Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s running mate said in a podcast interview that they were considering dropping their struggling independent presidential bid and endorsing Republican Donald Trump, blaming the Democratic Party for what she said was a “sabotage” of their campaign.
Hours later, Trump said he would consider giving Kennedy a position in his administration under those circumstances.
“I like him a lot. I respect him a lot,” Trump said in an interview with CNN after a speech in Michigan. “I probably would, if something like that would happen.”
In a nearly hourlong interview posted online Tuesday, Kennedy’s running mate, Nicole Shanahan, a Silicon Valley investor who has poured more than $10 million into their campaign, appeared to concede that their effort was not likely to end in victory. The campaign is running out of money, its poll numbers are falling and its efforts to secure ballot access across all 50 states have hit repeated snags.
“There’s two options that we’re looking at,” Shanahan said. “One is staying in,” hoping to get 5% of the vote to establish a viable political party that will have more access to money and be able to get onto election ballots in 2028. “But we run the risk of a Kamala Harris and Walz presidency, as we draw votes from Trump — we draw somehow more votes from Trump.”
She continued: “Or we walk away, right now, and join forces with Donald Trump, and we walk away from that and explain to our base why we are making this decision. Not easy.”
In response to a request for comment, Stefanie Spear, a spokesperson for the Kennedy campaign sent a link to a message that Kennedy posted on the social platform X Tuesday, which read, in part: “As always, I am willing to talk with leaders of any political party to further the goals I have served for 40 years in my career and in this campaign.”
Shanahan is a former donor to the Democratic Party who was once married to Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google. In the podcast interview, she said she was “so disappointed” that she had previously supported the party.
“We wanted to win, we wanted a fair shot,” Shanahan said of their presidential bid. “The DNC made that impossible for us.” She accused the Democratic Party of “planting insiders into our campaign to disrupt it and create actual legal issues for us.”
A spokesperson for the Democrats dismissed those allegations.
“Nicole Shanahan isn’t even pretending to be a serious VP candidate anymore,” said Lis Smith, a communications adviser to the Democratic National Committee. “From the beginning of this race, we’ve said that RFK Jr. is nothing more than a spoiler for Donald Trump, and we’re glad that his running mate is finally admitting it.”
Of Shanahan’s accusations of Democratic sabotage, Smith said: “These are more delusional conspiracies floated by a couple of unhinged candidates. If they want to know who’s sabotaging their campaign, all they need to do is look in the mirror.”
Shanahan suggested that the Kennedy campaign had been in contact with the Trump team about the direction of a possible second Trump term. “What we are hearing from the Trump camp is very positive,” she said.
Trump’s views on Kennedy have vacillated as the 2024 race has developed. When Kennedy was running in the Democratic primary to challenge President Joe Biden, Trump was supportive. He called Kennedy a “very smart person” and praised him as “very much a libertarian in a certain way.”
But after Kennedy decided instead to run as an independent candidate, the Trump campaign quickly began attacking him as a Democrat in hiding. Trump repeatedly insisted that Kennedy was part of the “radical left.”
Even on Trump’s own ticket, there seems to be disagreement about how to handle Kennedy. Taking questions from members of the press on his campaign plane last week, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, Trump’s running mate, said it would be “unethical” for Trump to give Kennedy a job in a second Trump administration in exchange for Kennedy endorsing him.
Vance noted that people in Trump’s orbit believed that Kennedy’s presence in the race benefited Harris, echoing polling that shows that he draws votes from Trump.
“I certainly hope that he drops out and endorses Mr. Trump,” Vance said. “He’s much closer on the issues to President Trump than he is to Kamala Harris.”
Shanahan said in her interview that she had not poured money into Kennedy’s campaign simply to be a spoiler. Asked if she and Kennedy saw “any path to victory, at this point,” she sighed and said, inaccurately, that they had “qualified for all the ballots.” (As of Monday, the campaign is on the ballot in 19 states, and it has submitted applications in more than a dozen others.)
“As long as we remain on the ballots, we could win,” she said. “The question is: Is the risk of a Harris-Walz presidency worth us staying in?”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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