Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has dropped out of the presidential race and will be taking his 4.7% of voters elsewhere. The independent candidate made the announcement at a press event in Phoenix, Arizona, Friday. Kennedy used his announcement to launch a prolonged attack on the Democratic Party, President Joe Biden, traditional journalism, and the legal process for appearing on state ballots.
“In an honest system,” he complained, “I believe I would have won the election.”
The Associated Press reported earlier Friday that Kennedy would be endorsing Republican nominee Donald Trump, according to a court filing asking to remove his name from the Pennsylvania ballot. He officially removed himself from Arizona’s ballot Thursday, paving the way for Friday’s announcement.
Speculation that Kennedy planned to throw his support behind Trump was cemented by the fact that Kennedy’s running mate, Nicole Shanahan, basically said as much on a podcast Tuesday, indicating that if the campaign shut down they would probably back the Republican. Trump is also in Arizona Friday, where he is scheduled to hold a rally just hours after RFK Jr.’s announcement.
The Washington Post reported Tuesday that Kennedy and Trump have been talking to one another and those conversations have “included possible jobs that Kennedy could be given in a second Trump administration, either at the Cabinet level or posts that do not require Senate confirmation.”
That’s because Kennedy would likely face stiff bipartisan opposition in the Senate, and rightly so. Republicans would have a problem voting for anyone named Kennedy, and Democrats will never accept a conspiracy theorist crank who has been known to hang out with neo-Nazis. Daily Kos readers will remember the saga of Kennedy’s lawsuits against the site and community member DowneastDem, the author of a post about Kennedy’s neo-Nazi friends.
That has not worked out well for Kennedy, as Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas explained back in May.
The issues at hand are so important that The New York Times, the E.W.Scripps Company, the First Amendment Coalition, New York Public Radio, and seven other New York media companies joined the appeals effort with their own joint amicus brief. What started as a dispute over a Daily Kos diarist has become a meaningful First Amendment battle, with major repercussions given New York’s role as a major news media and distribution center.
After reportedly spending over $1 million on legal fees, Kennedy somehow discovered the identity of our community member sometime last year and promptly filed a defamation suit in New Hampshire in what seemed a clumsy attempt at forum shopping, or the practice of choosing where to file suit based on the belief you’ll be granted a favorable outcome. The community member lives in Maine, Kennedy lives in California, and Daily Kos doesn’t publish specifically in New Hampshire. A perplexed court threw out the case this past February on those obvious jurisdictional grounds.
Beyond Kennedy’s recent weirdness, which includes brain worms, a dead bear cub, and allegedly eating a dog, he has been an objectively awful person for a long time.
He has spent years “stoking fear and mistrust of vaccines” and has done very real and very deadly harm to people. His anti-vaccine group, Children’s Health Defense, is largely responsible for a measles outbreak in Samoa in 2019 that killed 83 people, mostly children.
He compared vaccines to the Holocaust.
He and Trump deserve each other. They can celebrate Festivus every day, enumerating their grievances and cooking up more conspiracy theories.
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