GLENDALE, Ariz. (AP) — Three weeks after suspending his independent presidential campaign, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has become a ubiquitous Donald Trump supporter, urging his own loyal followers to cast their lot with the former president, who said give Kennedy a job if he returns to the White House.
Kennedy is hitting the road with Tulsi Gabbard, a former congresswoman who has built her own following on the right.
Many of the people who turned out to see them in suburban Phoenix on Saturday night were already committed Trump supporters. Some, like Jacob Cutler, wore clothes from Kennedy’s defunct campaign. An avid Kennedy supporter, Cutler has seen Trump as the best person to stop Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee.
“I was worried about what would happen if he won, and that’s why I felt I had to support Donald Trump and help him win,” said Cutler, 40, who said he voted for Democratic President Joe Biden four times. years ago. “If anything, the lesser of two evils.”
The Kennedy-Trump alliance gives the former Republican president the support of a prominent scion of a Democratic dynasty and an opportunity to present his campaign as a bipartisan attraction. Even the small number of Democrats who defect to Trump because of Kennedy’s endorsement could be critical in states like Arizona, which Biden won in 2020 by less than 11,000 votes.
Trump’s path back to the White House rests in part on voters who distrust institutions like government, corporations and the mainstream media, a group that can be difficult to reach, win over and motivate to vote. Kennedy and Gabbard have pulled with voters who typically get their news and information from podcasts and YouTube videos.
Both Trump and Kennedy have vowed in recent weeks to make America healthy again. This is a play on Trump’s signature “Make America Great Again” slogan, a reference to Kennedy’s frequent claims during his campaign that chronic disease is on the rise among Americans and his momentum. distorted vaccine theories.
Kennedy spoke at a Trump campaign event on Saturday to members of his family who have criticized Trump’s embrace.
“I feel like people—including family members who have turned against me, my old friends who look at me with contempt and judgment—are victims of a kind of hypnosis and psyop, and that they are trying to separate us from each other. ,” Kennedy told an audience at Arizona Christian University. “We awake must protect the things that are precious in this country, not go after them until they wake up and see what we have done for them.”
Partisans who switch parties often carry extra weight, which commands respect from the activists who once condemned them. They can become sought after surrogates and trusted messengers.
“It’s a huge, huge addition to Trump’s team,” Henry Slayton, a 62-year-old engineer from Bakersfield, Calif., said of Kennedy and Gabbard. “It shows that they are all for the citizens, they are for the Americans, not for themselves.”
Harris has his own coalition of strange bedfellows, including the son of former Republican presidential candidate John McCain and prominent members of former President George W. Bush’s administration. Progressives have even found themselves rooting for Bush’s Vice President, Dick Cheney, for endorsing Harris, a head-spinning shift in attitude toward the lifelong conservative and die-hard Iraq War winner.
Kennedy rose to prominence as an environmental lawyer and leader of an anti-vaccine group. He originally challenged Biden for the Democratic nomination before leaving the party to run as an independent, accusing the party of conspiring against him.
During her four terms in Parliament, Gabbard was known for taking positions that conflicted with her own party’s establishment. He was an early and vocal supporter of Senator Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary, making him popular among progressives.
Gabbard did not seek re-election in 2020, instead running for president herself, saying that US wars in the Middle East have destabilized the region, made the US less safe and cost thousands of American lives, and that Democrats and Republicans share the blame. He broke Harris’ record in the primary debate and eventually defeated him in a race that Biden ultimately won.
He used that experience to help Trump prepare for his own debate against Harris. Trump has given him and Kennedy roles in his presidential campaign, potentially giving them leverage to help his administration and shape the policies the federal bureaucracy would follow if he returned to the White House.
“This is about us the people standing up for freedom,” Gabbard said Saturday. “This is about us the people standing up for peace.”
Kennedy argued that the United States should stop arming Ukrainians in the third year of a war sparked by the Russian invasion, and argued that the West forced Russian President Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine by expanding NATO. In Tuesday’s presidential debate, Trump refused to say whether he considers winning the war in Ukraine important.
And he found Trump’s brush with expert opinion and research admirable.
She said she was moved to see Trump embrace the views of mothers who believe their children have been harmed by vaccines, despite the overwhelming consensus among researchers that complications from childhood vaccines are extremely rare and that the benefits outweigh them. He described Trump as not being captured by the “whole organization” and the “Orthodox high priests”.
“I think it’s a measure of his character,” he said.
Children’s Health Defense, an organization that Kennedy represents, is currently suing several news organizations, including the Associated Press, accusing them of violating antitrust laws by taking steps to identify false information, including COVID-19 and COVID-19. vaccines.
