The Trump-Kennedy alliance followed a six-week crush of behind-the-scenes discussions, embarrassing missteps, secret meetings and private misgivings.
About three hours after former President Donald Trump was nearly assassinated, on a Saturday evening in
mid-July, Robert F. Kennedy jnr got a phone call: would he consider joining forces with Trump? What about serving as his running mate?
The caller was Calley Means, a health care entrepreneur who had advised Kennedy on chronic disease policy. He suggested that it might be a moment for unity – Trump had just narrowly escaped the same fate that had befallen Kennedy’s father and uncle. Kennedy, who was running an independent campaign for president, said he wasn’t interested in the vice-presidency, and the call ended.
A short while later, Kennedy called back. Yes, he said, he would speak with Trump.
The calls set off a frenzy of calculations and soul-searching inside the Kennedy camp: what, if anything, was on the table? Could an alliance with Trump give Kennedy more power to address issues he had described throughout his campaign – chronic disease, censorship, corporate reach into government agencies, the war in Ukraine? Or would it tear apart his coalition, and his family?
Trump was not, at that point, seriously considering adding Kennedy to the ticket. Still, Means’ efforts presented an opening to bring Kennedy into the fold and remove him as a potential drain on Trump’s votes.
What followed was a six-week crush of behind-the-scenes discussions, embarrassing missteps, secret meetings and private misgivings, culminating in Kennedy’s suspending his campaign and backing Trump.
The Trump-Kennedy alignment, one of the strangest in modern political history, brought together two men of extraordinary ego and unpredictability. Each candidate, a Republican and a former Democrat, had publicly disparaged the other during the campaign. Now, each had made the political calculation to embrace the other.
This account of how that partnership came to be is based on interviews with more than 20 people who were involved in or briefed on the discussions. It is supported by public interviews and statements by Kennedy over the past 10 days.
Some voices in both camps had been pushing for an alliance for months, some for more than a year. Others, including Kennedy’s closest family members, fought it until the last minute. And it nearly fell apart several times.
The discussions were mediated by a few inner-circle players, including Trump’s top adviser, Susie Wiles, and Kennedy’s campaign manager, his daughter-in-law, Amaryllis Fox. Tucker Carlson, the political commentator, played a vital role, as did Donald Trump jnr. Omeed Malik, a businessperson and political donor who has supported Kennedy and Trump, was also closely involved.
There were also people, like Means, who were outside the inner circle but nonetheless exerted pressure on both sides. Leaders in the so-called health freedom movement, a small but vocal coalition of people opposed to vaccines and public health mandates, who have long considered Kennedy their champion, encouraged the merger as well.
In the end, both men saw political value in the partnership.
Dennis Kucinich, the former member of Congress from Ohio who was Kennedy’s campaign manager for much of 2023, observed that while the Democratic Party had pushed Kennedy away, Trump embraced him.
For Trump, that effort “presents a real opportunity for the campaign,” he said. “It consolidates a base and broadens a reach.”
‘It’ll be so good for you’
When Means got off the phone with Kennedy on July 13, he reached out to Carlson. The moment, in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, seemed to present an opening to connect Trump with Kennedy and facilitate a possible endorsement.
Carlson loved the idea. Kennedy was his friend, and for months Kennedy had been giving the Trump team headaches. The Trump campaign’s internal polling showed that Kennedy was draining support from both President Joe Biden and Trump, but some of Trump’s advisers believed he posed a bigger threat to their candidate. Donald Trump jnr, in particular, had been trying to find a way to push Kennedy out of the race, fearing he could hurt his father’s chances, according to two people briefed on private discussions.
Kennedy was a fixture in right-wing media, reaching audiences that embraced his heterodox political views, conspiratorial rhetoric, and the ideas he floated about health and medicine – including promoting widely disproved claims that childhood vaccinations can cause autism. He appealed to voters Trump wanted.
As recently as April, Trump – who has long been fascinated by the allure of the Kennedy name, allies say – had considered naming Kennedy as his running mate, musing that he liked how “Trump-Kennedy” sounded. The Trump campaign even conducted polling of the pair as a ticket.
But while Kennedy remained in the race, he presented a threat that the Trump team was eager to fight. As summer approached, the campaign was preparing to run negative ads against him.
The assassination attempt changed the dynamic.
That evening, just hours after Trump was shot, Carlson connected Kennedy to the former president on a three-way text message, and the two candidates agreed to talk. After Trump was examined at a hospital in western Pennsylvania, they spoke by phone for nearly half an hour, according to four people with direct knowledge of the discussions.
Trump tried to coax Kennedy into his camp. “I would love you to do something,” he said, according to a portion of the conversation that was later made public. “I think it’ll be so good for you and so big for you. And we’re going to win.”
A moment of reckoning
It wasn’t only the Trump team that had been considering an alliance. For months, some in the Kennedy campaign had toyed with the same idea.
Some had even imagined Kennedy becoming Trump’s running mate. “A Trump/Kennedy ticket would cause Pfizer’s stock to plummet, the corrupt media conglomerates to go into hysteria, and would guarantee a win in November,” Link Lauren, who worked briefly as a communications strategist for Kennedy, wrote in an email to the candidate and a few top aides in January.
Now, in the hours after the shooting, combining forces seemed close to becoming a reality.
But as Kennedy weighed his options, some of his closest advisers and family members were wary.
Kennedy’s wife, actress Cheryl Hines, was particularly concerned. A lifelong Democrat, Hines had criticised Trump in the past. She had also faced public backlash for her husband’s political pursuits.
“I would say that Cheryl’s reaction was the opposite of encouraging,” Kennedy said in a call to TMZ Live.
In conversations that weekend, Hines and others close to Kennedy cautioned that Trump was untrustworthy. As they saw it, Trump had left him hanging before: in January 2017, Kennedy told reporters that Trump, then the president-elect, had asked him to lead a vaccine safety commission. Hours later, Trump’s aides distanced themselves from the idea. The incident still stung.
They also wondered whether some of Kennedy’s supporters would balk at the idea of his working with Trump, whose administration gutted environmental protections, empowered big corporations and pursued other measures at odds with Kennedy’s most cherished causes.
Kennedy had assailed Trump over his handling of the coronavirus pandemic – especially his push for the rapid development of Covid-19 vaccines. Operation Warp Speed, a partnership between the Government and pharmaceutical companies that expedited the production of a vaccine, is broadly considered one of the greatest successes of Trump’s administration. But to Kennedy and many people in the health freedom movement, the project was tantamount to tyranny.
Finally, it was not clear to Kennedy’s advisers what he would, or could, do in a Trump administration. Some took Means at his word when he mentioned the vice-presidency, one person close to Kennedy said. Others argued that it was probably posed as a hypothetical – or that it was a misunderstanding.
(Kennedy has since said, on a podcast, that he would never have taken the job: “Vice-President is the worst job in Washington.”)
More immediate forces were also pressing on Kennedy. His campaign was facing costly lawsuits over his efforts to get his name on state ballots across the country. His popularity in the polls was shrinking. And he was running out of money, fast.
After Biden’s disastrous debate performance against Trump in June, some of Kennedy’s advisers were surprised that Kennedy did not see a surge of support from disaffected Democrats, according to a person close to the candidate.
They realised he had no more support to peel from the Democrats – and the Democratic leadership had shown no interest in a partnership. For some of Kennedy’s allies, it was a reckoning that the only path forward lay with Trump.
Meeting in Milwaukee
After their initial phone call, Kennedy was eager to talk with Trump in person. On July 15, two days after the shooting, the men met in Milwaukee, where the Republican National Convention was being held.
When reports of the meeting began to circulate, Kennedy insisted that he was staying in the race.
But privately, Kennedy’s team started to pitch him for a particular role: he wanted to be the Health and Human Services Secretary, or take on some meaningful role in public health oversight.
At least one of the asks came in writing, which made the Trump team nervous because of possible implications of a quid pro quo, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.
A person involved with the Kennedy campaign said they had merely proposed what Kennedy’s vision of a collaborative government might look like. Part of the discussion between the camps was first reported by the Washington Post in July.
The next day, a video that captured Kennedy and Trump’s phone conversation on the evening of the assassination attempt was posted on the social media platform X by Kennedy’s son – an extraordinary breach of privacy.
Several Trump advisers now saw Kennedy as untrustworthy – the same warning that Kennedy was getting about Trump.
Kennedy quickly apologised, but communication between the two camps went cold.
As the Republican convention ended, Trump was feeling invincible. Biden, sidelined by a Covid infection, was slipping steadily in the polls, and the Democratic Party seemed hopelessly divided. The Kennedy campaign returned to business as usual.
But that vibe did not last. Just three days after Trump formally accepted his party’s nomination, Biden dropped out of the race. Within the week, the Democrats had coalesced behind Vice-President Kamala Harris, rattling Trump.
Kennedy apologised again to Trump as Malik nudged the two sides to reengage. Two weeks later, conversations resumed.
On August 12, Kennedy and Trump reconvened at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club in Florida, a meeting also attended by Wiles, Fox, Malik and Donald Trump jnr.
‘Bobby and I’
The next few days consolidated the alliance, although uncertainty lingered until the last moment.
On August 16, at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, Trump sat down with members of the New Jersey Coalition for Vaccination Choice, a group that has fought vaccine mandates and whose support Trump was eager to court.
The group was there to discuss child health issues but also talked up Kennedy as an ally, according to two of the people briefed on the meeting. Trump indicated that he planned to bring him into his camp.
Privately, Kennedy told his advisers that he felt Trump was serious about focusing on childhood chronic disease and de-escalating the war in Ukraine.
The next week, Kennedy’s running mate, Nicole Shanahan, told an interviewer that she and Kennedy were considering dropping out and supporting Trump, making public what had been privately in the works for weeks.
Later that week, she expressed qualms. “The hesitation we have right now in joining forces with Trump is that he has not apologised or publicly come out and said Operation Warp Speed was his fault,” she told Adam Carolla, a podcast host.
Trump is unlikely to apologise for the vaccine effort. But Kennedy nonetheless finally came to believe that the partnership was worth it. On August 23, he shared a stage with Trump at a rally in Arizona, formally throwing his support behind his onetime rival.
“Bobby and I will fight together to defeat the corrupt political establishment,” Trump crowed.
A few days later, he made Kennedy an honorary co-chair of his transition team, giving him prized influence over personnel and policy for a second Trump term.
Kennedy is expected to campaign for Trump this fall, but his long-term role with Trump remains unclear. Some of his advisers believe that he is poised to lead the Health and Human Services Department, despite the formidable battle he’d face getting confirmed by the Senate.
Trump has so far made no public promises.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Rebecca Davis O’Brien, Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman
Photographs by: Adriana Zehbrauskas, Jordan Vonderhaar, Jim Wilson and Jon Cherry
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
