Donald Trump thought he narrowed his running mate shortlist down to one name.
But Trump got the surprise of his life.
And this candidate just rejected Donald Trump’s offer to be Vice President.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. rejects Trump’s offer to serve as his running mate
Poll after poll shows that Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pulls more votes from Joe Biden than from Donald Trump.
Trump is playing a little political jujitsu by releasing videos on Truth Social pumping up Kennedy’s left-wing credit and pointing out that he is a big fan of the Green New Deal and the most far-left candidate in the race.
Trump is doing this in the hopes that Democrats who feel “meh” about Joe Biden will vote for Kennedy instead.
“RFK Jr. is, as you know, the most radical Left candidate in the race. He’s more so than the Green Party, he’s more so than even Crooked Joe Biden,” Trump said in a video posted on Truth Social. “But he’s got some nice things about him, I happen to like him. Unfortunately, he is about the Green New Scam because he believes in that and a lot of people don’t.”
Kennedy responded on X by stating that Trump asked him to serve as his running mate.
“President Trump calls me an ultra-left radical. I’m soooo liberal that his emissaries asked me to be his VP,” Kennedy posted. “I respectfully declined the offer. I am against President Trump, and President Biden can’t win. Judging by his new website, it looks like President Trump knows who actually can beat him.”
The appeal of a Trump-Kennedy ticket
Both reports from Trump supporters and the media revealed a surprising level of openness on the part of him to having Kennedy on the ticket.
The New York Times said Trump liked the idea of running with Kennedy since they would be two anti-establishment outsiders who would scramble all preconceived notions about what a Presidential ticket needs to look like.
It would also appeal to Trump’s sense of showmanship that he honed during his years as a major television star.
“In other cases, Mr. Trump has fixated on the whimsical over the practical. He has asked several people about running with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., saying he is intrigued by the branding potential of a ‘Trump-Kennedy’ ticket despite his recent attacks on Mr. Kennedy and the unlikelihood of such a scenario. Mr. Trump’s campaign team remains adamantly opposed to the idea, and Mr. Kennedy, who is already running for president as an independent, has said he would not consider such an offer,” the New York Times reported.
Even Trump supporters like Steve Bannon advocated for him to put Kennedy on the ticket in order to guarantee a historic landslide win.
“If somehow it worked out [that] you could get Kennedy as a running mate — and I don’t know, that is far from even technically can happen because of the structure of the Democratic and Republican parties and ballot access and all that — you could get 60 percent or higher in the country and win a massive landslide,” Bannon said on his War Room podcast.
A Trump-Kennedy ticket will not happen.
But Kennedy could still serve Trump’s purposes by pulling votes from Biden.
