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RFK Jr. Campaigning for Trump 09/16 06:20
GLENDALE, Ariz. (AP) -- Three weeks after dropping his independent
presidential campaign, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has become a ubiquitous campaigner
for Donald Trump, urging his own loyal followers to cast their lot with the
former president who said he'd give Kennedy a job if he returns to the White
House.
Kennedy is hitting the road with Tulsi Gabbard, a former congresswoman who's
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. A few, like Jacob
Cutler, wore clothing from Kennedy's defunct campaign. An enthusiastic Kennedy
supporter, Cutler has embraced Trump as the best person to stop Vice President
Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate.
"I was concerned about what would happen if she won, and so that's why I
felt like I needed to support Donald Trump and help him win," said Cutler, a
40-year-old who said he voted for Democratic President Joe Biden four years
ago. "If anything, the lesser of two evils."
The Kennedy-Trump alliance gives the Republican former president an
endorsement from the well-known scion of a Democratic dynasty and the chance to
present his campaign as having bipartisan appeal. Even a small number of
Democrats moving to Trump's side due to Kennedy's endorsement could be critical
in states like Arizona, which Biden won in 2020 by fewer than 11,000 votes.
Trump's path back to the White House relies in part on voters who don't
trust institutions like government, corporations and the mainstream media, a
group that can be hard to reach, win over and motivate to vote. Kennedy and
Gabbard have pull with those voters, who tend to get news and information from
podcasts and YouTube videos.
Both Trump and Kennedy have vowed in recent weeks to "make America healthy
again," a play on Trump's signature "Make America Great Again" slogan that
references Kennedy's frequent arguments during his campaign that chronic
illnesses have become more prevalent among Americans and his boosting of
discredited theories about vaccines.
At the Trump campaign event on Saturday, Kennedy addressed the members of
his family who have criticized his embrace of Trump.
"I feel like people -- including family members who have turned against me,
my old friends who look at me with disdain and condemnation -- that they're
victims of a kind of hypnosis and a psyop and an orchestrated effort to divide
us from each other," Kennedy told the crowd at Arizona Christian University.
"Those of us who are awake need to protect the things that are valuable in this
country without going after them until they wake up and see what we've done for
them."
Partisans who switch sides often carry extra weight, picking up reverence
from 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, California, said of Kennedy and Gabbard. "It shows
you they're all for the citizens, they're for the American people, not out for
themselves."
Harris has her own coalition of strange bedfellows, including a son of
former Republican presidential candidate John McCain and prominent members of
former President George W. Bush's administration. Progressives have even found
themselves cheering Bush's vice president, Dick Cheney, for endorsing Harris, a
head-spinning change of attitude toward a lifelong conservative and fierce
champion of the Iraq War.
Kennedy rose to prominence in his own right as an environmental lawyer and
leader of an anti-vaccine group. He initially challenged Biden for the
Democratic nomination before leaving the party to run as an independent,
accusing the party of conspiring against him.
Gabbard was known during her four House terms for taking positions at odds
with her own party's establishment. She was an early and vocal supporter of
Sen. Bernie Sanders' 2016 Democratic presidential primary run, which made her
popular with progressives.
Not seeking reelection in 2020, Gabbard ran for president herself instead,
saying U.S. wars in the Middle East destabilized the region, made the U.S. less
safe and cost thousands of American lives, and that Democrats and Republicans
shared the blame. She tore into Harris' record during a primary debate and
ultimately outlasted her in that race, which Biden ultimately won.
She drew on that experience to help Trump prep for his own debate against
Harris. Trump has given her and Kennedy roles in his presidential transition,
potentially giving them the influence to help staff his administration and
shape the policies the federal bureaucracy would pursue if he returns to the
White House.
"This is about we the people standing up for freedom," Gabbard said
Saturday. "This is about we the people standing up for peace."
Kennedy argued the U.S. should stop arming the Ukrainians in the third year
of a war launched by Russia's invasion, claiming the West forced Russian
President Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine by expanding NATO. Trump in
Tuesday's presidential debate refused to say whether he believes it important
that Ukraine win the war.
And he presented Trump's brushing off of expert opinions and research as
admirable.
He was moved, he said, to see Trump embrace the views of moms who believe
their children were injured by vaccines, even though the overwhelming consensus
among researchers is that complications from childhood vaccines are extremely
rare and are outweighed by the benefits. He described Trump as not falling
captive to "the entire establishment" and the "high priests of the orthodoxies."
"I think that's a measure of his character," he said.
An organization that Kennedy represents, Children's Health Defense,
currently has a lawsuit pending against a number of news organizations, among
them The Associated Press, accusing them of violating antitrust laws by taking
action to identify misinformation, including about COVID-19 and COVID-19
vaccines.
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