Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Throws Sad Little Hissy Fit After Harris Ignores His Attempt to Score a Position in Her Cabinet
Nothing says presidential material like a post-spurning tantrum.
The Washington Post revealed on Wednesday that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has attempted to meet with Kamala Harris, in the hopes of negotiating a potential position in her administration in exchange for an endorsement. Unfortunately for Kennedy, as the Post reported, Harris and her team have “not responded with an offer to meet or shown interest in the proposal.” Also unfortunate for the independent candidate? That his response to being ignored was to throw a massive tantrum attacking the woman from whom he was only recently trying to get a job..
On X, Kennedy wrote, “VP Harris’s Democratic Party would be unrecognizable to my father and uncle and I cannot reconcile it with my values.” He claimed, among other things, that Harris is “scared to debate,” and mocked her for embracing the “infantile slogan” of “joy,” before concluding, “I have no plans to endorse Kamala Harris for President. I do have a plan to defeat her.”
VP Harris’s Democratic Party would be unrecognizable to my father and uncle and I cannot reconcile it with my values.
The Democratic Party of RFK and JFK was the party of civil liberties and free speech. VP Harris‘s is the party of censorship, lockdowns, and medical coercion.…
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) August 15, 2024
After the Post story ran, Kennedy also spoke to The New York Times about trying to set up the sit-down with Harris, and how he and his advisers have been rebuffed. “We’ve reached out repeatedly through the highest level intermediaries,” he wrote in a text message to the Times. “We’ve been told that they have no interest in talking with me.” Which makes Jr.’s subsequent social media claims, post-spurning, extremely embarrassing. Also deeply embarrassing? This detail from the Post story:
In other words, Kennedy—or someone working for him—apparently thought that he should replace Biden on the Democratic ticket, and after that pipe dream didn’t come to pass, tried to land a position in a potential Harris administration, which also went nowhere, which left him no choice but to throw a fit.
Last month, in a clip posted online (and then taken down) by one of Kennedy’s sons, the candidate is seen speaking on the phone with Donald Trump about their shared distrust of vaccines; at one point, the ex-president says, “I would love you to do [something]. And I think it’ll be so good for you and so big for you. And we’re going to win.” According to the Post, Kennedy and Trump met in Milwaukee last month to discuss “a policy role and endorsement that resulted in no agreement.” Trump campaign advisers told the outlet that “they are still in touch with Kennedy and his senior team, and some of the advisers are expecting Kennedy to drop out and endorse Trump.”
RFK Jr considers dropping out to help Trump, running mate says
Nicole Shanahan says she and independent 2024 candidate could ‘walk away and join forces with Donald Trump’
Nicole Shanahan says she and independent 2024 candidate could ‘walk away and join forces with Donald Trump’
Robert F Kennedy Jr is considering abandoning his campaign as an insurgent independent presidential candidate in order to help the election of Donald Trump, his running mate has said.
The startling disclosure was made by Nicole Shanahan, Kennedy’s vice-presidential candidate, who said the pair were considering dropping their campaign over fears it might help elect Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, as president.
Shanahan’s remarks, made on the Impact Theory With Tim Bilyeau podcast, were close to an all-out admission that Kennedy’s campaign had more in common with Trump than Harris. Kennedy was a member of the Democratic party and attempted to run as its nominee before choosing to stand as an independent.
“There’s two options that we’re looking at, and one is staying in, forming that new party, but we run the risk of a Kamala Harris and [Tim] Walz presidency because we draw votes from Trump,” said Shanahan, a wealthy Silicon Valley attorney, reportedly worth $1bn as a result of her former marriage to Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google.
“[Or] we walk away right now and join forces with Donald Trump … and we explain to our base why we’re making this decision.”
Shanahan said the conundrum was “not an easy decision” but added that her sympathies lay more with Trump and his wealthy backers than with Harris’s campaign, which has its own moneyed supporters.
“If we are splitting hairs, I would say that I trust the future of this county more under the leadership of Trump and the [Peter] Thiels [the founder of PayPal and a leading Trump backer] and the JD Vances [the Republican vice-presidential nominee] than I do right now under Harris and the Reid Hoffmans [a Democratic-supporting mega-donor],” she said.
Not long after Shanahan’s comments were made public, Trump told CNN’s Kristen Holmes in Michigan he would “certainly” be open to giving Kennedy a role in a future Trump administration.
“I like him, and I respect him,” Trump said.
“He’s a brilliant guy. He’s a very smart guy. I’ve known him for a very long time. I didn’t know he was thinking about getting out, but if he is thinking about getting out, certainly I’d be open to it.”
Shanahan’s comments followed recent polls indicating that Kennedy – who has traded in anti-vaccination conspiracy theories that tend to have greater currency on the right than among Democratic-leaning voters – was drawing more support from Trump than from Harris.
Kennedy’s potential to act as a spoiler has long been a source of political guesswork. Commentators have expressed uncertainty whether the Democrats or Republicans stand to lose more from his candidacy. Kennedy is currently running at about 5% in many surveys.
The revelation that he is considering standing aside comes after he met Trump at last month’s Republican national convention in Milwaukee. At that time, Trump reportedly sought his endorsement, and the two discussed the possibility of Kennedy being given a job in a future Trump administration.
Kennedy was apparently rebuffed when he recently sought a similar meeting with Harris.
“No one has any intention of negotiating with a Maga-funded fringe candidate who has sought out a job with Donald Trump in exchange for an endorsement,” a Democratic National Committee source told the New York Post.
Trump and Kennedy have received generous funding from Timothy Mellon, heir to one of America’s most famous banking families. Mellon, a known Trump financial backer, has given $25m to American Values 2024, a Super Pac supporting Kennedy’s presidential campaign, most recently in April, when he donated $5m.
Kennedy – scion of America’s most famous political dynasty and son of the former US attorney general – was denounced by his own siblings when he announced his presidential campaign as an independent last autumn.
“The decision of our brother Bobby to run as a third-party candidate against Joe Biden [the then presumptive Democratic nominee] is dangerous to our country,” said sisters Rory Kennedy, Kerry Kennedy and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend; and brother Joseph P Kennedy II in a statement last October.
“Bobby might share the same name as our father, but he does not share the same values, vision or judgment. We denounce his candidacy and believe it to be perilous for our country.”
Trump attacks Kamala Harris and ‘Marxist left’ in speech to police
Ex-president falsely claims US is in grip of violent crime wave, and vows to shield officers from legal accountability
Donald Trump has pledged to shield police officers from legal accountability if he is re-elected as president after falsely claiming the US is in the grip of a wave of violent crime that he blamed on the Black Lives Matter movement and people crossing the Mexican border.
Speaking to police officers in Michigan on Tuesday, the former president sought to pin responsibility for the imagined crisis on his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, whom he characterised as among “Marxist district attorneys” with a record of being anti-police and pro-criminal during her term as the district attorney in San Francisco in the 2000s.
At the same time, Trump lamented his own legal difficulties, including his criminal convictions for fraud in New York and other looming prosecutions.
“They go after guys like me, but they don’t go after guys that kill people,” he said.
Flanked by local sheriffs in Howell, a small city in greater Detroit where a group of white supremacists marched last month chanting “We love Hitler, we love Trump” and carrying signs reading “White Lives Matter”, Trump painted a picture of Americans living in fear of leaving their homes because of crime.
“It’s just insane, but you can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot, you get mugged, you get raped, you get … whatever it may be,” he said.
The former president claimed that this alleged crime wave materialised when Joe Biden and Harris took office.
“Since Comrade Kamala Harris took office, her administration’s crime statistics show she’s presided over a 43% increase in violent crime. These are all government numbers,” he claimed.
In fact, official statistics show that violent crime is at an almost 50-year low in the US.
Nonetheless, Trump pledged to “crack down on local Marxist DAs who refuse to enforce the law” while, he said, ruining the lives of police officers for doing their jobs.
“Over the past four years, the Marxist left has waged a vicious war on law enforcement in our country. They’ve taken away the dignity and the spirit and the life of some of these police officers, and that’s why you see it – the crime is so out of control in our country,” he claimed.
Trump said that the police “have a lot of difficulty with the laws of our land”.
“We’re going to get rid of that difficulty, because they shouldn’t have difficulty, our police,” he said.
Trump added: “We’re going to be guaranteeing immunities.”
The former president accused Harris of a “pro-crime, anti-police record”.
“She repeatedly endorsed defunding the police,” he said. “If she ever had a chance, she would do whatever she could to defund the police because that’s where her spirit is, that’s where her heart is, and we can’t have a president like that.”
In 2020, then senator Harris gave support to the “defund the police” movement in the wake of a white police officer’s murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. Harris said at the time that it was right that BLM questioned the amount of money spent on “militarising” police departments at the expense of social services, housing and education
“This whole movement is about, rightly, saying we need to take a look at these budgets and figure out whether it reflects the right priorities,” she told the radio programme Ebro in the Morning.
The former president also claimed that Harris bore responsibility for a rise in shoplifting as California’s attorney general a decade ago.
“She came up with a concept of, $950 and below you don’t even get prosecuted. So guys are walking into stores with calculators to figure [it] out,” he said, to the evident amusement of the police officers around him.
“Did you know that they have calculators adding it up? They want to make sure they’re under $950, but it didn’t matter, because they didn’t prosecute the ones that went over either.”
In fact, there is no such policy in California and the accusation appears rooted in a ballot measure passed by voters in 2014 that reclassified some thefts and misdemeanors.
Trump blamed much of the imagined increase in crime on people crossing the Mexican border, for which he also blamed Harris as the supposed “border tsar”, even though immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than US citizens. He also claimed that some Latin American countries are exporting their criminals to the US.
“We have criminals from all over the world pouring into our country right now,” he said.
However, Trump was upset about at least one instance of prosecutors upholding the law.
“We’re not getting justice in New York,” he said of his own conviction over paying hush money to an adult film star.
The former president is also facing criminal prosecutions over his attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021, and his handling of classified documents.
“Anytime I fly over a state, they indict you. Got indicted more than the great Alphonse Capone,” he told the police officers, to laughter.
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