After announcing that he would not pursue the Libertarian Party’s nomination in order to gain ballot access across the nation, outsider presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he also turned down an offer by Donald Trump’s camp to be his running mate.
A member of the Kennedy clan and elder son of the late U.S. Attorney General Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy, who was assassinated when he was in the middle of his own campaign to be the Democrat’s nominee, RFK Jr. has nonetheless presented himself as an alternative to the two status quo parties. His vaccine skepticism and deference to personal autonomy over the dictates of experts and government officials have garnered him many sympathizers who normally support Trump.
This is likely part of why reports have been circulating in the media for months that Trump representatives have reached out to Kennedy to gauge his interest in joining the former president’s ticket. On Monday, Kennedy, responding on X to Trump’s accusation that he is too far left, claimed that the outreach did occur:
“President Trump calls me an ultra-left radical. I’m soooo liberal that his emissaries asked me to be his VP. I respectfully declined the offer. I am against President Trump, and President Biden can’t win.”
The Trump team initially reached out when RFK Jr. announced his candidacy in April 2023, per the Fox News report.
Trump campaign co-manager Chris LaCivita issued a strong denial that any such communication occurred when the news first broke in January. This was reiterated in a recent X post that seemed to channel his boss’s penchant for off-the-cuff insults.
“Re-upping this from January …was true then and it’s true now [RFK Jr.] ….your [sic] a leftie loonie that would never be approached to be on the ticket..sorry!” LaCivita said. He attached a repost of the original denial for good measure.
Kennedy also rejected the notion of running on the Libertarian Party ticket, further evincing a willingness to ride out the election cycle on his own terms.
“We’re not gonna have any problems getting on the ballot ourselves so we won’t be running Libertarian,” he told ABC News at an event in Iowa this weekend arranged just to qualify him for the state’s ballot.
Kennedy, who is running on the self-formed “We the People Party” ticket, might not have been a sure bet to take over the Libertarian ticket even if he wanted it, reported ZeroHedge, as some of his policy positions — including his steadfast defense of Israel while the country is under international pressure to pause its siege of Gaza, along with his support for imposing some limits on Second Amendment rights — put him at odds with anti-war, pro-self reliance libertarians.
