CROSSROAD IN A HERO’S JOURNEY: ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR WILL FORGE AN ADMIRABLE LEGACY WITH A TRUMP ENDORSEMENT

by Sarah Dillingham

Election cycles in precariously teetering empires are rarely dull, and this week offers no respite from the bipolar array of what could possibly happen next in the 2024 presidential race. As the DNC unveils its curated spectacle of rebranding in Chicago, a more substantive and consequential development threatens to eclipse the crescendo of Kamalot’s official rollout: the Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. campaign has telegraphed a possible withdrawal from the race and endorsement of the Trump-Vance ticket.

The revelation isn’t entirely surprising given Kennedy’s conversation with President Trump last month, and last week’s reports of Kennedy’s rejected overtures to the Harris campaign amid his shrinking poll numbers after President Joe Biden disappeared from the race. However, Kennedy’s running mate Nicole Shanahan denied those reports during a remarkably candid conversation with Tom Bilyeu on the “Impact Theory” podcast recorded this past Monday. Shanahan roundly condemned the DNC for sabotaging their campaign, contemplated a possible Gubernatorial run in 2026, and weighed possible next steps: “There’s two options that we’re looking at, and one is staying in, forming that new party…or we walk away right now and join forces with Donald Trump…and we explain to our base why we’re making this decision.”

It was a stunning public acknowledgement that their best-case anticipated outcome is to win at least 5% of the vote, thus establishing a viable third party and secure public funds in future election cycles – effectively quashing Kennedy’s recent assertion that he’s “in it to win it.”  Kennedy’s public statements this week have been more anodyne, stopping short of mentioning President Trump directly. Kennedy’s video address posted Wednesday indirectly references the assassination attempt on Trump, calling on Americans to “realign ourselves with the founding spirit of our nation” and “reach across the divide.”

Most notably, Kennedy has scheduled an address to the nation about “the present historical moment and his path forward” on Friday in Phoenix, Arizona concurrent with President Trump’s rally in the same city.

It’s not entirely clear to anyone outside the campaign’s inner circle whether these events have been carefully orchestrated to test the viability and potential fallout of a Kennedy-Trump alliance, or if perhaps Kennedy, his running mate, and various advisors inside the campaign are not acting fully in unison. The unexpected dissolution of Kennedy’s presidential run has emerged in the wake of legal challenges to ballot access in multiple battleground states, and as Shanahan acknowledged, the decision to sidestep both major and minor party platforms forced them to commit millions in campaign dollars and grassroots ground efforts to gaining ballot access. With early voting kicking off next month in 7 states, legal challenges effectively preclude any viable chance of a Kennedy victory even if poll numbers showing 5% support are inaccurate.

What is perfectly clear at this moment, regardless of what currently informs Kennedy’s probable decision to end his presidential run, is that to do so would be the strategically correct and morally forthright decision. Closing the presidential run with a Trump-Vance endorsement is the most viable path to forge a lasting, admirable legacy and achieve the stated goals of his campaign.

To its credit, the Kennedy campaign has constructed a comprehensive platform attracting a broad swath of supporters which pollsters can’t seem to quantify. However, all roads in the campaign lead to a single coherent endpoint. Try as he might to broaden the conversation in every interview and articulate his positions on the deficit, the military, climate change, or any policy other than the epidemic of chronic illness among children in the U.S. and worldwide – that’s where the conversation seems always to gravitate in the Kennedy campaign. It was the overwhelming response to Kennedy’s commanding appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast which ignited the viral appeal of his candidacy. Kennedy noted that every interview, seemingly without fail, tends to drift back to the discussion of vaccine safety and, more broadly, the gaping holes in our national conversation addressing the rigor and integrity of medical science. Kennedy’s presidential run, it seems, has forced the universally verboten conversation into the public dialogue, finally. That in and of itself is an immeasurably valuable legacy.

The strongest coherent theme uniting Kennedy’s diverse coalition is the hunger for a genuine national response to the raging epidemic of myriad degenerative diseases plaguing our nation. There isn’t a single U.S. resident who hasn’t been impacted in some way by a preventable Covid death or Covid vaccine injury. Since Kennedy launched his campaign in 2023, the CDC and the Biden administration have doubled down on their policies despite lacking evidence of safety and efficacy. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has given voice to thousands, if not millions, of injury victims in this country.

The Kennedy campaign released a biographical documentary entitled “The Real RFK, Jr. Movie” detailing the trajectory of his early life which informed his career and personal philosophy. The film highlights Kennedy’s encounter with Dr. Sarah Bridges, whose son was injured by his 4-month DPT vaccine and was subsequently granted compensation through the NVICP program. Kennedy identifies that moment as the catalyst which launched his career in advocacy for medical safety. Like many healthcare providers, scientists, and parents who inadvertently pull a thread in the infinite web of vaccine science and politics, Kennedy experienced censorship, ostracism, isolation, and character assassination.  And yet, for nearly two decades at great personal and professional cost, Kennedy has persevered. He characterizes this dogged commitment as a “hero’s journey” – one which doesn’t deliver accolades or seven-figure grant proposals, and is never complete.

Exploring what makes this issue so invisible and radioactively toxic exceeds the scope of this discussion. But it’s clear that The Kennedy campaign has managed to catapult this heretofore verboten issue into the realm of public discussion. The question before the Kennedy campaign at this crossroad is, now that the discussion is irreversibly underway, how best to achieve to a tangibly positive outcome.

I pose this question as someone who should, by all measures, constitute the archetypal Kennedy-Shanahan supporter. I was born in Washington D.C. to a journalist and a government scientist who met and married in the mid-1960s. My parents were lifted by the exuberant spirit of that time inspired by the Kennedy generation, and admiration for the Kennedy family was an enduring background theme in our house. The year after I graduated from high school my mother died of breast cancer, and that summer her colleague at the Washington Post kindly arranged for me to volunteer with Mrs. Ethel Kennedy working with children in the St. Anne’s Infant and Maternity Home. The weekly swim group at Hickory Hill was relaxed and genial, emblematic of Kennedy generosity. My mother’s illness stimulated a life-long compulsion to investigate environmental pollution, health and wellness, and the causes of chronic disease. After attending college, I worked for several decades developing and managing database systems at several national environmental non-profit organizations. I later married and had a son, whose autism diagnosis launched the most challenging and enriching learning experience of my life which radically shaped my perspective on science, the medical industrial complex, and effective ways to solve problems. I was forced to dismantle and reconstruct foundational assumptions about myself, my place in the world, and my political orientation. I co-founded a tiny fledgling Maryland non-profit to protect medical freedom in 2019, where I served as Executive Director until I relocated to Florida in 2023.

I’m infinitely grateful for Kennedy’s immense contributions and the scope of personal sacrifice he has endured to advocate for children’s health.  Shanahan’s personal and professional experiences, so skillfully articulated, resonate deeply with my own learning process. I know Kennedy and Shanahan constitute a team with tremendous potential to address the most fundamental challenges we face.

I also wholeheartedly support the Trump-Vance campaign. Decades of activism and a lifetime of living in Washington have shaped my belief the President of the United States cannot simultaneously oversee the military, protect the borders, direct federal policies, and represent our national culture and interests among other nations while fully dissecting and rebuilding private and public institutions.

Granular analysis and bold activism require a slightly different kind of heroism than executive leadership of a superpower in transition. The Kennedy-Shanahan platform exudes the exuberance of JFK’s 20^th century vision, when we sent men to the moon, built towering industries, and established a shining example and safe haven for other developing nations. We were flush with natural resources. Medical science seemed like magic, with an arsenal of “magic bullets” to address every pre-industrial malady, as Robert Whitaker describes in Anatomy of an Epidemic. Centuries of infectious disease seemed to disappear from modern memory with no apparent consequence, and the signals of mass-scale industrial degenerative disease were not yet painfully apparent. Erudite national conversations exploring lofty hypotheses and infinite human potential filled the pages of the comparatively substantive periodicals and television programming of that era.

But magic isn’t real, and in retrospect, the consequences of that exuberance – and specifically, overconfidence in the promise of medical magic bullets – is now manifesting in alarming forms. These consequences cannot be magically resolved with federal regulation, revolving officials and government commissions, or shiny automation tools. All of these innovations are potentially useful in the right context, but addressing the depth and breadth of these problems far supersedes the scope of executive oversight. What we can and should demand is a president who will never mandate an untested, hastily authorized medical intervention. And most importantly, the President of the United States must carry out strategies and policies – however, wherever, and whenever is necessary and effective – which create a fortress between U.S. citizens and any internal or external force that threatens to impose medical mandates.

The Biden-Harris administration is poised to implement any medical mandate decreed by the World Health Organization or World Economic Forum, and the Harris-Walz campaign openly endorses demonstrably harmful medical interventions of all kinds, supplanting the privacy and individual discretion of parents and patients with state authority to mandate treatment.

Many of my peers in medical freedom advocacy were disappointed, in retrospect, at the Trump administration’s response to the Covid crisis and his defense of Operation Warp Speed. But we must consider that the President represents all citizens, individuals and institutions, and is an interactive player on the world stage. The President, realistically, has latitude to safeguard everyone’s right to privacy and dominion over their own medical decisions, which must translate to freedom from medical mandates. That’s what a President can reasonably promise to safeguard. The President cannot stay all financial and scientific institutions, large and small, at a critical moment’s notice or in a single term, and to either promise or expect as much is to sacrifice the necessary good for the intangibly perfect.

One potentially critical factor in the Kennedy-Shanahan pivot, not widely publicized, was a meeting last week in New Jersey between President Trump and several key medical freedom advocates. With limited fanfare and deep commitment, President Trump listened and addressed their concerns. “I hear you, I heard you, and tell your people – I hear them,” he promised. Melissa Alfieri-Collins, RN, BSN, of New Jersey Coalition for Vaccine Choice,  was pleased with the outcome: “Consistent with NJCVC’s non-partisan mission to promote vaccination choice without endorsing candidates, we are very encouraged that both President Trump and Mr. Kennedy recognize the importance of protecting the medical freedom rights of all Americans.”

President Trump’s vice-presidential pick, Senator JD Vance, has a strong record safeguarding medical freedom. Stephanie Stock, President of Ohio Advocates for Medical Freedom, noted that Senator Vance “rated an A+ on our OAMF survey preceding our 2022 Ohio Primary. His answers were sincere and well-considered, and he spoke out against vaccine mandates on social media and in the Senate debate. Senator Vance took immediate action after the East Palestine train derailment to ensure that proper health and safety testing was done to protect the victims.”

Jill Hines, Co-Director of Health Freedom Louisiana, ran for local office this year and is a co-defendant in a lawsuit combating censorship. She unequivocally endorses Kennedy’s potential move, stating “we firmly support a united effort by President Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to preserve our freedoms. Trump has already bolstered his future administration with health freedom powerhouse Senator JD Vance, and we see an alliance with Kennedy as a victory for our voting bloc.”

Conversations among medical freedom activists and special needs parents across the country are suddenly infused with electric excitement and anticipation. The Trump-Vance and Kennedy-Shanahan teams each possess a particular brand of courage and tenacity specific to the tasks at hand. Parents, nurses and doctors, scientists, military personnel and first responders, health freedom advocates and victims of iatrogenic injuries in every state are energized by the potential of a Trump-Kennedy alliance to achieve a lasting and powerful legacy.

Genuine heroism is the strength and vision to do what’s right in the face of incredible blowback and long-term uncertainty, with the quiet confidence that it is right. I fully believe that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is this kind of hero.

Sarah Dillingham resides in Central Florida with her 11-year-old son. She is the former Executive Director and current Board Member of Informed Choice Maryland, a 501-c4 non-profit organization. The opinions expressed here are her own, and not affiliated with any organization or individual not directly quoted in the article.