How Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Unlikely Partnership Took Shape

About three hours after former President Donald J. Trump was nearly assassinated, on a Saturday evening in mid-July, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. got a phone call: Would he consider joining forces with Mr. Trump? What about serving as his running mate?

The caller was Calley Means, a health care entrepreneur who had advised Mr. Kennedy on chronic disease policy. He suggested that it might be a moment for unity — Mr. Trump had just narrowly escaped the same fate that had befallen Mr. Kennedy’s father and uncle. Mr. Kennedy, who was running an independent campaign for president, said he wasn’t interested in the vice presidency, and the call ended.

A short while later, Mr. Kennedy called back. Yes, he said, he would speak with Mr. Trump.

The calls set off a frenzy of calculations and soul-searching inside the Kennedy camp: What, if anything, was on the table? Could an alliance with Mr. Trump give Mr. Kennedy more power to address issues he had described throughout his campaign — chronic disease, censorship, corporate reach into government agencies, the war in Ukraine? Or would it tear apart his coalition, and his family?

Mr. Trump was not, at that point, seriously considering adding Mr. Kennedy to the ticket. Still, Mr. Means’s efforts presented an opening to bring Mr. Kennedy into the fold and remove him as a potential drain on Mr. Trump’s votes.

What followed was a six-week crush of behind-the-scenes discussions, embarrassing missteps, secret meetings and private misgivings, culminating in Mr. Kennedy’s suspending his campaign and backing Mr. Trump.

The Trump-Kennedy alignment, one of the strangest in modern political history, brought together two men of extraordinary ego and unpredictability. Each candidate, a Republican and a former Democrat, had publicly disparaged the other during the campaign. Now, each had made the political calculation to embrace the other.

This account of how that partnership came to be is based on interviews with more than 20 people who were involved in or briefed on the discussions. It is supported by public interviews and statements by Mr. Kennedy over the past 10 days.

Some voices in both camps had been pushing for an alliance for months, some for more than a year. Others, including Mr. Kennedy’s closest family members, fought it until the last minute. And it nearly fell apart several times.

The discussions were mediated by a few inner-circle players, including Mr. Trump’s top adviser, Susie Wiles, and Mr. Kennedy’s campaign manager, his daughter-in-law, Amaryllis Fox. Tucker Carlson, the political commentator, played a vital role, as did Donald Trump Jr. Omeed Malik, a businessman and political donor who has supported both Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Trump, was also closely involved.

There were also people, like Mr. Means, who were outside the inner circle but nonetheless exerted pressure on both sides. Leaders in the so-called health freedom movement, a small but vocal coalition of people opposed to vaccines and public health mandates, who have long considered Mr. Kennedy their champion, encouraged the merger as well.

In the end, both men saw political value in the partnership.

Dennis Kucinich, the former Ohio congressman who was Mr. Kennedy’s campaign manager for much of 2023, observed that while the Democratic Party had pushed Mr. Kennedy away, Mr. Trump embraced him.

For Mr. Trump, that effort “presents a real opportunity for the campaign,” he said. “It consolidates a base and broadens a reach.”

When Mr. Means got off the phone with Mr. Kennedy on July 13, he reached out to Mr. Carlson. The moment, in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, seemed to present an opening to connect Mr. Trump with Mr. Kennedy and facilitate a possible endorsement.

Mr. Carlson loved the idea. Mr. Kennedy was his friend, and for months Mr. Kennedy had been giving the Trump team headaches. The Trump campaign’s internal polling showed that Mr. Kennedy was draining support from both President Biden and Mr. Trump, but some of Mr. Trump’s advisers believed he posed a bigger threat to their candidate. Donald Trump Jr., in particular, had been trying to find a way to push Mr. Kennedy out of the race, fearing he could hurt his father’s chances, according to two people briefed on private discussions.

Mr. Kennedy was a fixture in right-wing media, reaching audiences that embraced his heterodox political views, conspiratorial rhetoric, and the ideas he floated about health and medicine — including promoting widely disproved claims that childhood vaccinations can cause autism. He appealed to voters Mr. Trump wanted.

As recently as April, Mr. Trump — who has long been fascinated by the allure of the Kennedy name, allies say — had considered naming Mr. Kennedy as his running mate, musing that he liked how “Trump-Kennedy” sounded. The Trump campaign even conducted polling of the pair as a ticket.

But while Mr. Kennedy remained in the race, he presented a threat that the Trump team was eager to fight. As summer approached, the campaign was preparing to run negative ads against him.

The assassination attempt changed the dynamic.

That evening, just hours after Mr. Trump was shot, Mr. Carlson connected Mr. Kennedy to the former president on a three-way text message, and the two candidates agreed to talk. After Mr. Trump was examined at a hospital in western Pennsylvania, they spoke by phone for nearly half an hour, according to four people with direct knowledge of the discussions.

Mr. Trump tried to coax Mr. Kennedy into his camp. “I would love you to do something,” he said, according to a portion of the conversation that was later made public. “I think it’ll be so good for you and so big for you. And we’re going to win.”

A moment of reckoning

It wasn’t only the Trump team that had been considering an alliance. For months, some in the Kennedy campaign had toyed with the same idea.

Some had even imagined Mr. Kennedy becoming Mr. Trump’s running mate. “A Trump/Kennedy ticket would cause Pfizer’s stock to plummet, the corrupt media conglomerates to go into hysteria, and would guarantee a win in November,” Link Lauren, who worked briefly as a communications strategist for Mr. Kennedy, wrote in an email to the candidate and a few top aides in January.

Now, in the hours after the shooting, combining forces seemed close to becoming a reality.

But as Mr. Kennedy weighed his options, some of his closest advisers and family members were wary.

Mr. Kennedy’s wife, the actress Cheryl Hines, was particularly concerned. A lifelong Democrat, Ms. Hines had criticized Mr. Trump in the past. She had also faced public backlash for her husband’s political pursuits.

“I would say that Cheryl’s reaction was the opposite of encouraging,” Mr. Kennedy said in a call to TMZ Live.

In conversations that weekend, Ms. Hines and others close to Mr. Kennedy cautioned that Mr. Trump was untrustworthy. As they saw it, Mr. Trump had left him hanging before: In January 2017, Mr. Kennedy told reporters that Mr. Trump, then the president-elect, had asked him to lead a vaccine safety commission. Hours later, Mr. Trump’s aides distanced themselves from the idea. The incident still stung.

They also wondered whether some of Mr. Kennedy’s supporters would balk at the idea of his working with Mr. Trump, whose administration gutted environmental protections, empowered big corporations and pursued other measures at odds with Mr. Kennedy’s most cherished causes.

Mr. Kennedy had assailed Mr. Trump over his handling of the coronavirus pandemic — especially his push for the rapid development of Covid-19 vaccines. Operation Warp Speed, a partnership between the government and pharmaceutical companies that expedited the production of a vaccine, is broadly considered one of the greatest successes of Mr. Trump’s administration. But to Mr. Kennedy and many people in the health freedom movement, the project was tantamount to tyranny.

Finally, it was not clear to Mr. Kennedy’s advisers what he would, or could, do in a Trump administration. Some took Mr. Means at his word when he mentioned the vice presidency, one person close to Mr. Kennedy said. Others argued that it was probably posed as a hypothetical — or that it was a misunderstanding.

(Mr. Kennedy has since said, on a podcast, that he would never have taken the job: “Vice president is the worst job in Washington.”)

More immediate forces were also pressing on Mr. Kennedy. His campaign was facing costly lawsuits over his efforts to get his name on state ballots across the country. His popularity in the polls was shrinking. And he was running out of money, fast.

After Mr. Biden’s disastrous debate performance against Mr. Trump in June, some of Mr. Kennedy’s advisers were surprised that Mr. Kennedy did not see a surge of support from disaffected Democrats, according to a person close to the candidate.

They realized he had no more support to peel from the Democrats — and the Democratic leadership had shown no interest in a partnership. For some of Mr. Kennedy’s allies, it was a reckoning that the only path forward lay with Mr. Trump.

Meeting in Milwaukee

After their initial phone call, Mr. Kennedy was eager to talk with Mr. Trump in person. On July 15, two days after the shooting, the men met in Milwaukee, where the Republican National Convention was being held.

When reports of the meeting began to circulate, Mr. Kennedy insisted that he was staying in the race.

But privately, Mr. Kennedy’s team started to pitch him for a particular role: He wanted to be the health and human services secretary, or take on some meaningful role in public health oversight.

At least one of the asks came in writing, which made the Trump team nervous because of possible implications of a quid pro quo, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

A person involved with the Kennedy campaign said they had merely proposed what Mr. Kennedy’s vision of a collaborative government might look like. Part of the discussion between the camps was first reported by the Washington Post in July.

The next day, a video that captured Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Trump’s phone conversation on the evening of the assassination attempt was posted on X by Mr. Kennedy’s son — an extraordinary breach of privacy.

Several Trump advisers now saw Mr. Kennedy as untrustworthy — the same warning that Mr. Kennedy was getting about Mr. Trump.

Mr. Kennedy quickly apologized, but communication between the two camps went cold.

As the Republican convention ended, Mr. Trump was feeling invincible. Mr. Biden, sidelined by a Covid infection, was slipping steadily in the polls, and the Democratic Party seemed hopelessly divided. The Kennedy campaign returned to business as usual.

But that vibe did not last. Just three days after Mr. Trump formally accepted his party’s nomination, Mr. Biden dropped out of the race. Within the week, the Democrats had coalesced behind Vice President Kamala Harris, rattling Mr. Trump.

Mr. Kennedy apologized again to Mr. Trump as Mr. Malik nudged the two sides to re-engage. Two weeks later, conversations resumed.

On Aug. 12, Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Trump reconvened at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club in Florida, a meeting also attended by Ms. Wiles, Ms. Fox, Mr. Malik and Donald Trump Jr.

‘Bobby and I’

The next few days consolidated the alliance, although uncertainty lingered until the last moment.

On Aug. 16, at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., Mr. Trump sat down with members of the New Jersey Coalition for Vaccination Choice, a group that has fought vaccine mandates and whose support Mr. Trump was eager to court.

The group was there to discuss child health issues but also talked up Mr. Kennedy as an ally, according to two of the people briefed on the meeting. Mr. Trump indicated that he planned to bring him into his camp.

Privately, Mr. Kennedy told his advisers that he felt Mr. Trump was serious about focusing on childhood chronic disease and de-escalating the war in Ukraine.

The next week, Mr. Kennedy’s running mate, Nicole Shanahan, told an interviewer that she and Mr. Kennedy were considering dropping out and supporting Mr. Trump, making public what had been privately in the works for weeks.

Later that week, she expressed qualms. “The hesitation we have right now in joining forces with Trump is that he has not apologized or publicly come out and said Operation Warp Speed was his fault,” she told Adam Carolla, a podcast host.

Mr. Trump is unlikely to apologize for the vaccine effort. But Mr. Kennedy nonetheless finally came to believe that the partnership was worth it. On Aug. 23, he shared a stage with Mr. Trump at a rally in Arizona, formally throwing his support behind his onetime rival.

“Bobby and I will fight together to defeat the corrupt political establishment,” Mr. Trump crowed.

A few days later, he made Mr. Kennedy an honorary co-chair of his transition team, giving him prized influence over personnel and policy for a second Trump term.

Mr. Kennedy is expected to campaign for Mr. Trump this fall, but his long-term role with Mr. Trump remains unclear. Some of his advisers believe that he is poised to lead the Health and Human Services Department, despite the formidable battle he’d face getting confirmed by the Senate.

Mr. Trump has so far made no public promises.

Theodore Schleifer contributed reporting.