A US presidential candidate who ran a campaign marked with weird moments including admitting he has a worm in his brain has dropped out and endorsed Republican nominee Donald Trump.
Robert F Kennedy Jr, 70, in a lengthy speech on Friday afternoon announced he is suspending his bid for the White House as an independent candidate, and threw his support to Trump.
‘I am not terminating my campaign I am simply suspending it and not ending it,’ Kennedy said from Phoenix, Arizona.
‘My name will remain on the ballot in most states,’ he continued, explaining that he will only withdraw his name from ballots in battleground states to avoid being a spoiler.
The nephew of the US’s 35th president, John F Kennedy, said he was a Democrat since birth but that the party is ‘abandoning democracy’ and engaged in unjust ‘legal warfare’ against him and Trump.
Kennedy noted indications that if he continued to stay in the race in the swing states, he would ‘likely hand the election the Democrats’.
‘Three great causes drove me to enter this race in the first place, primarily, and these are the principal causes that persuaded me to leave the Democratic Party and run as an independent, and now to throw my support to President Trump,’ he said.
Kennedy said that Trump was open to speaking with him, but that Democratic nominee and Vice President Kamala Harris declined.
The candidate who first pursued the Democratic nomination but left the party and launched his independent campaign in October had several bizarre happenings during his bid.
In April, Kennedy’s claim in a 2012 deposition for his divorce surfaced, in which he said, ‘I have cognitive problems, clearly. I have short-term memory loss, and I have longer-term memory loss that affects me.’ Kennedy had brain scans and found that his health issue ‘was caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died’, The New York Times reported.
And in early July when a photo emerged of him holding an animal carcass, Kennedy pushed back on claims he ate a barbecued dog and said it was a goat.
Earlier this month, Kennedy admitted to dumping a dead bear cub in Central Park in New York City, after a photo emerged of him posing with his hand stuffed in its mouth.
Shortly after Kennedy’s announcement, Trump thanked him from a restaurant in Las Vegas.
‘I want to thank Bobby, that was very nice,’ said Trump. ‘He’s a great guy, respected by everybody.’
Trump has a campaign rally scheduled in Arizona later in the day and had said he will have a ‘special guest’. Kennedy during his speech did not confirm it would be himself.
But Kennedy did say that Trump after two recent meetings together asked to ‘enlist him in his administration’.
Meanwhile, five siblings of Kennedy accused him of betraying them for backing Trump.
‘We want an America filled with hope and bound together by a shared vision of a brighter future, a future defined by individual freedom, economic promise and national pride,’ stated Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Courtney Kennedy, Kerry Kennedy, Chris Kennedy and Rory Kennedy.
‘We believe in Harris and Walz. Our brother Bobby’s decision to endorse Trump today is a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear. It is a sad ending to a sad story.’
Kennedy’s support base was made up of Democrats and Republicans dissatisfied with their respective parties and pushed populist economic theories and isolationist foreign policy ideas. The Trump campaign had worried about some of Kennedy’s rhetoric around conspiracies and his anti-vaccine stance.
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