RFK suspends campaign, supports Trump for president, says Dems ‘abandoned democracy’

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced Friday he is suspending his presidential campaign and supporting Republican nominee Donald Trump for president.

The independent candidate made his announcement in a speech in Phoenix, Arizona, hours before Trump will hold a rally in Glendale with a “special guest” widely rumored to be Kennedy himself.

Kennedy began by remembering his previous, decades-long allegiance to the Democratic Party, which he described as once “the party of democracy.” He said he recently left the party to run as an independent because it had “abandoned democracy,” particularly by abandoning its primary voters and “conceal[ing] the cognitive decline of the president.”

“In the name of saving democracy, the Democratic Party set itself to dismantling it,” Kennedy said of the Democrat establishment’s legal targeting of his own campaign and Trump.

He criticized Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris for being nominated despite having no primary votes cast for her, and “no policies, no interviews, no debates.”

“They [nominated Harris] by weaponizing the government agencies,” he said.

Kennedy also criticized mainstream media, which once gave independent candidate Ross Perot dozens of interviews in the early 1990s, but has not given him the same opportunity. He called the media and social media a “mouthpiece of government.”

Kennedy said he no longer believes he has a viable path to the White House, and has decided to suspend his campaign and remove his name from the ballot in battleground states.

He also said he will now “throw my support to President Trump,” especially in light of Trump’s promise to end the war in Ukraine and tackle censorship, among other shared priorities.

Kennedy also revealed he met with Trump multiple times in July and August, including to discuss a possible role in a Trump administration. He says he realized they agreed on a number of issues, in spite of still sharing some key differences. Harris and her campaign, however, refused to even meet with Kennedy, he said.

Minutes before Kennedy was expected to begin his speech, the Associated Press reported a Pennsylvania court filing from the Kennedy campaign, also made on Friday, requested he be removed from that state’s ballot and also disclosed his endorsement of Trump.

Kennedy withdrew from Arizona’s ballot Thursday.

This story is breaking and will be updated.