Former President Donald Trump welcomed independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. onstage in Glendale, Arizona, hours after he suspended his presidential campaign and officially accepted his endorsement. 

Mr. Kennedy on Friday opted to pause his longshot bid for the White House and formally endorsed Mr. Trump. While Mr. Kennedy promised that he would remove his name from the ballot in swing states, he plans to appear on the ballot in nearly two dozen red and blue states. 

Mr. Trump welcomed Mr. Kennedy’s endorsement hours later, bringing him onstage to chants of “Bobby, Bobby.” He said that while he and Mr. Kennedy were sometimes at odds, the independent candidate ran an “extraordinary campaign.” 

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“I mean this sincerely, had he been allowed to enter the Democratic primary, he would have easily beaten Joe Biden, but they wouldn’t let him in,” Mr. Trump said. 

Mr. Kennedy, who is the son of former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and nephew of President John F. Kennedy,  initially launched his campaign as a Democratic challenger to President Biden but flipped to an independent. He has since been hit with numerous lawsuits by the Democratic National Committee to keep him off the ballots.

So far, Mr. Kennedy has removed his name from contention in Arizona and Pennsylvania, where he was engaged in a legal battle to get onto the ballot. As of Saturday, he was still on the ballot in North Carolina. 

The Trump campaign believed that Mr. Kennedy’s support would bolster their odds of winning on Nov. 5 in swing states because most of his supporters broke in support of Mr. Trump, largely because of his more hardline views on vaccines.

Speculation on whether Mr. Trump would tap Mr. Kennedy for a cabinet position has swirled in recent weeks since the possibility of RFK dropping out gained steam. Mr Trump did not say whether he would put Mr. Kennedy in charge of a government agency, but did make a pair of promises as “tribute” to him. 

“I am announcing tonight that upon my election, I will establish a new independent presidential commission on assassination attempts, and they will be tasked with releasing all of the remaining documents pertaining to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy,” Mr. Trump said. 

He also promised to launch a panel of “top experts” that would work with Mr. Kennedy on investigating the root cause of the increase in chronic health problems and childhood diseases. 

Indeed, Mr. Kennedy said that he was willing to work with Mr. Trump because of his position on battling chronic diseases, ending the war in Ukraine and putting an end to censorship — a point that Mr. Kennedy used to attack the Democratic National Committee, which he has routinely accused of coordinating with the media to censor his campaign. 

“He told me that he wanted to end censorship, because the whole basis of American democracy is the free flow of information, and we know that a government that can silence its opponents has license for any kind of atrocity,” Mr. Kennedy said onstage with Mr. Trump. “And can you think of any time that you can look back in history and say that the people who were censoring were the good guys?”