Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Endorses Trump and Suspends His Independent Bid for President

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. threw his support behind former President Donald J. Trump on Friday after suspending his troubled independent campaign for president, saying he was withdrawing his name from the ballot in battleground states and that Mr. Trump had “asked to enlist me” in his second administration.

He announced his plans in a speech in Phoenix that also castigated the mainstream media and accused the Democratic Party of “abandoning democracy” and engaging in “legal warfare” against him and Mr. Trump.

Campaigning in Las Vegas, Mr. Trump expressed delight with Mr. Kennedy’s decision. “That’s big,” he said. “He’s a great guy, respected by everybody.” On Friday evening, Mr. Kennedy spoke at a rally for Mr. Trump in Arizona.

Mr. Kennedy’s decision to back Mr. Trump, in the final months before a closely fought general election, was a remarkable twist for the scion of a Democratic political dynasty. A longtime Democrat, Mr. Kennedy renounced his party, whose leaders in turn accused him of running as a stalking horse for Mr. Trump.

In his remarks, Mr. Kennedy, 70, said he had pledged to leave the race if he “became a spoiler” — a candidate with no path to victory who could nonetheless alter the outcome of the election. “In my heart, I no longer believe I have a realistic path to electoral victory, in the face of this relentless, systematic censorship and media control,” he said.

“Our polling consistently showed that by staying on the ballot in battleground states, I would most likely hand the election to the Democrats, with whom I disagree on most existential issues,” he said.

A New York Times analysis found that was not consistently true, and that Mr. Kennedy’s decision to suspend his campaign is unlikely to significantly change the nature of the race. Even if all Republicans or independents who supported Kennedy now switch to supporting Trump, Trump would only gain an average of 1 percentage point across swing states, according to the most recent New York Times/Siena polls of seven battleground states.

Mr. Kennedy had been in behind-the-scenes talks with the Trump team for weeks about the possibility of suspending his campaign and endorsing the former president. Those talks were brokered in part by Donald Trump Jr., Tucker Carlson and Omeed Malik, a businessman who has supported both candidates, according to two people familiar with the discussions.

In his speech on Friday, Mr. Kennedy said Mr. Trump had offered him a role in a second Trump administration, dealing with health care and food and drug policy. He later said was “choosing to believe” that “this time” Mr. Trump would honor his word — an apparent reference to an incident from Mr. Trump’s transition to the White House in 2017, when Mr. Kennedy said Mr. Trump had proposed that he chair a commission on vaccine safety, only to have the campaign distance itself from such a claim hours later.

Mr. Trump, taking questions from reporters at a restaurant in Las Vegas, declined to say whether he would offer Mr. Kennedy a role in his administration if he is elected in November. He called Kennedy “beloved.”

Mr. Kennedy said that his decision to back the former president would be a “difficult sacrifice for my wife and children,” but that he felt compelled to help Mr. Trump because of his agreement with Mr. Kennedy on policy positions he holds dear.

In a statement on X after his remarks, Mr. Kennedy expressed gratitude to his wife, the actress Cheryl Hines, saying he had “made a political decision with which she is very uncomfortable.”

In her own statement on X, Ms. Hines thanked “every person who has worked so tirelessly and lovingly on his campaign,” adding: “I deeply respect the decision Bobby made to run on the principle of unity.” Mr. Kennedy had eagerly claimed the mantle of his family legacy even as his own relatives disavowed his candidacy. On Friday, five of Mr. Kennedy’s siblings released a statement on Instagram saying that his decision to endorse Mr. Trump “is a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear.” They concluded: “It is a sad ending to a sad story.”

Several of Mr. Kennedy’s campaign staff and advisers distanced themselves from his decision on Friday. Among them was Jay Carson, a former top Democratic aide — now a Hollywood writer and producer — who has been quietly advising Mr. Kennedy in his bid and producing ads for him.

“I helped Bobby in this race because I believed he was the best option to beat Trump, and that he had the guts and wits to really change Washington,” Mr. Carson said in an emailed statement. “So this is saddening to me for two reasons: Trump puts himself above everyone and everything else, including his country. And this removes a choice for the millions of Americans who are unhappy with both major parties.”

Mr. Kennedy ran one of the more unconventional and persistent third-party bids in modern American political history, combining populist economic rhetoric, isolationist foreign policy leanings and government skepticism. He found a base of support among Kennedy-curious independent voters and disaffected Democrats and Republicans.

He began his presidential campaign last year as a Democrat, seeking to challenge President Biden for the nomination. But when he found his path there blocked — which he blamed on the Democratic Party — he embarked on an independent campaign that unnerved both major parties, as allies of both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump feared he could siphon support from their candidate.

Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign in a statement Friday afternoon encouraged supporters of Mr. Kennedy to instead back her. “Even if we do not agree on every issue, Kamala Harris knows there is more that unites us than divides us: respect for our rights, public safety, protecting our freedoms, and opportunity for all,” the statement said.

Whether Mr. Kennedy’s endorsement will move his small but forceful coalition of supporters into Mr. Trump’s camp remains to be seen. He is expected to appear on the campaign trail for Mr. Trump, two people briefed on the arrangement said.

In recent months, Mr. Kennedy’s campaign had become almost singularly focused on ballot access: As an independent presidential candidate, he had to get on each state’s ballot separately, which required hundreds of thousands of signatures and tens of millions of dollars.

He encountered resistance, in the form of legal challenges filed by the Democratic Party or its surrogates, in Pennsylvania, New York, North Carolina, and several other states. As of this week, he was on the ballot in 19 states, and had applied for access in more than a dozen more.

The effort was largely bankrolled by his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, a wealthy Silicon Valley investor who was once married to Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, and whose arrival on the ticket in late March brought an immediate and much-needed cash infusion. To date, she has put more than $14 million into the campaign, campaign finance records show, though some had recently been refunded.

Through the spring and summer, as Mr. Kennedy began to get on state ballots, his poll numbers, once in the double digits, began to soften — a trend that is often seen among third-party and independent candidates as the general election approaches. By the end of August, polls put him at around 5 percent nationwide. And his campaign was running out of money, campaign finance filings showed.

An environmental lawyer, Mr. Kennedy has become better known over the past two decades as a prominent opponent of vaccine mandates, promoting widely refuted claims that childhood vaccinations cause autism and railing against what he called the “corporate capture” of the federal government by pharmaceutical companies.

On the campaign trail, he opposed U.S. aid to Ukraine, supported Israel’s war in Gaza and argued for sealing the southern border. He changed his position on abortion several times, ultimately landing on restrictions tied to fetal viability.

He has been particularly active and unscripted on social media, where he has featured videos of his workouts and his dealings with wildlife, and on podcasts, where he has discussed health issues. (His relationship to wild animals was a consistent theme in news coverage this year: A worm in his brain, a dead bear cub hauled into Central Park, an emu that chased Ms. Hines, a photograph of a barbecued animal that he denied was a dog.)

Mr. Kennedy dedicated a substantial portion of his 45-minute remarks Friday to his objections to U.S. support for the war in Ukraine, and detailed his concerns about chronic diseases in America, which he blamed on environmental factors, prescription medications and processed food. He cast himself as a public health warrior, and as a freedom fighter against a broken democratic process.

“In an honest system,” Mr. Kennedy said, “I believe I would have won the election.” He referred to the far-fetched possibility of him winning the election anyway, through what is known as a “contingent election,” if neither major party candidate secures enough votes.

As he often has throughout his candidacy, Mr. Kennedy inveighed against the mainstream media, which he said had abandoned its mission to hold power to account.

But he reserved the harshest criticism for his former political party, citing the legal battles against him over ballot access, and what he called a “palace coup” against Mr. Biden. “In the name of saving democracy, the Democratic Party set itself to dismantling it,” he said.

Neil Vigdor and Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.