Why I Am Suspending My Campaign for President

By Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

[The following is a transcript of Kennedy’s speech, delivered on August 23, 2024 from Phoenix, Arizona]

Sixteen months ago, in April of 2023, I launched my campaign for President of the United States. I began this journey as a Democrat — the party of my father and my uncle, the party to which I pledged my allegiance long before I was old enough to vote. 

I attended my first Democratic convention at age six in 1960. Back then, the Democrats were the champions of the Constitution, and civil rights. The Democrats stood against authoritarianism, against censorship, and against colonialism, imperialism, and unjust wars. We were the party of labor and the working class. The Democrats were the party of government transparency and the champion of the environment. Our party was the bulwark against Big Money interests and corporate power. True to its name, it was the party of democracy.

As you all know, I left that party last October because it had departed so dramatically from the core values I grew up with. It had become the party of war, censorship, corruption, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Ag, and Big Money. When it abandoned democracy by cancelling the primary to conceal the cognitive decline of the sitting President, I left the party to run as an independent.

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The mainstream of American politics and journalism derided my decision. Conventional wisdom said it would be impossible even to get on the ballot as an independent, because each state poses a tangle of arbitrary rules for collecting signatures. I would need over a million of them, something no presidential candidate in history had ever achieved, and then I’d need a team of attorneys and millions of dollars to handle the legal challenges. The naysayers told us we were climbing a glass version of Mount Impossible. 

So, the first thing I want to tell you is that we proved them wrong. We did it because beneath the radar of mainstream media organs, we inspired a massive independent political movement. More than a hundred thousand volunteers sprang into action, hopeful that they could reverse our nation’s decline. Many worked ten-hour days, sometimes in blizzards and blazing heat. They sacrificed family time, personal commitments, and sleep month after month, energized by a shared vision of a nation healed of its divisions. They set up tables at farmers’ markets. They canvassed door-to-door. In Utah and New Hampshire, volunteers collected signatures in snowstorms, convincing each supporter to stop in the frigid cold, take off their gloves, and sign legibly. During a heat wave in Nevada, I met a tall, athletic volunteer who cheerfully told me he had lost 25 pounds collecting signatures in 117-degree heat. To finance this effort, young Americans donated their lunch money, and senior citizens gave from their Social Security checks. Our 50-state organization collected those million signatures, and more. No presidential campaign in American political history has ever done that.

And so, I want to thank all of these dedicated volunteers, and congratulate all of the campaign staff who coordinated this enormous logistical feat. You accomplished the impossible. You carried me up that glass mountain. You pulled off a miracle. You achieved what all the pundits said could never be done. You have my deepest gratitude. I will never forget that — not just for what you did for my campaign, but for the sacrifices you made because of your love for our country. You showed everyone that democracy is still possible here. It continues to survive in the breasts and in the idealistic human energies that still thrive beneath the canvas of neglect and official and institutional corruption.

Today I am here to tell you that I WILL NOT ALLOW YOUR EFFORTS TO GO TO WASTE.

I am here today to tell you how I will leverage your tremendous accomplishment to serve the ideals we share, the ideals of peace, prosperity, freedom, and health that motivated our campaign. I am here today to describe the path forward that you have opened with your commitment and hard labors.

In an honest system, I believe I would have won this election. In a system of open, fair primaries, with regularly scheduled debates, with a truly independent media untainted by government propaganda and censorship, in a system of nonpartisan courts and election boards, everything would be different. After all, polls consistently showed me beating each of the other candidates in both favorability and in every head-to-head matchup. 

But I’m sorry to say that while democracy may still be alive at the grass roots, it has become little more than a slogan for our political institutions, our media, and our government, and most sadly of all, for the Democratic Party. 

In the name of saving democracy, the Democratic Party set itself to dismantling it. Lacking confidence that its candidate could win at the voting booth, the DNC waged continual legal warfare against both President Trump and myself. Each time our volunteers turned in those towering boxes of signatures needed to get on the ballot, the DNC dragged us into court state by state attempting to erase their work and to subvert the will of the voters who had signed. It deployed DNC-aligned judges to throw me — and other candidates — off the ballot and to throw President Trump in jail. It ran a sham of a primary, rigged to prevent any serious challenge to President Biden.

Then, when a predictably bungled debate performance precipitated the palace coup against President Biden, the same shadowy DNC operatives appointed his successor — also without an election. They installed a candidate who was so unpopular with voters that she dropped out in 2020 without winning a single delegate. 

My uncles and my father both relished debate and prided themselves on their capacity to go toe-to-toe with any opponent in the battle over ideas. They would be astonished to learn of a Democratic Party presidential nominee who, like Vice President Harris, has not appeared for a single interview or unscripted encounter with voters in 35 days. This is profoundly undemocratic. How are the people to choose, when they don’t know whom they are choosing? And how can this look to the rest of the world?

My father and uncle were always conscious of America’s image because of our nation’s role as the template of democracy and the leader of the free world.

Instead of showing us her substance and character, the DNC and its media organs engineered a surge of popularity for Vice President Harris based upon, well, nothing. No policies, no interviews, no debates — only smoke and mirrors and balloons in a highly produced Chicago circus. There, a string of Democratic speakers mentioned Donald Trump 147 times on just the first day. Who needs policy when you have a Trump to hate? In contrast, at the RNC convention President Biden was mentioned twice in 4 days.

I do interviews every day. Some days, as many as 10. President Trump, who actually was nominated in an election, also does interviews daily. How did the Democratic Party choose a candidate that has never done an interview or debate during the entire election cycle? We know the answer. They did it by weaponizing the government and agencies. They did it by abandoning democracy. They did it by suing the opposition and by disenfranchising voters. 

What most alarms me isn’t how the Democratic Party conducts its internal affairs or runs its candidates. What alarms me is the resort to censorship, media control, and weaponization of federal agencies. When a U.S. president colludes with — or outright coerces — media companies to censor political speech, it is an attack on our most sacred right of free expression, the very right upon which all of our other constitutional rights rest.

President Biden mocked Vladimir Putin’s 88% landslide in Russian elections, observing that Putin’s party controlled the Russian press, and that Putin prevented serious opponents from appearing on the ballot. But here in America, the DNC also prevented opponents from getting on the ballot and our television networks exposed themselves as Democratic Party organs. Over the course of more than a year, in a campaign where my poll numbers reached at times into the high 20s, the DNC-aligned mainstream networks maintained a near-total embargo on interviews with me. During his 10-month Presidential campaign in 1992, Ross Perot gave interviews 34 times on the mainstream networks. In contrast, during the 16 months since I declared, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, and CNN combined gave me only two live interviews. Those same networks instead ran a continuous deluge of hit pieces with inaccurate, often vile, pejorative, and defamatory smears. Some of those same networks then colluded with the DNC to keep me off the debate stage. 

Representatives of these networks are in the room right now. I will take a moment to ask you to consider the many ways that you have abdicated your responsibility — the duty of a free press to safeguard democracy and challenge the party in power. Instead of maintaining a posture of fierce skepticism toward authority, you have made yourselves government mouthpieces and stenographers for the organs of power. You did not alone cause the devolution of America’s democracy, but you could have prevented it.

The Democratic Party’s censorship of social media was an even more naked exercise of executive power. This week a federal judge, Terry Doughty, upheld my injunction against President Biden, calling the White House censorship project “the most egregious violation of the First Amendment in the history of the United States of America.” 

Doughty’s previous 155-page decision details how 37 hours after he took the oath of office swearing to uphold the constitution, President Biden's White House opened up a portal and invited the CIA, FBI, CISA, DHS, IRS, and other agencies to censor me and other political dissidents. Even today, users who try to post my campaign videos to Facebook or YouTube get messages that “this content violates community standards.” Two days after Judge Doughty rendered his decision this week, Facebook was attaching warning labels to an online petition calling on ABC to include me in the upcoming debate.

The mainstream media, once the guardian of the First Amendment and democratic principles, has joined a systematic attack on democracy. It always justifies its censorship on the grounds of “combating misinformation,” but oppressors don’t fear lies. They fear the truth.

But here’s the good news. While mainstream outlets denied me a critical platform, they didn’t shut down my ideas, which have especially flourished among young and independent voters thanks to the alternative media. 

Many months ago, I promised the American people that I would withdraw from the race if I became a spoiler. A “spoiler” is someone who will alter the outcome of the election but has no chance of winning. In my heart, I no longer believe I have a realistic path to electoral victory in the face of relentless, systemic censorship and media control. I cannot in good conscience ask my staff and volunteers to keep working long hours, or ask my donors to keep giving, when I cannot honestly tell them we have a path to the White House.

Furthermore, our polling consistently showed that by staying on the ballot in the battleground states, I would likely hand the election to the Democrats with whom I disagree on the existential issues of censorship, war, and chronic disease. 

I want everyone to know that I am only suspending my campaign, not terminating it. My name will still be on the ballot in most states. If you live in a blue state, you can vote for me without harming or helping President Trump or Vice President Harris. In red states — the same applies. I encourage you to do so. And if enough of you vote for me and neither of the major party candidates win 270 electoral votes, I could still end up in the White House in a contingent election. 

But in about ten battleground states where my presence would be a spoiler, I will remove my name and urge voters not to vote for me. 

It is with a sense of victory, and not defeat, that I am suspending my campaign activities. Not only did we do the impossible by collecting a million signatures, but we changed the national political conversation forever. Chronic disease, free speech, government corruption, and breaking our addiction to war have moved to the center of politics. I can say to all who have worked so hard for the last year and a half: “Thanks for a job well done!” 

Three great causes drove me to enter this race in the first place. These are the principal causes that persuaded me to leave the Democratic Party, and then as an Independent, and now throw my support to President Trump.

The cause of free speech.

The war in Ukraine.

The war on our children.

I’ve already described some of my personal experiences with government censorship-industrial complex.

I want to say a word about the Ukraine war. The military-industrial complex has provided us with the familiar comic-book justification that this war is a noble effort to stop supervillain Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and to thwart his Hitler-like march across Europe. 

In fact, tiny Ukraine is a proxy in a geopolitical struggle initiated by the ambitions of the U.S. Neocons for U.S. global hegemony. I’m not excusing Putin for invading Ukraine. He had other options. But the war is Russia’s predictable response to the reckless Neocon project of extending NATO to encircle Russia.

The credulous media rarely explain to Americans that we unilaterally walked away from our two intermediate nuclear weapons treaties with Russia, and then put nuclear-ready Aegis missile systems in Romania and Poland, and that the Biden White House repeatedly spurned Russia’s offer to settle the dispute peacefully.

The Ukraine war began in 2014, when US agencies overthrew the democratically elected government of Ukraine and installed a handpicked pro-West government that launched a civil war against ethnic Russians in Ukraine.

In 2019, America walked away from a peace treaty, the Minsk agreement that had been negotiated by European leadership.

In April 2022, President Biden sent Boris Johnson to Ukraine to force President Zelensky to tear up a peace treaty with President Putin that would have brought peace and left Donbass and Ukraine as part of Ukraine.

President Biden stated that month that his objective in the war was regime change in Russia. 

His Defense Secretary, Lloyd Austin, said that America’s purpose in the war was to exhaust the Russian army to degrade its capacity to fight anywhere else.

These objectives of course had nothing to do with what they were telling Americans about protecting Ukraine’s sovereignty.

Since then, we have squandered the flower of Ukrainian youth. As many as 600,000 Ukrainian kids have died and Ukraine’s infrastructure is destroyed.

The war has been a disaster for our country. We squandered nearly $200 billion badly needed dollars. The Nord Stream pipeline sabotage and sanctions have destroyed Europe’s industrial base, which formed the bulwark of U.S. national security. We have pushed Russia into a disastrous alliance with China and Iran. We are closer to the brink of nuclear exchange than at any other time since 1962.

Our moral authority and our economy are in shambles, and the war gave rise to the emergence of BRICS, which now threatens to replace the dollar as the global reserve currency.

Judging by her bellicose, belligerent speech last night in Chicago, we can assume that President Harris will be an enthusiastic advocate for this and other Neocon military adventures.

President Trump says that he will reopen negotiations with Putin and end the war overnight. This alone would justify my support for his campaign. 

Last summer, it looked like no candidate was willing to negotiate a quick end to the Ukraine war, to tackle the chronic disease epidemic, to protect free speech and restore our Constitutional freedoms, to clean corporate influence out of government, or to defy the Neocons and their agenda of endless military adventurism. But now, one of the two candidates has adopted these issues as his own, to the point where he has asked to enlist me in his administration to tackle those issues. I am speaking, of course, of Donald Trump.

Less than two hours after President Trump narrowly escaped assassination, Calley Means called me on my cell phone. Calley is arguably the leading advocate for food safety, soil regeneration, and ending the chronic disease epidemic that is destroying American health and ruining our economy. Calley has exposed the insidious corruption at the FDA, NIH, HHS, and USDA that has caused the epidemic. Calley had been working on and off for my campaign, advising me on those subjects, which have been my primary focus for the last twenty years. I was delighted when Calley told me, that day, that he had also been advising President Trump. He told me President Trump was anxious to talk to me about chronic disease — and other subjects — and to explore avenues of cooperation. He asked if I would take a call from the President. President Trump telephoned me a few minutes later, and I met with him the following day.

A few weeks later, I met again with President Trump and his family members and closest advisors in Florida. In a series of long, intense discussions, I was surprised to discover that we are aligned on many key issues. In those meetings, he suggested that we join forces as a unity party. We talked about Abraham Lincoln’s team of rivals. That arrangement would allow us to disagree publicly and privately on the issues over which we differ, while working together on the existential issues upon which we are in concordance. I was a fierce critic of many of the policies of his first administration, and there are still issues and approaches upon which we continue to dispute. But we are aligned with each other on key issues like ending the forever wars, ending the childhood disease epidemics, securing the border, protecting our freedom of speech, unraveling corporate capture of the regulatory agencies, and getting U.S. intelligence agencies out of the business of propagandizing, censoring, and surveilling Americans, and interfering in our elections.

Following my first discussion with President Trump, I tried unsuccessfully to open up similar discussions with the Harris campaign. Vice President Harris declined to meet or speak with me.

Suspending my candidacy is a heartrending decision for me. But I am convinced that it is the best hope for ending the Ukraine war and ending the chronic disease epidemic that is eroding our nation’s vitality from the inside and for protecting free speech. I feel a moral obligation to use this opportunity to save millions of American children. 

In case some of you don’t realize how dire the condition is of our children’s health and chronic disease in general, I urge you to view Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with Calley Means and his sister, Dr. Casey Means, who was the top graduate of her class at Stanford Medical School. This is an issue that affects us far more directly and urgently than the culture war issues that are tearing the country apart. Therefore, it has the potential to bring us together. So let me share just a little bit about why I believe it is so urgent.

Today, two-thirds of American adults and half of children suffer chronic health issues. Fifty years ago, the number for children was less than one percent. 

In America, 74% of adults are now overweight or obese, and close to 50% of children. One hundred and twenty years ago, when someone was obese, they were sent to the circus. In Japan, the childhood obesity rate is 3%. 

Half of Americans now have prediabetes or type 2 diabetes. When my uncle was president, juvenile diabetes was effectively nonexistent. The average pediatrician would see a single case in their lifetime. Today, one of every three kids who walk through their office door is diabetic or prediabetic.

There’s been an explosion of neurological diseases that I never saw as a child. ADD, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, Tourette’s, narcolepsy, ASD, and Asperger’s. In the year 2000, the autism rate was one in 1,500. Now, autism rates in kids are one in 36 nationally, and 1 in 22 in California. The screening has not changed. Nor has the definition. The incidence has changed. 

About 18% of teens have fatty liver disease, a disease that primarily used to be found only in late-stage alcoholics. Cancer rates are skyrocketing in the young and the old. Young adult cancers are up 79%. 

One in four American women is on an antidepressant medication. 40% of teens have a mental health diagnosis. Today, 15% of high schoolers are on Adderall and half a million children are on SSRIs. 

So what’s causing all this suffering? I’ll name two culprits. First is ultra-processed foods. About 70% of American children’s diet is ultra-processed — industrially manufactured in a factory. These foods consist primarily of processed sugar, ultra-processed grains, and seed oils. Lab scientists concoct thousands of other ingredients to make these foods more palatable, more addictive. These ingredients didn’t exist 100 years ago, and humans aren’t biologically adapted to eat them. Hundreds of these chemicals are banned in Europe, but ubiquitous in America’s processed foods. 

The second culprit is toxic chemicals in our food, medicine, and environment. Pesticides, food additives, pharmaceutical drugs, and toxic waste permeate every cell of our bodies. The assault on a child’s cells and hormones is unrelenting. To name just one problem, many of these chemicals increase estrogen. Because young children are ingesting hormone disruptors, the average girl in America is reaching puberty at age 10 to 13 — six years earlier than girls were in 1900. Our country has the earliest puberty rates on any continent. And no, this isn’t because of “better nutrition.” This is not normal. Breast cancer, an estrogen-driven cancer, now strikes one in eight women.

Considering the grievous human cost of this tragic epidemic of chronic disease, it seems almost crass to mention the damage it does to our economy. But I’ll say, it is crippling our nation’s finances. When my uncle was President, our country spent zero dollars on chronic disease. Today, government healthcare spending is mostly for chronic disease, and it is double the military budget. And chronic disease costs the economy as a whole at least $4 trillion. Probably more when you consider the indirect costs. That’s a 20% drag on everything we could aspire to. And it is the fastest-growing cost.

Poor and minority communities suffer disproportionately. Industry lobbyists make sure that most of the food stamp and school lunch program dollars are funding processed foods. We are systematically mass-poisoning America’s poorest citizens. 

The same food industry lobbied to make sure that nearly all agricultural subsidies go to the commodity crops that are the feedstock of the processed food industry. The policies are destroying small farms and our soils.

The good news is that we can change all of this, and change it quickly. America can get healthy again. To do that we need to do three things. First, root out the corruption in our health agencies. Second, change the incentives of the healthcare system. And third, inspire Americans to get healthy again. 

Eighty percent of NIH grants go to people who have conflicts of interest. These agencies, the FDA, the USDA, the CDC, all of them are controlled by huge for-profit corporations. 75% of the FDA’s funding doesn’t come from taxpayers. It comes from pharma. And pharma executives and consultants and lobbyists cycle in and out of these agencies. 

With President Trump’s backing, I am going to change that. We are going to staff these agencies with honest scientists and doctors free from industry funding. We will make sure that the decisions of consumers, doctors, and patients are informed by unbiased science. 

A sick child is the best thing for the pharmaceutical industry. When American children, or adults, get sick with a chronic condition, they are put on medications for their entire life. Imagine what will happen when Medicaid starts paying for Ozempic, which costs $1,500 a month and is being recommended for children as young as six. All for a condition, obesity, that is completely preventable and barely even existed a hundred years ago. Since 74% of Americans are obese, the costs could be as high as $3 trillion a year. With a fraction of that money, we could buy organic food for every American and get rid of diabetes altogether. We will bring healthy food back to school lunches. We will stop subsidizing the worst foods with our agricultural subsidies. We will get the toxic chemicals out of our food. We will reform the entire food system.

And for that, we need new leadership in Washington, because unfortunately, both the Democratic and Republican Parties are in cahoots with the food producers, Big Pharma, and Big Ag, which are among their major donors. Vice President Harris has expressed no interest in addressing this issue. Four more years of Democratic rule will complete the consolidation of corporate and Neocon power. And our children will be the ones who suffer the most.

I got involved with chronic disease 20 years ago, not because I chose to. It was thrust upon me. It was an issue that should have been central to the environmental movement, but it was widely ignored by all the institutions that should have been protecting our kids against toxins. It was an orphaned issue — I had a weakness for orphans. 

I watched generations of children get sicker and sicker in front of my eyes. And nobody in power seemed to care or even notice. For 19 years, I prayed every morning that God would put me in a position to end this calamity. The chronic disease crisis was one of the primary reasons for running for President. Along with ending the censorship, and the Ukraine war, it is the reason I have made this heart-wrenching decision to suspend my campaign and to support President Trump. This decision is agonizing for me, because of the difficulties it causes to my wife, my children, my family, and my friends. But I have the certainty that this is what I’m meant to do and that certainly gives me internal peace even in storms. If I’m given the chance to fix the chronic disease crisis and reform our food production, I promise that within two years, we will watch the chronic disease burden lift dramatically. We will make Americans healthy again. Within four years, America will be a healthy country. We will be stronger, more resilient, more optimistic, and happier. I won’t fail. Ultimately the future is in the hands of God, the American voters, and President Trump. If President Trump is elected and honors his word, the vast burden of chronic disease that now demoralizes and bankrupts the country, will disappear.

This is a spiritual journey for me. I reached my decision through deep prayer and hard-nosed logic. I ask myself, what choices must I make to maximize my chances to save America’s children and restore national health? I felt that if I refused this opportunity, I would not be able to look at myself in the mirror, knowing I could have saved the lives of countless children and reversed this country’s chronic disease epidemic.

I’m 70 years old. I have maybe a decade to be effective. I cannot imagine that a President Harris will allow me or anyone else to solve these problems. After eight years of President Harris, any opportunity for me to fix the problem will be out of my reach forever. President Trump has told me he wants this as his legacy. I’m choosing to believe that this time, he will follow through. His son, his biggest donors, and closest friends also support this objective. My joining the Trump campaign will be a difficult sacrifice for my wife and children, but worthwhile if there is even a small chance of success.

Ultimately the only thing that will save our children and our country is if we choose to love them more than we hate each other. That’s why I launched my campaign to unify this country. My dad and my uncle made such an enduring mark on the character of our nation not so much because of any particular policy, but because they were able to inspire profound love for our country and to fortify our sense of ourselves as a national community held together by shared ideals. They were able to put their love into the intentions and hearts of ordinary Americans, and to unify a national populist movement of all Americans — of Blacks and Whites and Hispanics, urban and rural. They inspired affection, love, high hopes, and a culture of kindness that continue to radiate from their memories. 

That is the spirit on which I ran my campaign, and that I intend to bring into the campaign of President Trump. Instead of vitriol and polarization, I will appeal to the values that unite us, the goals we could achieve if only we weren’t at each others’ throats. The most unifying theme for all Americans is that we all love our children. If we all unite around this issue now, we will finally give them protection, the health, and the future that they deserve.