Inside the Last Weeks of RFK Jr.'s Campaign

August 17, 2024

Robert Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign ended as it began: with a lengthy speech that railed against the dark forces controlling politics, government and the media.

Speaking in Phoenix on Friday, Kennedy said he was suspending his independent bid for the White House and endorsed former President Donald Trump, citing their shared concerns about "the war on our children," the war in Ukraine, and free speech. "I have the certainty that this is what I'm meant to do," he said, calling the decision a "spiritual journey" to embrace a candidate who, until a few weeks ago, he derided as a "sociopath" and a "terrible human being."

In other circumstances, it would have been a striking scene: the scion of the most iconic family in Democratic politics, endorsing Trump to keep the Democrats out of the White House and denouncing them as "the party of war, censorship [and] corruption." Except that this particular Kennedy is a longtime conspiracy theorist who used his famous name to prop up one of the most bizarre presidential bids in modern history.

The announcement marked the end of a chaotic campaign which over 16 months switched from Democrat to independent, cycled through campaign managers and staffers, and shifted its positions on issues from abortion to climate change. Run by Kennedy's daughter-in-law, the operation had no headquarters, few official events, and dedicated much of its time to appearing on podcasts and fringe YouTube shows. Kennedy showed up where he was invited: a sheriffs conference in Oklahoma, the set of Dr. Phil in Houston, a Bitcoin conference event in Miami, and a discussion about pig farming in Maine.

Kennedy says all of this was by design. “I’m less interested in campaigning and I have, I would say, almost zero interest in attention," he told me in an interview in Albuquerque, N.M., in June, where he was about to premiere his latest documentary in front of an audience of more than 200 supporters wearing “Kennedy for President” buttons. "I really am preoccupied with governing.”

When Kennedy managed to make national headlines, it was rarely for anything related to governing. Instead, an increasingly outlandish series of revelations about his past trickled to the surface: the dead worm in his brain, the dead bear cub in his trunk, the dog (or was it a goat?) he once ate off a stick in the Andes.

Kennedy's unlikely coalition of vaccine skeptics, New Age influencers, environmental activists, Silicon Valley pundits, and right-wing fans was held together by nostalgic vibes and cash infusions from his running mate, philanthropist Nicole Shanahan. Kennedy and Shanahan rarely saw one another. She spent her time visiting raw milk farms, talking about soil as a political issue, and musing about whether the government may be "satanically possessed.” (Kennedy did not even mention her in his speech suspending his campaign.)

Despite all this, Kennedy polled in double digits for more than a year. The candidate cast himself as a third choice during an election cycle that should have presented the biggest opportunity for an independent candidate in decades. In polls, roughly 2 in 3 Americans said they dreaded a rematch between the 78-year-old Trump and 81-year-old Joe Biden. In a campaign season ripe for a third-party spoiler, Kennedy’s bid had the potential to capture enough support to swing a tight race. Three major forces in U.S. politics—the Democratic National Committee, the Trump campaign, and Kennedy’s own prominent family—all feared that he could draw enough voters to affect the outcome in November.

But Kennedy’s haphazard operation was unable to capitalize on broad public dissatisfaction with Trump and Biden. Like the candidate himself, it operated without a clear goal or coherent ideology, according to interviews with half a dozen current and former campaign staffers and advisers. One month, it would veer left, casting the candidate as "the original liberal" and "old school Kennedy Democrat." The next, it would pull sharply to the right, flying Kennedy to Arizona to “formulate policies that will seal the border permanently” and promoting COVID-19 conspiracy theories.

The 70-year-old candidate was more or less cosplaying the process of running for President, according to current and former staffers. "He hates making binary, black-and-white choices, and he hates deadlines," says one former adviser. Staffers described a chaotic campaign rife with screaming matches on Zoom calls. Longtime associates from Kennedy’s days in environmental and anti-vaccine activism collected six-figure salaries without showing up to a single meeting, they said, describing a constant clash between right and left-wing factions as the campaign struggled to define their candidate's platform.

Staffers who believed in Kennedy's stated mission of "healing the divide" tried to propose a more strategic approach. "I can't be the only one saying let's go to Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada," recalls one former staffer. "Why are we going swimming with sharks in Hawaii from an electoral standpoint? Why are we posting videos of him sailing and skiing?" Surrogates found themselves having to guess Kennedy's stance on issues. "I'm going on TV in front of millions of people,” says a former staffer, “and if they ask me about this guy's policies, I have no f—ing clue where he stands day to day."

Kennedy’s campaign said they were not asking supporters to agree with all his policy positions. His own vice president didn’t. Shanahan, the 39-year-old ex-wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, only met Kennedy twice before deciding to become his running mate and often seemed surprised by the ticket’s positions. In May, she was visibly taken aback when a podcast host told her that Kennedy supported a woman’s right to an abortion up until birth.

She also often appeared blind-sided by revelations about his past. Responding to allegations that he had been accused of sexually assaulting a babysitter, she told TIME on July 5: "Maybe he didn't know that this was the babysitter and thought it was his wife, and came over and affectionately, like, touched her and was like, 'Whoa, that was a mistake!'" When a photo was published that allegedly showed Kennedy eating a dog in Patagonia, Shanahan asked her fiancé to call him for answers. "I was incredibly alarmed," she told TIME, "I was like, this is not okay. You can't eat dogs!" (Kennedy told her it was not a dog, but a goat.)

Advisers complained about the hefty salaries paid to Kennedy allies, many with scant political experience, who struck colleagues as doing little actual campaign work. "It felt like I was the only one on the campaign who didn't have another organization or nonprofit or Substack or podcast they were promoting," says another former staffer. One of Kennedy's senior advisers, Charles Eisenstein, was paid up to $21,000 per month, according to federal election filings, despite taking extended sabbaticals in Costa Rica, calling some of Kennedy's views "repugnant" on a podcast, and telling his 80,000 Substack subscribers that "winning the campaign is not the end goal." (Eisenstein did not return TIME’s request for comment.)

Much of the campaign’s time and money was spent on a fight to appear on state ballots across the country. But a significant amount was spent on efforts to position Kennedy as a scion of his famous father and uncle. A super PAC spent $7 million to air a 30-second ad during the Super Bowl in February, which channeled President John F. Kennedy's famous 1960 spot. It also paid for a half-hour documentary, titled "Who is Bobby?", produced by former Hillary Clinton aide Jay Carson and narrated by Woody Harrelson. These campaign videos, which were promoted on X and YouTube, cast Kennedy as the heir of his father's political legacy.

Read More: The Podcast Campaigners.

Even a flailing Kennedy campaign spooked national Democrats and Republicans, who feared polls could not account for what might happen when Americans fed up with their choices saw a Kennedy on the ballot—no matter what he stood for.

The DNC ran an aggressive, organized, and unusually public effort to draw attention to Kennedy's history of conspiracies and paint him as a Republican-backed stalking horse for Trump. It focused on Kennedy’s ballot-access efforts, retaining lawyers to file legal challenges against the campaign and his super PAC for any violation of federal coordination laws. They were especially worried about swing states, where even a small number of votes could potentially sway the election. "What he seems to be mad at is that the DNC is engaged in politics,” says Lis Smith, who runs the communications for the DNC “war room” targeting third-party candidates, “and that his campaign is completely unprepared to wage an effective political campaign.

Kennedy's famously private family also came out in force. His sister Kerry has called his candidacy "dangerous to our country," and other siblings have called the situation "heart-wrenching" and characterized his policies as "fringe thinking, crackpot ideas and unsound judgment.” Some younger family members were less subtle, with one calling him an "embarrassment” and depicting him as a Russian stooge. "Our brother Bobby’s decision to endorse Trump today is a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear,” five of Kennedy's siblings said in a statement. “It is a sad ending to a sad story.”

The turn toward Trump may have been driven in part by his running mate. In an interview with TIME on July 5, Shanahan, a former major donor to Democratic candidates including Biden, laid out her disgust at the Democrats. Their victory would be “more problematic for democracy than four years of a Trump presidency,” she said. “When you actually get to know those people around Trump, you realize that they’re not as evil as they’re made out to be.”

Shanahan also expounded on a series of right-wing conspiracies, referring to the false notion that Vice President Kamala Harris allowing hundreds of children to be “abducted at the border" and suggesting 9/11 conspiracies merited closer examination. (Shanahan said she had only recently Googled QAnon after being told some of these theories overlapped). “People throw around words like paranoid, fringe, conspiracy, or anti-science,” she says. “I would redefine what fringe and conspiracy theory is. There are millions of Americans questioning if the government is satanic…wondering if there’s some awful evil that has overtaken this country.”

The Trump team’s approach to Kennedy shifted as the campaign progressed. When Kennedy first announced he would run as a Democrat, in April 2023, Trump allies amplified the campaign, believing it would hurt Biden. Kennedy was a frequent guest on right-wing shows, and Fox News aired dozens of segments about his campaign, including a full-length documentary. Kennedy "was making some inroads" with voters, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon told TIME in June, calling Kennedy an "instrument" to help Trump.

Yet over time, polls indicated that Kennedy was increasingly drawing voters away from Trump, and that Republicans largely viewed Kennedy more favorably than Democrats. Trump began to bash Kennedy as a "Democrat Plant" and "radical left liberal" and insulted his family as a "bunch of lunatics." He warned Republicans that a vote for Kennedy was a "wasted protest vote."

As his poll numbers sagged— in a recent CBS News poll, Kennedy drew 2%—and his campaign ran out of cash, Kennedy blamed his lack of momentum on a multi-front war against his campaign. But he particularly blamed Democrats, saying his campaign was under siege by shadowy DNC operatives. "Some of the stuff they've done is just crazy," he told TIME on June 15, somberly thumbing the beads of a white rosary in a dingy side room of the Albuquerque convention center. Kennedy said his campaign had been infiltrated and sabotaged by undercover Democratic operatives trying to "gut it from within." At every level, he said, “we're seeing a lot of dirty tricks being used against the campaign.”

At that time, Kennedy was withering in his appraisal of Trump. "I don't think President Trump has a high interest in actually governing," Kennedy told TIME. "I think he had a very high interest in campaigning." He sharply criticized the former President's "really weak" handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. "He let Anthony Fauci do whatever he wanted,” Kennedy said. "He gave us lockdowns, closed 3.3 million businesses, he bankrupted the country, ran up an 8 trillion dollar debt.”

Shanahan was equally disparaging. "I don't like his style," she said of Trump in her separate interview with TIME. "It's very brutish." A Democrat or Republican win would be "different flavors of awful" for the country, she said.

Yet behind the scenes, Kennedy and his inner circle had long pondered a Trump endorsement. In January, a proposal had made the rounds laying out the case for joining forces with the Trump campaign while Kennedy had leverage.

"A convergence of these two campaigns would change the landscape of American politics, ushering in a new era," Link Lauren, a 25-year-old senior adviser, wrote in a memo, which TIME obtained, to Kennedy and his senior staff. "Trump is not running as a Republican. He's running an America First agenda. He's running outside the lines of the two-party system, just like you."

The proposal, which campaign manager Amaryllis Fox had workshopped, was enthusiastically backed by much of the senior campaign team at the time, according to Lauren. "I thought it would be better to have a seat at the table to impact policy than go home empty-handed," he said. But key advisers, some of whom were being paid huge monthly sums to work remotely, cooled on the idea when they realized that if Kennedy suspended his campaign they would stop receiving their salaries, according to a former staffer.

By mid-summer, Kennedy appeared to be openly shopping around for the best offer, to the panic and disgust of some of his most fervent supporters. Trump changed his tune on Kennedy, describing him as “a little different, but very smart” and saying he would be “honored” to receive his endorsement.

Trump and Kennedy met in Milwaukee during the Republican National Convention, and a leaked video of a phone call between the two candidates showed Trump appearing to appeal for an endorsement. "I would love you to do something," Trump said in the video of the call, which was leaked by Kennedy's son. "And I think it'll be so good for you and so big for you. And we're going to win." In the weeks that followed, Donald Trump Jr. and investor Omeed Malik were among those working to persuade Kennedy to jump on board, according to a source familiar with the discussions.

In the wake of a successful convention, Democrats dismissed the move. “Donald Trump isn’t earning an endorsement that’s going to help build support, he’s inheriting the baggage of a failed fringe candidate," DNC senior advisor Mary Beth Cahill said in a statement on Friday. "Good riddance.”

With reporting by Eric Cortellessa

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