Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suspends campaign and supports Trump

12:05 PM PT — After 15 minutes of speaking, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has announced that he is not ending his campaign; he simply suspends the campaign.

He thanked all his volunteers across the country and campaign staff. He then lent his support to Donald Trump.

“We changed the national conversation forever,” he said.

He said polls consistently show that if he remained on the ballot in battleground states, the presidency would be handed to Democrats — an outcome he wants to avoid.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gives a speech in Phoenix… a day after withdrawing from the Arizona election. He is expected to announce his withdrawal from the presidential race.

This comes amid widespread speculation that the independent candidate will support Republican candidate Donald Trump for president. Trump is also in Arizona on Friday.

RFK Jr.’s speech will be “about the current historical moment and its path forward,” his campaign announced this week.

Trump will speak later today in nearby Glendale, Arizona. Trump’s campaign announced yesterday that he would be joined by “a special guest” at the Glendale event.

RFK Jr.’s external campaign has struggled to certify the required signatures to appear on several state ballots. They qualified for 23 state ballots but faced legal challenges in others.

The campaign requested the ballots be removed from Pennsylvania on Friday, according to the Associated Press.

His attempt to appear at the debate in June with Republican candidate Donald Trump and the president Joe Biden failed – that fateful night that ultimately led to Biden drop out of the race and pass the torch to VP Kamala Harriswho just wrapped up a popular Democratic National Convention in Chicago this week.

RFK Jr. did challenge Trump to a direct debate at the Libertarian National Convention in May, although Trump declined. On Trump’s Truth Social platform, he exclaimed: “RFK Jr. is a democrat ‘Plant’, a radical left liberal.”

RFK Jr. attracted a storm of attention after he admitted he was behind a infamous NYC joke where a dead bear cub was left on a Central Park bike path in 2014. A photo from that time shows him with his finger in the dead bear’s mouth.

In May, Kennedy confirmed that a parasitic worm had eaten part of his brain and died while still inside his skull, resulting in ‘brain fog’.

RFK Jr.’s campaign insisted his action was “independent of the government’s broken two-party system and corporate corruption.” The campaign focused on issues such as the environment, foreign intervention, the country’s southern border and the concerns of the middle class.