Upon suspending his presidential campaign, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. attracted fury from his family, friends, and supporters for compromising on his values when he endorsed former President Donald Trump.
But in a speech explaining his decision to back Trump on Friday, Kennedy said while “there are still issues and approaches” where they disagree, there are “three great causes” on which the two men are aligned.
Kennedy launched his bid for the White House in April 2023 in a campaign that targeted his native Democratic Party and the Republican Party for playing partisan politics at the price of national unity. During his sixteen months on the campaign trail, Kennedy outlined an idealistic vision for the country. He expressed dedication to ending polarization in the highest echelons of power and stamping out the “the hatred, the fear” and the “darker angels” in U.S. politics.
Within roughly the first minute of his speech announcing his Democratic primary to President Joe Biden, Kennedy outlined his policy agenda while speaking to supporters at Boston’s Park Plaza Hotel.
“My mission,” he told crowds, “is to end the corrupt merger of state and corporate power that is threatening to impose a new kind of corporate feudalism in our country.”
During the remainder of his presidential campaign, Kennedy continued to harp on “forever wars” brought on by “neocons,” worried about the chronic disease “epidemic” affecting children in the United States, and slammed the censorship he said was undermining First Amendment freedoms.
Approximately a year and a half after his speech in Boston, Kennedy argued that the same vision for the U.S. that compelled him to launch his movement led him to suspend his campaign and throw his weight behind Trump.
The problems, Kennedy said in his Phoenix speech, are “the cause of free speech. The war in Ukraine. The war on our children.” The last “great cause” Kennedy floated as he pledged to “make Americans healthy again” was a reference to the chronic disease epidemic he says is destroying young people.
Trump has often expressed his desire to end the war in Ukraine as he stumps across swing states and told voters he could end the conflict in “twenty-four hours.”
Censorship also falls into the bucket of items the two men agree on, with Trump often complaining his campaign is politically targeted by big corporations who want to silence his voice. Shortly after his attempted assassination in July, the former president slammed Facebook and Google for allegedly blocking information about the political violence.
Trump has been less vocal about the “chronic disease crisis” Kennedy is so passionate about, but the former third-party candidate said multiple private conversations with the former president have him convinced him that “if President Trump is elected and honors his word, the vast burden of chronic disease that now demoralizes and bankrupts the country, will disappear.”
Kennedy said he’s working with Trump to staff agencies such as the National Institute of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “with honest scientists and doctors free from industry funding” in order to avoid “conflicts of interests.”
He also appears to be heading up a new arm for the Trump campaign called “Make America Healthy Again.”
The two men’s willingness to tackle health concerns together comes after they battled each other about COVID-19 matters for years. During the course of his now-suspended presidential campaign, Kennedy directed the bulk of his ire toward Trump’s leadership during COVID-19 because he held the former president responsible for allowing lockdowns that produced “the biggest shift in wealth in human history.”
“With lockdown, mask mandates, the travel restrictions, President Trump presided over the greatest restriction on individual liberties this country has ever known,” Kennedy said at the Libertarian National Convention in May.
A senior adviser for the Trump campaign blasted back in a statement to Politico.
“Radical Leftist RFK Jr” believes in “increasing the size of the federal bureaucracy, higher taxes, and infringing upon the rights of law-abiding, freedom-loving citizens,” Karoline Leavitt, national press secretary for the Trump campaign, said.
Before he welcomed Kennedy into the Republican fold last week, Trump called him a “fake,” a “Democrat ‘Plant’” and a “Radical Left Liberal who’s been put in place” to help Biden in May.
The two’s verbal sparring during the 2024 election cycle came after their relationship appeared to take a setback following the 2020 election.
Shortly after Trump clinched his first term in the White House four years ago, Kennedy met with him to discuss vaccine safety and said later the former president had asked him to chair a study on vaccine safety. The commission never materialized, however, after the Trump White House appeared to backtrack the alleged promise.
Kennedy later placed blame for the apparent reversal on the Trump administration’s hiring of “pharmaceutical lobbyists who are very pro-vaccines” to run the CDC and other healthcare-related agencies.
“‘Policy,’ the president likes to say, ‘policy is personnel.’ Well, he put in those positions, personnel that represent the policies that he wants, which is very, very pro-pharma agenda, I’m sorry to report,” Kennedy said to the Connecticut Vaccine Science Forum in March 2019.
Kennedy has also questioned the efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine, which Trump has proudly assumed responsibility for rolling out, calling it “one of the greatest miracles of the ages.”
In May 2021, the Trump administration’s so-called “Operation Warpspeed” developed the quickest vaccine development in U.S. history.
Despite their disagreements on COVID-19, Kennedy and Trump appear to have recently come to an agreement that giving children large doses of vaccines could be tied to increases in autism.
“When you feed a baby, Bobby, a vaccination that is like 38 different vaccines, and it looks like it’s meant for a horse, not a … you know, 10-pound or 20-pound baby,” Trump said on a call leaked last month. “And then you see the baby all of a sudden starting to change radically. I’ve seen it too many times. And then you hear that it doesn’t have an impact, right? But you and I talked about that a long time ago.”
Although Kennedy says unifying with Trump is the best bet for a healthy country, his family and friends disagree.
“I completely disavow and separate, dissociate myself from Robert Kennedy Jr.,” said Kerry Kennedy, RFK Jr.’s sister, Sunday.
Billy Baldwin, a longtime friend of RFK Jr., echoed similar words the same day.
“For him to end his pursuit of the presidency and endorse Trump is not only a betrayal of the values and traditions of the Kennedy family but it is also a cynical, hypocritical betrayal of his own political beliefs and personal feelings about Trump which have been publicly documented for years and years,” Baldwin wrote in a post to X.
Despite the backlash, RFK Jr. has remained firm in his resolve to help Trump, although he said over the weekend the endorsement was not tied to a promised Cabinet position.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“I am campaigning actively” for Trump, RFK Jr. told Fox News on Sunday.
“Ultimately, the only thing that will save our children and our country is if we choose to love them more than we hate each other,” he said.
