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GLENDALE, Ariz. (AP) — Three weeks after dropping his independent presidential campaign, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has become a ubiquitous campaigner for Donald Trump, urging his own loyal followers to cast their lot with the former president who said he'd give Kennedy a job if he returns to the White House.
Kennedy is hitting the road with Tulsi Gabbard, a former congresswoman who's built her own following on the right.
Many of the people who turned out to see them in suburban Phoenix on Saturday night were already committed Trump supporters. A few, like Jacob Cutler, wore clothing from Kennedy's defunct campaign. An enthusiastic Kennedy supporter, Cutler has embraced Trump as the best person to stop Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate.
“I was concerned about what would happen if she won, and so that’s why I felt like I needed to support Donald Trump and help him win,” said Cutler, a 40-year-old who said he voted for Democratic President Joe Biden four years ago. “If anything, the lesser of two evils.”
The Kennedy-Trump alliance gives the Republican former president an endorsement from the well-known scion of a Democratic dynasty and the chance to present his campaign as having bipartisan appeal. Even a small number of Democrats moving to Trump's side due to Kennedy's endorsement could be critical in states like Arizona, which Biden won in 2020 by fewer than 11,000 votes.
Trump’s path back to the White House relies in part on voters who don’t trust institutions like government, corporations and the mainstream media, a group that can be hard to reach, win over and motivate to vote. Kennedy and Gabbard have pull with those voters, who tend to get news and information from podcasts and YouTube videos.
Both Trump and Kennedy have vowed in recent weeks to “make America healthy again,” a play on Trump's signature “Make America Great Again” slogan that references Kennedy's frequent arguments during his campaign that chronic illnesses have become more prevalent among Americans and his boosting of discredited theories about vaccines.
At the Trump campaign event on Saturday, Kennedy addressed the members of his family who have criticized his embrace of Trump.
“I feel like people — including family members who have turned against me, my old friends who look at me with disdain and condemnation — that they’re victims of a kind of hypnosis and a psyop and an orchestrated effort to divide us from each other,” Kennedy told the crowd at Arizona Christian University. “Those of us who are awake need to protect the things that are valuable in this country without going after them until they wake up and see what we’ve done for them.”
Partisans who switch sides often carry extra weight, picking up reverence from activists who once condemned them. They can become sought-after surrogates and trusted messengers.
“It’s a huge, huge addition to Trump’s team,” Henry Slayton, a 62-year-old engineer from Bakersfield, California, said of Kennedy and Gabbard. “It shows you they’re all for the citizens, they’re for the American people, not out for themselves.”
Harris has her own coalition of strange bedfellows, including a son of former Republican presidential candidate John McCain and prominent members of former President George W. Bush’s administration. Progressives have even found themselves cheering Bush's vice president, Dick Cheney, for endorsing Harris, a head-spinning change of attitude toward a lifelong conservative and fierce champion of the Iraq War.
Kennedy rose to prominence in his own right as an environmental lawyer and leader of an anti-vaccine group. He initially challenged Biden for the Democratic nomination before leaving the party to run as an independent, accusing the party of conspiring against him.
Gabbard was known during her four House terms for taking positions at odds with her own party’s establishment. She was an early and vocal supporter of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 Democratic presidential primary run, which made her popular with progressives.
Not seeking reelection in 2020, Gabbard ran for president herself instead, saying U.S. wars in the Middle East destabilized the region, made the U.S. less safe and cost thousands of American lives, and that Democrats and Republicans shared the blame. She tore into Harris’ record during a primary debate and ultimately outlasted her in that race, which Biden ultimately won.
She drew on that experience to help Trump prep for his own debate against Harris. Trump has given her and Kennedy roles in his presidential transition, potentially giving them the influence to help staff his administration and shape the policies the federal bureaucracy would pursue if he returns to the White House.
“This is about we the people standing up for freedom,” Gabbard said Saturday. “This is about we the people standing up for peace.”
Kennedy argued the U.S. should stop arming the Ukrainians in the third year of a war launched by Russia's invasion, claiming the West forced Russian President Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine by expanding NATO. Trump in Tuesday's presidential debate refused to say whether he believes it important that Ukraine win the war.
And he presented Trump's brushing off of expert opinions and research as admirable.
He was moved, he said, to see Trump embrace the views of moms who believe their children were injured by vaccines, even though the overwhelming consensus among researchers is that complications from childhood vaccines are extremely rare and are outweighed by the benefits. He described Trump as not falling captive to “the entire establishment” and the “high priests of the orthodoxies.”
“I think that’s a measure of his character," he said.
An organization that Kennedy represents, Children’s Health Defense, currently has a lawsuit pending against a number of news organizations, among them The Associated Press, accusing them of violating antitrust laws by taking action to identify misinformation, including about COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines.