In the wake of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announcing the suspension of his campaign and endorsement of President Donald Trump, multiple legacy media outlets have opened fire on the former Independent candidate.
Kennedy announced his decision at a press conference in Phoenix on Friday, telling reporters, “I’ve made the heart-wrenching decision to suspend my campaign and to support President Trump. This decision is agonizing for me because of the difficulties it causes me, and my children and my friends.”
He accused the Democratic Party of waging “continual legal warfare against both President Trump and myself,” and running “a sham” Democratic primary, which prevented him from having a fair shot at the White House.
“I cannot, in good conscience, ask my staff and volunteers to keep working their long hours, or ask my donors to keep giving when I cannot honestly tell them that I have a real path to the White House,” Kennedy added.
“These are the principled causes that persuaded me to leave the Democratic Party and run as an independent, and now to throw my support to President Trump. The causes were: Free speech, the war in Ukraine, and the war on our children,” he said.
Fox News collected several headlines from various liberal media outlets bashing Kennedy for his decision. Some outlets, such as CNN, suggested that Kennedy’s endorsement of Trump would help the former president’s reelection campaign.
CNN host Erin Burnett warned the Democratic Party that Kennedy’s support of Trump drastically hurts Vice President Kamala Harris’ chances at the White House this year.
“The latest swing state polls show Kennedy with five or six percent of the vote,” Burnett said on Friday evening, adding, “And so, when you think about it overall, and they say ‘Well, that’s not a big deal.’ Actually, if that is the case in swing states, it is huge. It is everything. It is more than the margin between Harris and Trump in some of those same states.”
The Associated Press also noted reports that Kennedy staying in may hurt Trump more than Harris.
“According to a July AP-NORC poll, Republicans were significantly more likely than Democrats to have a favorable view of Kennedy,” the outlet reported. “And those with a positive impression of Kennedy were significantly more likely to also have a favorable view of Trump (52%) than Harris (37%).”
Others, meanwhile, focused on attacking Kennedy directly, belittling and generally demeaning him over his decision to pull out, among other things.
One such article, written by Washington Post associate editor Karen Tumulty, was entitled “By endorsing Trump, RFK Jr. betrays the Kennedy legacy.”
Tumulty argued that Kennedy had betrayed his family’s legacy as longtime democrats, and this decision was only the continuation of a lifelong betrayal of that legacy.
“His bizarre campaign for president this year — with its revelations that he had a dead worm in his brain and once left the carcass of a bear cub in Central Park — was an embarrassment. But his announcement on Friday that he would ‘throw my support’ to Donald Trump in battleground states represents a betrayal of a higher order.”
She continued, writing, “Yet in casting his lot with a former president who preaches intolerance and division, he has cast aside the principles for which generations of Kennedys have stood.”
Similarly, Politico published an article about the “7 weirdest moments from RFK Jr.’s long-shot campaign” which included the story about his brain parasite, an X post from July where he said he said he wasn’t sure “what is a conspiracy theory and what isn’t” regarding 9/11, and the instance where he “held a debate” between him, President Biden, and Trump which saw him pausing the ongoing debate between the two candidates to give his own answers.
Fox also reported on comments from former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan, who appeared on his former network alongside anchor Ari Melber to discuss the situation, saying, “I didn’t think that he was a big threat to Trump. He was a threat to Democrats because he was pulling voters away from Trump because he’s an anti-vaxxer loon, and a lot of the Trump people who thought Trump was not loony enough on vaxes was heading toward RFK Jr.”
“So actually, whether we like it or not, it is a good thing for Donald Trump that he pulled out and endorsed Trump because Trump gets to have some of those far-right nutty voters come home to him,” Hasan said. “It is ironic to see RFK junior, the independent third-party candidate who’s running against the establishment – who called Trump the worst president of his lifetime, called him sociopathic – now saying, ‘Oh yeah, I’m gonna back this guy for a second term.’”
