, 70, also ranted about how he was treated unfairly by the media, claiming they conspired to not interview him and give him airtime.
“The mainstream media was once the guardian of the First Amendment and democratic principles,” he said, claiming the press has “joined” a “systemic attack on democracy.”
Reports have said Trump’s campaign would consider Kennedy for a cabinet role if he suspended his campaign and endorsed the Republican.
While Kennedy was polling “in the mid-single digits” at the national level on Friday morning, according to the AP, his move to quit could still spell trouble for Harris in states where margins are already razor thin. That includes places like Arizona, where he’s still polling around 5.4 percent, and in Nevada, where he’s at 6.7 percent, according to The Hill.
Kennedy polled at around 10 percent nationally for most of 2024 and did even better in some swing states, but has seen his polling figures plummet since Joe Biden bowed out of the race. Political analysts said the change at the top of the ticket pulled Kennedy’s Democratic-leaning voters back to the Harris ticket, Axios reported.
Bizarre stories that emerged in recent weeks about Kennedy likely didn’t help matters, either. Most notably, he admitted to dumping the body of a bear cub in New York City’s Central Park in 2014—an incident that caused a police animal cruelty investigation but was never solved.
Add in Kennedy’s admission in May that he had a brain worm—paired with his inability to coax his way on to a debate stage—and it becomes apparent Kennedy likely was never a real threat to the status quo of America’s two-party system at the presidential level.
Kennedy’s running mate, Nicole Shanahan, made sure she emphasized to their supporters on Friday that she’s “not a Trump Republican.”
“I’m an INDEPENDENT American who is endorsing ideas, not a person or a party,” she posted. “I will continue working to give a voice to the voiceless and bring power back to the people.”
