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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. joined Donald Trump onstage in Arizona, shortly after the independent suspended his campaign and threw his support behind the Republican former president.
Kennedy got a rock star’s welcome at an arena in the battleground state city of Glendale on Friday, complete with pyrotechnics and a Foo Fighters song blasting.
Onstage, Trump praised RFK Jr., who he said “brought together people from across the political spectrum grounded in the values of his father, Robert F. Kennedy, a great man, and his uncle John F. Kennedy,” and promised to create a commission to investigate presidential assassinations that would release any remaining classified information on the JFK assassination.
The crowd then began chanting, “Bobby! Bobby!”
Kennedy said he didn’t agree with Trump on everything, but wanted to support his campaign, believing it would tackle issues on health and foreign policy.
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump shakes hands with Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at a campaign rally at the Desert Diamond Arena, Friday, Aug. 23, 2024, in Glendale, Ariz. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) (AP)
“Our children are the unhealthiest, sickest in the world. Don’t you want healthy children? Don’t you want the chemicals out of our food?” Kennedy asked the crowd. “That’s what President Trump told me that he wanted.”
“He also told me he wanted to end the grip of the neocons on U.S. foreign policy,” Kennedy continued. “He said he didn’t want any more $200bn wars in Ukraine that we could use that money back here in the United States.”
The reception from the Kennedy family itself was much less enthusiastic.
A Friday statement from members of the Kennedy family called the endorsement a “betrayal.”
“We want an America filled with hope and bound together by a shared vision of a brighter future, a future defined by individual freedom, economic promise, and national pride,” the statement reads, adding that the alliance with Trump is “a sad ending to a sad story.”
Jack Schlossberg, JFK’s grandson, said on Friday on X that RFK Jr. was “for sale” and “works for Trump.”
“Kamala Harris is for the people — the easiest decision of all time just got easier,” he added.
Elsewhere during the Glendale speech, Trump returned to familiar attack lines, lambasting the “fake news,” falsely claiming he won the 2020 election, and mocking “nasty” Barack Obama by using his full name.
Trump also made a direct appeal to Kennedy voters to join the Republican movement, arguing they will have a “huge influence on this campaign.”
(REUTERS)
“Bobby and I will fight together to defeat the corrupt political establishment and return control of this country to the people,” he said.
Despite the new endorsement, Trump still expressed his dissatisfaction with the race, complaining he had to face Kamala Harris instead of Joe Biden.
The former president accused Democrats of carrying out an “unconstitutional coup” to elevate Harris.
“She’s the only person ever to get a nomination of the party without getting one vote,” Trump said. “Hey, maybe she’s smarter than we think. You know you could look at it that way.”
Elsewhere, Trump falsely claimed Harris lost more than 300,000 migrant children, most of whom ended up dead or sex slaves.
“She allowed them to be trafficked into our country,” Trump said. “Many of them are in sex slavery or dead, probably mostly dead.”
The former president was referring to a recent report from the Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General, which found that between 2019 and 2023, ICE was “not able to account” for all the locations of 32,000 unaccompanied minors who had been settled in the U.S. after exiting immigration detention.
The report also found that 291,000 of the kids were not placed into removal proceedings because ICE had never served them notices to appear or scheduled a court date for them.
What Trump declined to mention was that this period involved two of his own years in office, and ICE itself has argued the OIG report is inaccurate.
That wasn’t the only humdinger from the podium.
Trump also claimed Harris cast a tie-breaking entitlement by over $250bn because she “wants to have the illegal immigrants coming into our county go on Social Security and Medicare, which will destroy Social Security and Medicare.”
The Trump campaign has used this attack before, though it has later explained that this figure was a reference to the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, which would indeed lower government spending on these programs—by lowering the prices the government spent on drugs themselves, not by cutting benefits, an idea celebrated by many health experts.
