Former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy announced last Friday that he would be pulling out of the race and supporting GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump. He’s wasting no time getting right down to business and campaigning on behalf of the former president, publishing a post on X over the weekend titled, “What ‘MAGA’ really means.” And it has already gone viral. When you see what he had to say about the “Make America Great Again” movement Trump started, you’ll see why it’s such a popular post.
“The phrase has troubled liberals who think it is a call for a return to an America before civil rights, gay rights, and women’s rights. But I have a more generous interpretation, one that is truer to my experience of Donald Trump as he is today,” the former Democrat said at the beginning of the post, according to The Western Journal.
“‘Make America Great Again’ recalls a nation brimming with vitality, with a can-do spirit, with hope and a belief in itself. It was an America that was beginning to confront its darker shadows, could acknowledge the injustice in its past and present, yet at the same time could celebrate its successes,” Kennedy added in the post. “It was a nation of broad prosperity, the world’s most vibrant middle class, and [an] idealistic belief (though not consistently applied) in freedom, justice, and democracy. It was a nation that led the world in innovation, productivity, and technology.”
Kennedy concluded, “And it was the healthiest country in the world. I have talked to many Trump supporters. I have talked with his inner circle. I have talked to the man himself. This is the America they want to restore.”
What "MAGA" really means
The phrase has troubled liberals who think it is a call for a return to an America before civil rights, gay rights, and women's rights. But I have a more generous interpretation, one that is truer to my experience of Donald Trump as he is today. "Make…
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) August 25, 2024
As of Monday morning, the post had garnered 291,000 likes.
What a lot of us really want to know is how much of an impact Kennedy’s endorsement will have on Trump’s chances of victory in November. Does it really matter? The answer is a definite yes. During the news conference in Phoenix where RFK Jr. announced his campaign’s suspension and his support for Trump, he said he was pulling his name off the ballot in 10 key swing states where votes for him might have resulted in a win for Harris.
The independent presidential candidate further stated, he was endorsing Trump for three primary reasons: his support for free speech, ending the war in Ukraine and taking on the nation’s childhood health epidemic. During a “Fox News Sunday” interview over the weekend, Kennedy recounted that after speaking by phone and meeting with Trump following last month’s assassination attempt his views on the 45th president began to change.
“The broad issues that were most important to me, the ones that brought me into the campaign, which was ending the Ukraine war, ending the censorship and protecting children’s health, reforming our food supply, all the things we need to do to make our children healthy again, those are all things that President Trump also wanted to work on,” he stated during his appearance on the network.
Kennedy said that Trump wanted to form a “unity government” and that the two agreed they would be free to continue to criticize each other on matters they do not agree on. There has been no commitment from Trump that RFK Jr. would be in his administration should the Republican win, Kennedy said, but just an agreement to work together on these issues.
Overall, the endorsement of Kennedy and his exiting the race will give him a bump in the polls of at least a point or two and that could make all the difference in the end.