Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. suspended his presidential campaign today and endorsed former President Donald Trump.

The former Democrat supports Trump because the Democratic Party has betrayed its ideals, Kennedy said, while Trump opposes neoconservative foreign adventurism, vowed to stop the war in Ukraine, and agreed with Kennedy on important public-health matters. 

Kennedy clearly expects a top appointment in a Trump administration. His focus will be ending Big Pharma’s control of the federal food and health bureaucracies.

The Party of Censorship and Lawfare

In a room with supporters, Kennedy opened a nationwide address on social media by saying the Democratic Party of his father, Robert F. Kennedy, and uncle, John F. Kennedy, is dead.

“Back then the Democrats were the champions of the Constitution, of civil rights,” he said, and stood against authoritarianism, against censorship, against colonialism, imperialism and unjust wars.”

Continued Kennedy:

We were the party of labor, of the working class. The Democrats were the party of government transparency and the champion of the environment. Our party was the bulwark against big money interests and corporate power. True to its name, it was the party of democracy.

But now, he said, it’s the “party of war, censorship, corruption, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Ag, and Big Money.”

Describing the tenacious work of campaign volunteers to get him on state ballots nationwide, Kennedy said he could have become president were the system not rigged against him. He accused the Democratic Party of waging legal war against him and Trump. 

The party “deployed DNC-aligned judges to throw me and other candidates off the ballot and to throw President Trump in jail,” he said:

It ran a sham primary that was rigged to prevent any serious challenge to President Biden. Then when a predictably bungled debate performance precipitated the palace coup against President Biden, the same shadowy DNC operatives appointed his successor, also without an election. 

They installed a candidate who was so unpopular with voters that she dropped out in 2020 without winning a single delegate.

He called the Democratic convention in Chicago a “circus” and noted that speakers denounced Trump 147 times on the first day. “Who needs a policy when you have Trump to hate?” he asked, noting that Republicans mentioned Biden twice at their convention.

Kennedy also detailed the Biden administration’s effort to censor speech it opposed almost as soon as Biden took office.

Suspending Campaign

Kennedy said his name will remain on the ballot in blue states, but he would remove his name from the ballots in battleground states, a clear sign that he hopes those Kennedy voters will switch to Trump.

Kennedy will “throw my support” to Trump because the two agree on free speech, the war in Ukraine, and the “war on our children,” meaning the chronic diseases that affect so many of them, not least, preventable obesity.

Kennedy denounced the military industrial complex’s “comic-book justification” for involvement in Ukraine’s war against Russia.

“Tiny Ukraine is a proxy in a geopolitical struggle initiated by the ambitions of the U.S. neocons for American global hegemony,” he said. Russia’s attack on Ukraine was the “predictable response” to NATO’s encirclement of the nation, “a hostile act.” Also hostile, he said, was the placement of missile systems in Poland and Romania.

Biden, he said, has “repeatedly spurned Russia’s offer to settle this war peacefully.”

Trump’s vow to negotiate with Russian leader Vladimir Putin “alone would justify my support for his campaign.”

Kennedy said he spoke with Trump less than two hours after the July 13 assassination attempt against the former president. Then he met with Trump, family members, and close advisors in Florida for “a series of long intense discussions.”

“I was surprised to discover that we are aligned on many key issues. In those meetings he suggested that we join forces,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy said he still differs with Trump on many matters, but would work “together on the existential issues upon which we are in concordance,” such as “ending the forever wars, ending the childhood disease epidemics, securing the border, protecting freedom of speech, unraveling the corporate capture of our regulatory agencies, getting the U.S. intelligence agencies out of the business of propagandizing and censoring and surveilling Americans, and interfering with our elections.”

Harris and her team refused similar discussions.

Kennedy focused the remainder of his remarks on the frightening epidemic of chronic disease that affects Americans of all ages and is wrecking the American economy because those sufferers spend so much money on medical care.

As for corporate control of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Kennedy said with “President Trump’s backing, I’m going to change that.”

Continued Kennedy:

We’re going to staff these agencies with honest scientists and doctors who are free from industry funding. We’re going to make sure the decisions of consumers, doctors, and patients are informed by unbiased science. 

In other words, Trump promised Kennedy either a top job or Cabinet post.

Family Reaction

Predictably, family members, who opposed Kennedy’s independent bid for the White House as “dangerous to our country,” immediately denounced him and said they support the Harris-Walz ticket.

“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,” his brother and sisters wrote on X:

“We believe in Harris and Walz. Our brother Bobby’s decision to endorse Trump today is a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear. It is a sad ending to a sad story.”

Amusingly, multiple X accounts noted, CNN cut away from Kennedy’s speech when he described the “shadowy DNC operatives” who removed Biden and installed Harris as the presidential candidate.

H/T: The Hill