Donald Trump welcomed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to the stage at his rally in Arizona on Friday night, saying the independent ran an “extraordinary campaign,” hours after Kennedy endorsed the former president.
“With all the votes he got, he could have gotten a lot of votes… I think he’s going to have a tremendous impact on this campaign,” Trump said at the start of his rally in Glendale, a Phoenix suburb.
Trump went on to say that if elected, he would establish a commission on assassination attempts in Kennedy’s honor. Kennedy’s father, Senator Robert F. Kennedy Sr., and uncle, President John F. Kennedy, were both assassinated. The commission, Trump said, would be tasked with declassifying remaining documents related to the 1963 presidential assassination — documents that Trump did not release while he was in office.
In his speech, Kennedy said he had spoken with Trump about issues that he said “unite us,” including “safe food and ending the chronic disease epidemic.”
“Don’t you want a president who will make America healthy again?” asked Kennedy, a staunch opponent of vaccinations who suspended his campaign for the presidency on Friday.
The alliance between Trump and Kennedy marks a new phase in their relationship, after years of criticizing each other.
Trump called Kennedy a “fake radical leftist fool,” a “Democratic ‘plant'” and a “liberal nutcase,” despite the fact that many of Kennedy’s positions conflict with those of the Democrats.
Kennedy said in a 2018 Newsweek op-ed that Trump’s presidency “has discredited not just our nation, but the entire American experiment in self-government.”
In a separate op-ed that year, published by NBC News, Kennedy called Trump’s policies a “disgrace to democracy.”
“President Trump’s policy is not to actively promote democracy abroad, but to reach out to, support, and encourage some of the world’s most tyrannical governments,” he wrote at the time.
Those positions appeared to fade into the background on Friday when Kennedy endorsed Trump at an event in Phoenix. Kennedy said he would remove his name from the ballot in “about 10 swing states where my presence would be a game changer.” But he encouraged voters in states where he is still on the ballot to cast their ballots for him this fall.
Some Kennedy supporters in Arizona told NBC News they support Trump.
Bruce Brimacombe, a Scottsdale resident, said he now plans to vote for Trump because of Kennedy’s involvement.
“It’s not that I’m not going to vote for Trump because he’s Trump,” Brimacombe said. “I’m going to vote for Trump because if Bobby can do what he’s asked to do, I’m going to support him. Because that’s going to build a platform.”
Casey Westerman, a Trump voter in 2016 and 2020 who was set to back Kennedy in November, now plans to back Trump. The Chandler resident is backing Trump again because “I trust Bobby.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
