A member of Donald Trump’s campaign threw cold water on reports that the former president was considering Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as his running mate—with an aide saying on X, formerly Twitter, that such a partnership would never happen due to the Kennedy scion’s past environmental activism.
“NO ONE from the Trump Campaign ever approached RFK Jr. (or ever will)—one of the most LIBERAL and radical environmentalists in the country,” senior adviser Chris LaCivita wrote. “For all the fake news—update your stories.”
Speculation about the strange pairing reached a fever pitch over the weekend when the New York Post penned a story claiming that the Trump campaign reached out to RFK Jr. “early on” about joining the ticket, citing sources close to the former president.
The Post also reported that Kennedy promptly responded to the inquiry, telling representatives for Trump that he was not interested.
At least one Trump donor, however, told the newspaper that the movement to get Kennedy on board is “still alive.”
Trump, for his part, has not directly responded to the idea.
The idea of the odd couple—Kennedy is a lifelong Democrat currently running as an independent—has at least one high-profile fan in Trumpworld: Steve Bannon, who has for months pushed the idea of the former president joining together with the notorious anti-vaxxer.
Last year, he said that a Trump-Kennedy ticket would win “in a massive landslide” and bring voters out to the polls that would never have voted for the former president.
“If somehow it worked out, if 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.”
Trump similarly complimented RFK Jr. last year when asked about his candidacy, saying that he is a “very smart person,” who has “hit a little bit of a nerve” with his conspiratorial comments on a host of issues—including pushback against the efforts in several states to remove Trump from the 2024 ballot under the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment.
