During a meeting in Arizona on Friday evening, Donald Trump suggested a new idea on the sidelines of his assassination attempt in mid-July. The candidate for the White House said he wanted to create, once elected, an “independent presidential commission on assassinations”, which would be headed by Robert F. Kennedy. The assassinated former president's nephew will have the power to declassify all secret documents on the assassinations of his uncle, John F. Kennedy, in 1963, of his father, U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy, in 1968, and on the attempt to which Donald Trump himself was the subject.
The former US president, who was shot in the ear by a gunman during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, made the statement the day after RFK Jr., who was running as an independent candidate, dropped out of the presidential race. Donald Trump explained that he would give full powers to his former rival, an “extraordinary man” and “who himself was the subject of multiple threats during his campaign”, to consult all the documents linked to these shootings.
The 2024 electoral campaign still holds surprises. The cycle leaves a new twist in the script after the attack against Donald Trump and the departure of President Joe Biden from the race. The road to November 5 now leaves a Trumpist Kennedy. Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy threw in the towel this Friday, ten months after beginning his path to the White House. The environmental lawyer and renowned anti-vaccine activist closed the chapter this morning in Arizona, one of the seven states that will define the November 5 election.
Kennedy, son of Bobby Kennedy and nephew of the 35th president, John F. Kennedy, will remove his name from the ballot in 10 states to increase the chances of Trump returning to the White House. It is still too early to know how Kennedy's withdrawal benefits Trump. The independent had an average voting intention of around 5% in the polls. Analysts have warned how difficult it is to calculate the real value in the polls of non-party candidates in a two-party system.
On Thursday night, it was announced that the campaign of Kennedy, 70, had abandoned the legal process for the non-party candidate to compete in Arizona, with a series of letters signed by notaries. The news was confirmed by the entity's Secretary of State, which is responsible for organizing the elections. This despite the fact that Kennedy's team recently announced that they had exceeded the number of signatures necessary for his name to be included on the ballot.
The exit signs were clear. Nicole Shanahan, Kennedy's vice presidential candidate, said in an interview Tuesday that the campaign was already studying the possibility. “One option is to stay in the race and build a solid third party, but we run the risk of allowing a Kamala Harris and Tim Walz presidency because we take some votes away from Trump. Or we leave now and join forces with Trump and explain to our base why we are making this decision,” Shanahan said on the Impact Theory podcast.
These explanations came this morning at a press conference in Arizona. “I always told my voters that I would abandon the campaign to become a spoiler, someone who has the ability to affect the outcome of the election without having a real chance of winning. And the information we have in my hands shows that I have become one, since I have no viable way to win,” she noted.
Trump and Kennedy had been negotiating support for several months. The Washington Post assured in July that the teams were in communication and that they had even had a meeting in Milwaukee, where both met. The newspaper claimed that Kennedy was offering to get out of the race in exchange for a position in the Republican's Cabinet in 2025.
The campaign has left a string of scandals. Americans learned shockingly earlier this month that Kennedy was responsible for a decade-long unsolved mystery in New York. Kennedy admitted that in 2014 he abandoned the body of a dead bear cub in Central Park and made it look like the animal had been hit by a bicycle. The episode seemed funny to him then, but in 2024 it was a revelation that he himself brought to light as damage control hours before The New Yorker magazine revealed it.
