Robert F. Kennedy Jr. becomes a frequent campaigner for Donald Trump

GLENDALE, Arizona — Three weeks later drop his independent presidential campaign, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has become a ubiquitous campaigner for Donald Trumpurging his own loyal followers to throw their lot in with the former president, who had said he would give Kennedy a job if he returned to the White House.

Kennedy goes on the road with Tulsi Gabbarda former congresswoman who has built her own right-wing following.

Many of the people who turned out to meet them on Saturday night in the Phoenix suburbs were already dedicated Trump supporters. A few, like Jacob Cutler, wore gear from Kennedy’s now-defunct campaign. An avid Kennedy supporter, Cutler has embraced Trump as the best person to stop Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee.

“I was worried about what would happen if she won, and that’s why I felt like I had to support Donald Trump and help him win,” said Cutler, a 40-year-old who voted for Democratic President Joe Biden four years ago. “If anything, it was the lesser of two evils.”

The Kennedy-Trump alliance gives the former Republican president an endorsement from the high-profile scion of a Democratic dynasty and a chance to cast his campaign as one with bipartisan appeal. Even a small number of Democrats switching to Trump’s side because of Kennedy’s endorsement could be crucial in states like Arizona, which Biden won by fewer than 11,000 votes in 2020.

Trump’s path back to the White House depends in part on voters who Do not trust settings such as government, corporations, and mainstream media, a group that is hard to reach, convince, and motivate to vote. Kennedy and Gabbard appeal to those voters, who typically get their news and information from podcasts and YouTube videos.

Both Trump and Kennedy have pledged in recent weeks to “Make America Great Again,” a play on Trump’s signature slogan “Make America Great Again,” which references Kennedy’s frequent arguments during his campaign that chronic disease is becoming more prevalent among Americans and his support for discredited theories about vaccines.

During Trump’s campaign event on Saturday, Kennedy spoke members of his family who have criticized his embrace of Trump.

“I feel that people — including family members who have turned against me, my old friends who look at me with contempt and condemnation — are the victims of a kind of hypnosis and a psyop and an orchestrated attempt to separate us from each other,” Kennedy told the crowd at Arizona Christian University. “Those of us who are awake need to protect the things that are valuable in this country without going after them until they wake up and see what we have done for them.”

Partisans who switch sides often carry extra weight, because they are respected by activists who once condemned them. They can become sought-after surrogates and trusted messengers.

“It’s a huge, huge addition to the Trump team,” Henry Slayton, a 62-year-old engineer from Bakersfield, California, said of Kennedy and Gabbard. “It shows they’re all here for the people, they’re here for the American people, not for themselves.”

Harris has her own coalition of strange bedfellows, including a son of former Republican presidential candidate John McCain and prominent members of former President George W. Bush’s administration. Progressives have even cheered Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney, for Support Harrisa staggering change in attitude toward a lifelong conservative and fierce advocate of the Iraq war.

Kennedy gained fame as an environmental lawyer and leader of an anti-vaccination groupHe initially challenged Biden for the Democratic nomination, but then left the party to run as an independent, accusing the party of conspiring against him.

Gabbard was known during her four House terms for taking positions that are at odds with her own party’s establishment. She was an early and vocal supporter of Senator Bernie Sanders’ 2016 Democratic presidential primary, which made her popular with progressives.

Because she did not seek reelection in 2020, Gabbard instead ran for president. She said that America’s wars in the Middle East were destabilizing the region, making the U.S. less safe and costing thousands of American lives, and that Democrats and Republicans shared the blame. tore Harris’ record to shreds during a primary debate and ultimately outlasted her in that race, which Biden ultimately won.

She drew on that experience to help Trump prepare for his own debate against Harris. Trump has given her and Kennedy roles in his presidential transition, potentially giving them the clout to help staff his administration and shape the policies the federal bureaucracy would pursue when he returns to the White House.

“This is about us the people standing up for freedom,” Gabbard said Saturday. “This is about us the people standing up for peace.”

Kennedy argued that the U.S. should not arm Ukrainians in the third year of a war started by the Russian invasion, and claimed that the West forced Russian President Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine by expanding NATO. Trump in Tuesday’s presidential debate refused to say whether he thinks it is important that Ukraine wins the war.

And he presented Trump’s dismissal of expert opinions and research as admirable.

He was moved, he said, to see Trump embrace the views of mothers who believe their children have been harmed by vaccines, even though the overwhelming consensus among researchers is that complications from childhood vaccines are extremely rare and outweighed by the benefits. He described Trump as someone who is not captive to “the whole establishment” and the “high priests of the orthodoxies.”

“I think that’s a measure of his character,” he said.

Children’s Health Defense, an organization representing Kennedy, currently has a lawsuit pending against several news organizations, including The Associated Press, accusing them of violating anti-monopoly laws by taking steps to identify misinformation, including information about COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines.