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Donald Trump posted about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Truth Social Friday.
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Trump called the third-party candidate a “Democratic ‘Plant'” and a “Radical Left-Liberal.”
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The tirade comes at a time when polls show RFK Jr.’s election likely. could shift votes away from Trump.
Donald Trump will likely face a runoff against Joe Biden in the upcoming elections, but the former president currently has another candidate in his sights.
On Friday night, Trump went to Truth Social to meet Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to attack, an independent candidate who was running a protracted presidential campaign.
“RFK Jr. is a Democrat ‘Plant’, a radical left liberal appointed to help Crooked Joe Biden,” Trump claimed in his post.
Right now, six months before the election, Trump appears to have a razor-thin 0.8% lead in the polls against Biden, according to national polling averages compiled by FiveThirtyEight. Polls for Kennedy show him with 10.2% overall support, while Trump and Biden have 41.7% and 40.9% respectively.
A Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll also found Trump the favorite over Biden in six of the seven battleground states, a key metric in determining who could win the election.
So why is Trump whining about a long-standing independent candidate?
Evan Siegfried, a former GOP strategist and crisis communications specialist, told Business Insider that Trump’s tirade is to be expected, given another recent poll showing that Kennedy could actually hurt Trump in the election.
An NBC News poll released this month found that Kennedy could siphon votes away from Trump, giving Biden a two-point lead if the choices included all candidates — not just Biden and Trump.
“Frankly, this is not a surprise because polls in recent weeks have shown that Kennedy is taking more from Trump than from Biden,” Siegfried told BI. “He has clearly turned against RFK Jr. simply because he is distancing himself from the battlegrounds.”
Trump’s attack on Friday is a notable change in tone from Kennedy.
On April 5, The New York Times reported that Trump was considering the Democratic scion as a possible running mate, according to two sources familiar with the conversations.
“I love Trump-Kennedy,” Trump told one person, according to the report. “I like the way that sounds.”
Kennedy dismissed the idea, telling the Times it was “not a course I would consider.”
A spokesman for the Kennedy campaign declined to comment but pointed out one X message of the candidate on April 15.
“President Trump calls me an ultra-left radical. I am so liberal that his emissaries asked me to be his vice president,” he wrote. “I respectfully declined the offer.”
Siegfried told BI that Trump would like to create a “dynasty” and that one of the best ways to do that would be to attach himself to the Kennedy name.
But the consideration was likely a passing thought that the former president “mused about,” Siegfried said, adding that even Trump’s advisers likely knew it wouldn’t be a reality.
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Read the original article on Business Insider
