What better way to derail the momentum of an overall lackluster Democratic National Convention than to have the greatest third-party challenger for the presidency of the last three decades, who just so happened to be a member of America’s most famous Democratic political dynasty, endorse the Republican candidate for President of the United States: Donald J. Trump? Well, that is exactly what occurred late Friday afternoon, when RFK, Jr., who was running as an Independent after being forced out of the Democratic Party primary earlier this year, formally suspended his campaign in most states, including every battleground state of consequence, and tossed his support behind President Trump.
In Kennedy’s speech, he reiterated his contretemps with the party long associated with the Kennedy name; a party that is famously linked to his uncle John, the 35th President of the United States, his father Robert, who served as Attorney General in his brother’s administration, and another uncle, Ted, one of the longest serving senators in American history. Yet, the Democratic Party has transformed drastically in recent years. The party of John and Robert Kennedy, which exalted classical liberal values like free speech, the right to privacy, and due process is no longer accepted in the Democratic Party of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. The Biden-Harris Party is one that treats populist insurgents with contempt, using heavy-handed tactics to keep those voices marginalized while coopting the press to demonize and censure Democrats, like Kennedy, who call for a big tent coalition – the kind that his late father and uncles championed, one that seeks to elevate regular Americans over powerful DC lobbyists.
Now, the party of the people is the Republican Party spearheaded by Donald Trump. To his credit, Kennedy sees with admirable clarity (which cannot be said of his siblings and other members of the Kennedy clan) the dire stakes of our political moment, and knows through his own experiences that Donald Trump, not Kamala Harris, is the true change agent and outsider candidate. Thus, his endorsement speech – in which he scathingly indicted the modern Democratic Party and its fascist leftward lurch, was no-holds-barred and packed with righteous indignation:
“As you know, I left that party in October because it had departed so dramatically from the core values that I grew up with. It had become the party of war, censorship, corruption, big pharma, big tech, big ag, and big money. When it abandoned democracy by canceling the primary to conceal the cognitive decline of the sitting president, I left the party to run as an independent.”
In his blistering jeremiad, Kennedy dealt a significant blow to the Democratic establishment, which he accused of weaponizing lawfare to engage in unprecedented attacks against both him and Donald Trump. He also rebuked Democratic apparatchiks in the mainstream media for waging disinformation campaigns against party outsiders like himself and Bernie Sanders.
On policy, Kennedy condemned the Democrats for their attacks on the First Amendment, particularly the freedom to speak, which Big Tech companies disregard with shameless abandon to blackball not only conservative or right-leaning candidates. But also issues and causes, not necessarily always political, such as vaccine dangers, a centerpiece of Kennedy’s presidential platform, or who shine a light on voter fraud and election integrity-related issues, which though increasingly becoming mainstream, was for years pushed to the fringes – and remains a systemic and lingering problem that cost the livelihoods of so many brave warriors, from Rudy Giuliani to Jeff Clark to Tina Peters, who put themselves on the frontlines years before society began catching up.
Kennedy also critiqued big pharmaceutical companies and regulatory agencies that license the distribution of processed foods packed with artificial sugar and seed oils. The mass consumption of this garbage has deteriorated the physical and mental health of tens if not hundreds of millions of Americans, many of whom suffer from obesity and chronic illness at rates never seen before. Of course, Kennedy’s critique of the pharmaceutical industry dovetails with his campaign against injections, like any one of the covid vaccines, that bypassed FDA-clinical tests to reach the masses, in a campaign that was spearheaded by behind-the-scenes operators, like Dr. Anthony Fauci, who macabrely profited, and did so quite handsomely, off the mass rollout.
The synthesis between RFK and Donald Trump, then, must be construed in its most natural formulation: a unifying of populist insurgents against a trenchant managerial class hellbent on America’s managed decline. Whether it’s through the prescription drugs they force upon us, to the processed food we buy, to the wars the ruling class wages, and yet again profits off, Kennedy’s campaign from the beginning was defined as one against the powers-that-be. He joins President Trump, who shares in Kennedy’s skepticism towards the war in the Ukraine, for instance, and has consistently preached peaceful diplomacy over endless war for years based on the fundamental belief that a strong, powerful military — rarely deployed — is the ultimate telltale of a country’s strength.
There is another part of RFK’s decision to support the 45th President worth highlighting. Kennedy made a deliberate strategic ploy to suspend his campaign, but not drop out altogether. That means he will only remove himself from the ballot in key battleground states like Arizona, Michigan, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, which remain competitive between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. This has a twofold objective.
First, according to President Trump’s pollster, Tony Fabrizio, pluralities – if not outright majorities – of the 3%-5% of the voter share that Kennedy was polling in these battlegrounds would break for Donald Trump over Kamala Harris. In Fabrizio’s own words, “[t]o put these numbers into perspective, the net vote gained in a state like Arizona based on just a 2020 turnout model would be over 41,000 votes nearly 4 times Biden’s winning margin or in Georgia the net gain would be over 19,000 votes nearly twice Biden’s margin.”
Even assuming the most conservative outcome, where, for example, just 2% of that vote breaks for President Trump, he will still garner more than twice Joe Biden’s 2020 winning margin in a state like Arizona, and enough to get him over the winning threshold in critical states like Georgia and Nevada.
Should the Kennedy vote break in accordance with expectations – with majorities swinging, following their candidate, to the Trump corner – that should be more than enough to put President Trump over the line in every battleground. As it stands, the 45th President was already leading in states like Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, and neck-to-neck in Michigan and Wisconsin, where Kamala Harris is just coming off a protracted, media-induced honeymoon following the heels of the Democratic National Convention.
The second part of the strategy to suspend, rather than officially end, his campaign would mean that Kennedy remains on the ballot in qualifying, deep-blue states like New York, where the thought is that Democratic operatives will presumably have to divert more resources to curtail the effects of a third-party challenge that can eat into Harris’ leads. Whether that will amount to anything significant remains to be seen, but lest we forget, before Biden had dropped out, a few polls showed President Trump coming within single digits, if not outright leading, in states like New York and New Jersey just a few short months ago. Thus, the wildcard of Kennedy’s candidacy should not be written off, where many disenchanted Democrats living in those states might feel compelled to vote for an alternative to the Biden-Harris agenda, which has invited historic levels of crime and economic ruin upon so many deep-blue strongholds.
All told, Kennedy’s endorsement is the worst thing possible for Kamala Harris, whose honeymoon just came to a crashing halt with Friday’s news, a surefire momentum killer. Now, with about two and a half months to go, and a presidential debate and tons of media scrutiny still on the docket, Kamala Harris is about to realize that the real contest has only just begun.
With Kennedy’s endorsement in the bag, Donald Trump now heads the most powerful political coalition in modern American history; a united front that includes voices across a consortium of industries, from politics to business to technology, creating a juggernaut like no other at a time when the stakes could not possibly be higher. And where America’s survival will be literally determined at the ballot box — once and for all.
Paul Ingrassia is an Attorney; Communications Director of the NCLU; a two-time Claremont Fellow, and is on the Board of Advisors of the New York Young Republican Club and the Italian American Civil Rights League. He writes a widely read Substack that is regularly posted on Truth Social by President Trump. Follow him on X @PaulIngrassia, Substack, Truth Social, Instagram, and Rumble.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.
Wow. Talk about whistling past the graveyard.
If Junior is our purported solution to winning in November, we’ve got bigger problems than I thought.