Multiple mainstream media outlets launched an assault on Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. after he announced the suspension of his campaign and his endorsement of former President Trump.
Outlets like CNN sounded the alarm that Kennedy’s flip to Trump will significantly help the former president’s re-election campaign, while others like the Washington Post and Politico published entire pieces simply belittling the candidate.
“By endorsing Trump, RFK Jr. betrays the Kennedy legacy,” blasted the headline to Washington Post associate editor and columnist Karen Tumulty’s opinion piece.
Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. endorsing former President Donald Trump set off a wave of intense reactions from the mainstream media. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)
Kennedy announced his decision at a press conference in Phoenix on Friday, telling reporters, “I’ve made the heart-wrenching decision to suspend my campaign and to support President Trump. This decision is agonizing for me because of the difficulties it causes me, and my children and my friends.”
The candidate accused the Democratic Party of waging “continual legal warfare against both President Trump and myself,” and running “a sham” Democratic primary election that he said prevented him from having a fair shot at the White House.
He also called out the media, saying its “censorship” of his campaign contributed to the evaporation of his path to the presidency.
The Post’s Tumulty punished Kennedy with a searing column about how he has betrayed his family’s legacy throughout his life and has stayed true to form with this decision.
“His bizarre campaign for president this year — with its revelations that he had a dead worm in his brain and once left the carcass of a bear cub in Central Park — was an embarrassment. But his announcement on Friday that he would ‘throw my support’ to Donald Trump in battleground states represents a betrayal of a higher order.”
She continued, writing, “Yet in casting his lot with a former president who preaches intolerance and division, he has cast aside the principles for which generations of Kennedys have stood.”
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Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announces he is suspending his presidential campaign at a news conference Friday, Aug 23, 2024, in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Darryl Webb)
The Post columnist Alexandra Petri mocked Kennedy with a satirical column written from the perspective of the parasite that the candidate said a doctor told him had living in his head at one point.
She wrote on Friday, “I say now what I have said this whole campaign: I am a parasite and I do not have the country’s best interests at heart. So it is clear to me now that I have no choice but to drop out of the race and support Donald Trump.”
Politico couldn’t resist the abject mockery, publishing a listicle of the “7 weirdest moments from RFK Jr.’s long-shot campaign” that same day.
Among them, Politico listed his story about the brain parasite as one weird moment, the X post he wrote in July where he said he said he wasn’t sure “what is a conspiracy theory and what isn’t” regarding 9/11, and the time he produced a debate between him and President and Biden and Trump that involved him pausing the televised CNN presidential debate in June to give his answers.
Cable TV pundits ripped Kennedy as well, though they also pointed out that his endorsement of Trump will hurt the Democratic Party in November.
Appearing on his old network, former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan told network anchor Ari Melber, “I didn’t think that he was a big threat to Trump. He was a threat to Democrats because he was pulling voters away from Trump because he’s an anti-vaxxer loon, and a lot of the Trump people who thought Trump was not loony enough on vaxes was heading toward RFK Jr.”
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Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. waves to the crowd at a campaign rally for Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump, Friday, Aug. 23, 2024, in Glendale, Ariz. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)
“So actually, whether we like it or not, it is a good thing for Donald Trump that he pulled out and endorsed Trump because Trump gets to have some of those far-right nutty voters come home to him,” Hasan said, before adding another dig.
“It is ironic to see RFK junior, the independent third-party candidate who’s running against the establishment – who called Trump the worst president of his lifetime, called him sociopathic – now saying, ‘Oh yeah, I’m gonna back this guy for a second term.’”
During that same segment, Melber dinged Kennedy as an “unserious guy.”
CNN host Erin Burnett’s response to Kennedy’s Trump endorsement didn’t revel in mockery of the independent candidate, but provided a stark warning to the Democratic Party that the endorsement will lower its chances at winning the White House in November.
“The latest swing state polls show Kennedy with five or six percent of the vote,” Burnett told CNN viewers on Friday evening, adding, “And so, when you think about it overall, and they say ‘Well, that’s not a big deal.’ Actually, if that is the case in swing states, it is huge. It is everything. It is more than the margin between Harris and Trump in some of those same states.”
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Fox News Digital’s Joseph Wulfsohn contributed to this report.
