THINK WHAT YOU WILL about Donald Trump, his announcement Friday that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., would play a role in a second Trump administration was a masterstroke of political judo.
On Friday, Kennedy suspended his presidential campaign and announced that he would remove his name from ballots in swing states where he might draw enough votes away from Trump in November to hand the election to Kamala Harris. Kennedy said the Democratic Party had abandoned the ideals it held when his father and uncle, Robert F. Kennedy and John F. Kennedy, were Attorney General and President of the United States 60 years ago—fighting for peace, freedom, and the working class. According to Kennedy, Democrats now represent Big Pharma, Big Food, endless war, and the “censorship-industrial complex.”
Kennedy described his decision as heart-wrenching, in no small part because his wife and family do not support (or even like) Donald Trump. He’s become the first member of his family to endorse a Republican for president, and his siblings issued a statement less than an hour after his speech disavowing him and his endorsement.
But Kennedy said that as a 70-year-old man, he doesn’t have that many years left to be effective, and he views Trump as offering the best hope to save future generations of American children from chronic illnesses due to toxic chemicals in food and medicines, reverse the trend toward government censorship adopted by the Biden-Harris administration, and end America’s military adventures overseas.
Kennedy later appeared at a Trump rally in suburban Phoenix, where the former president promised to empower Kennedy to investigate the assassinations of his father and uncle. Kennedy’s potential role in a Trump administration is still unclear, but the unity between the two men, based on a promise to protect children, is a refreshing change from the increasingly personal attacks between Democrats and Republicans. The event derailed whatever momentum Kamala Harris had built with the Democratic Party convention in Chicago, which she addressed Thursday night. Reaction to her speech, which she delivered well, has been buried in the news cycle by the Trump-Kennedy alliance announced less than 24 hours later.
At the rally, Trump mentioned a report released by the Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General this week revealing some 300,000 unaccompanied migrant children that have disappeared into the United States. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has little authority to track those children or intervene, even in circumstances that are reportedly unsafe—as in one case where a woman reported to ICE that a migrant minor was in an inappropriate relationship with her husband. One Health and Human Services whistleblower described this shocking situation earlier this year as “taxpayer-funded child slavery.”
Also: Exciting new discovery at Göbekli Tepe; reported case of tularemia spreading from a seal to a human in Washington state; and thought crime apparently now illegal in the US and UK.
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