RFK Jr. claims VP ask; Team Trump: ‘Fake News’
Former President Donald Trump’s campaign was quick to deny a claim by independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that the latter had been asked to join the 45th President’s second campaign for a second term as vice president.
Kennedy, in a social media post published Monday, reiterated a claim he’s maintained for months, saying Trump’s team reached out to him to offer the number-two spot in a hypothetical future Trump White House earlier in the campaign cycle.
“President Trump calls me an ultra-left radical. I’m soooo liberal that his emissaries asked me to be his VP. I respectfully declined the offer. I am against President Trump, and President Biden can’t win. Judging by his new website, it looks like President Trump knows who actually can beat him,” the environmental lawyer wrote on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.
However, a member of Trump’s MAGA 2024 campaign said that Kennedy is being less than honest with his version of events. According to team Trump, no such outreach has ever occurred, nor will it.
“Re-upping this from January…was true then and it’s true now,” Trump Campaign co-manager Chris LaCivita wrote.
“…your a leftie loonie that would never be approached to be on the ticket..sorry,” he concluded, grammatical error his.
Kennedy, the black sheep of the once-powerful Massachusetts political dynasty, is perhaps best known for his controversial stance on the efficacy of vaccines and his work as lawyer for environmental causes.
His long-shot bid for the White House began with a declaration he would seek the Democratic nomination, but he later dropped the party affiliation to run as an independent.
Polling shows he’s not persuading many voters to turn away from the two party system. RealClearPolitics and 538 polling averages show him pulling less than 10% of the vote — not nearly enough to join the presidential debates scheduled for this fall — and the most recent New York Times/Siena poll shows him just barely ahead of perennial Green Party candidate Jill Stein at 2%.
According to Kennedy’s campaign, he’s thus far only officially made the ballot in Utah, but has done the legwork to secure enough signatures to appear on the ballot in Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, and North Carolina.