RFK Jr. Exits Race, Endorses Trump: In The Name Of Saving Democracy, The Democratic Party Is Dismantling It

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy suspended his campaign and endorsed Donald Trump on Friday during a speech in Arizona.

"In an honest system, I believe I would have won the election," Kennedy said. "I am sorry to say that while democracy may still be alive at the grassroots level, it has become little more than a slogan for our political institutions, our media, and our government -- and most of all, for the Democratic Party."

"In the name of saving democracy, the Democratic Party set itself to dismantling it."


"The DNC deployed aligned judges to throw me and other candidates off the ballot and to throw President Trump in jail. It ran a sham primary that was rigged to prevent any serious challenge to President Biden. Then, when a predictably bungled debate performance precipitated the palace coup against President Biden, the same shadowy DNC operatives appointed his successor, also without an election. They installed a candidate who was so unpopular with voters that she dropped out in 2020 without winning a single delegate," Kennedy continued.

"My uncle and my father both relished debate. They prided themselves on their capacity to go toe-to-toe with any opponent in the battle over ideas. They would be astonished to learn of a Democratic Party presidential nominee who, like Vice President Harris, has not appeared in a single interview or unscripted encounter with voters for 35 days. This is profoundly undemocratic. How are people to choose when they don't know whom they are choosing, and how must this look to the rest of the world?"

"Instead of showing us her substance and character, the DNC and its media organs engineered a surge of popularity for Vice President Harris based on, well, nothing—no policies, no interviews, no debates—only smoke and mirrors and balloons in a highly-produced Chicago circus," he said.

"How did the Democratic Party choose a candidate who has never done an interview or a debate during the entire election cycle? We know the answers. They did it by weaponizing government agencies. They did it by abandoning democracy," Kennedy said. "They did it by silencing the opposition and by disenfranchising American voters. What most alarms me isn’t how the Democratic Party conducts its internal affairs or runs its candidates. What alarms me is the resort to censorship and media control and the weaponization of federal agencies."

"I don’t want any of this to sound like a personal complaint because it is not... but I need to make these observations because I think they are critical for us as citizens and for the preservation of democracy," he said. "We must assess where we are in this country and what our democracy still looks like."

"We need to examine the assumptions about U.S. leadership around the globe and ask ourselves: Are we still a role model for democracy, or have we made it a kind of a joke?"

He added: "Our polling consistently showed that by staying on the ballot in battleground states, I would likely hand the election over to the Democrats, with whom I disagree on the most existential issues: censorship, war, and chronic disease. I want everyone to know that I’m not terminating my campaign. I am simply suspending it, not ending it. My name will remain on the ballot in most states. If you live in a blue state, you can vote for me without harming or helping President Trump or Vice President Harris. The same applies in red states. I encourage you to vote for me. And if enough of you do vote for me, and neither of the major party candidates wins 270 electoral votes—which is quite possible, as today shows a potential tie of 269 to 269—I could still conceivably end up in the White House in a contingent election."

"But, in about ten battleground states where my presence would be a spoiler, I’m going to remove my name, and I have started that process. I urge voters in those states not to vote for me."

Trump is also holding an event tonight in Arizona.

Read Kennedy's full speech here:

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR: I'm sorry to keep everybody waiting. Sixteen months ago, in April of 2023, I launched my campaign for President of the United States. I began this journey as a Democrat, the party of my father, my uncle, and the party to which I pledged my own allegiance long before I was old enough to vote. I attended my first Democratic convention at the age of 6, in 1960. Back then, the Democrats were the champions of the Constitution, of civil rights. The Democrats stood against authoritarianism, censorship, colonialism, imperialism, and unjust wars. We were the party of labor, of the working class. The Democrats were the party of government transparency and the champion of the environment. Our party was a bulwark against big money interests and corporate power. True to its name, it was the party of democracy.

As you know, I left that party in October because it had departed so dramatically from the core values I grew up with. It had become the party of war, censorship, corruption, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Ag, and Big Money. When it abandoned democracy by canceling the primary, due to the cognitive decline of the sitting president, I left the party to run as an independent.

The mainstream of American politics and journalism derided my decision. Conventional wisdom said that it would be impossible even to get on the ballot as an independent because each state poses an insurmountable tangle of arbitrary rules for collecting signatures. I would need over a million signatures, something no presidential candidate in history had ever achieved. Then I would need a team of attorneys and millions of dollars to handle all the legal challenges from the DNC. The naysayers told us we were climbing a glass version of Mount Impossible. The first thing I want to tell you is that we proved them wrong. We did it because, beneath the radar of mainstream media, we inspired a massive independent political movement. More than 100,000 volunteers sprang into action, hopeful that they could reverse our nation's decline. Many worked 10-hour days, sometimes in blizzards and blazing heat. They sacrificed family time, personal commitments, and sleep, month after month, energized by a shared vision of a nation healed of its divisions.

They set up tables at churches and farmers' markets. They canvassed door-to-door. In Utah and New Hampshire, volunteers collected signatures in snowstorms, convincing each supporter to stop in the frigid cold, take off their gloves, and sign legibly. During a heatwave in Nevada, I met a tall, athletic volunteer who cheerfully told me he had lost 25 pounds collecting signatures in 117-degree heat. To finance this effort, young Americans donated their lunch money, and senior citizens gave up part of their Social Security checks. Our organization collected those millions of signatures and more. No presidential campaign in American political history has ever done that.

So I want to thank all those dedicated volunteers and congratulate the campaign staff who coordinated this enormous logistical feat. Your accomplishments, regarded as impossible by many, carried me up that glass mountain. You pulled off a miracle and achieved what all the pundits said could never be done. You have my deepest gratitude, and I will never forget that. Not just what you did for my campaign but the sacrifices you made for our country. You showed everyone that democracy is still possible here. It continues to survive in the press and in the idealistic human energies that still thrive beneath the canvas of neglect and official institutional corruption.

Today, I am here to tell you that I will not allow your efforts to go to waste. I am here to tell you that I will leverage your tremendous accomplishments to serve the ideals that we share: the ideals of peace, prosperity, freedom, and health -- all the ideas that motivated my campaign. I am here today to describe the path forward that you have opened with your commitment and with your hard labors.

Now, in an honest system, I believe I would have won the election. In a system that my father and my uncles thrived in -- a system in which open debates, fair primaries, and a truly independent media, untainted by government propaganda and censorship, existed, along with nonpartisan courts and election boards -- everything would be different. After all, the polls consistently showed me beating the other candidates, both in favorability and in head-to-head matchups.

But I am sorry to say that while democracy may still be alive at the grassroots level, it has become little more than a slogan for our political institutions, our media, and our government -- and most of all, for the Democratic Party. In the name of saving democracy, the Democratic Party set itself to dismantling it. Lacking confidence in its candidate’s ability to win in a fair election at the voting booth, the DNC waged continual legal warfare against both President Trump and myself. Each time our volunteers turned in those towering boxes of signatures needed to get on the ballot, the DNC dragged us into court, state after state, attempting to erase their work and subvert the will of the voters who had signed those petitions.

The DNC deployed aligned judges to throw me and other candidates off the ballot and to throw President Trump in jail. It ran a sham primary that was rigged to prevent any serious challenge to President Biden. Then, when a predictably bungled debate performance precipitated the palace coup against President Biden, the same shadowy DNC operatives appointed his successor, also without an election. They installed a candidate who was so unpopular with voters that she dropped out in 2020 without winning a single delegate.

My uncle and my father both relished debate. They prided themselves on their capacity to go toe-to-toe with any opponent in the battle over ideas. They would be astonished to learn of a Democratic Party presidential nominee who, like Vice President Harris, has not appeared in a single interview or unscripted encounter with voters for 35 days. This is profoundly undemocratic. How are people to choose when they don't know whom they are choosing, and how must this look to the rest of the world?

My father and my uncle were always conscious of America’s image abroad because of our nation’s role as the template for democracy, a role model for democratic processes, and the leader of the free world.

Instead of showing us her substance and character, the DNC and its media organs engineered a surge of popularity for Vice President Harris based on, well, nothing—no policies, no interviews, no debates—only smoke and mirrors and balloons in a highly-produced Chicago circus.

In Chicago, a string of Democratic speakers mentioned Donald Trump 147 times, just on the first day. Who needs policy when you have Trump to hate? In contrast, at the RNC convention, President Biden was mentioned only twice in four days. I do interviews every day. Many of you have interviewed me. Anybody who asks gets to interview me. Some days, I do as many as ten interviews. President Trump, who actually was nominated and won an election, also does interviews daily.

How did the Democratic Party choose a candidate who has never done an interview or a debate during the entire election cycle? We know the answers. They did it by weaponizing government agencies. They did it by abandoning democracy. They did it by silencing the opposition and by disenfranchising American voters. What most alarms me isn’t how the Democratic Party conducts its internal affairs or runs its candidates. What alarms me is the resort to censorship and media control and the weaponization of federal agencies.

When a U.S. President colludes with or outright coerces media companies to censor political speech, it is an attack on our most sacred right of free expression, the very right upon which all our other constitutional rights rest. President Biden mocked Vladimir Putin’s landslide in the Russian elections, observing that Putin and his party controlled the Russian press and prevented serious opponents from appearing on the ballot. But here in America, the DNC also prevented opponents from appearing on the ballot, and our television networks exposed themselves as Democratic Party organs.

Over the course of more than a year, in a campaign where my poll numbers reached, at times, the high 20s, the DNC-aligned mainstream media networks maintained a near-perfect embargo on interviews with me. During his 10-month presidential campaign in 1992, Ross Perot gave 34 interviews on mainstream networks. In contrast, during the 16 months since I declared, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, and CNN combined to give only two live interviews with me. Those networks instead ran a continuous daily stream of hit pieces with inaccurate, often vile pejoratives and defamatory smears. Some of those same networks colluded with the DNC to keep me off the debate stage.

Representatives of those networks are in this room right now, and I will take a moment to ask you to consider the many ways your institutions have a duty as a free press to safeguard democracy and challenge the party in power. Instead of maintaining that posture of fear and skepticism toward authority, your institutions made themselves government mouthpieces and stenographers for organs of government power. You didn’t alone cause the devolution of American democracy, but you could have prevented it.

The Democratic Party’s censorship of social media was an even more naked exercise of executive power. A federal judge upheld my injunction against President Biden, calling the White House’s censorship project the most egregious violation of the First Amendment in the history of the United States. The previous 155-page decision details how, just 37 hours after taking the oath of office and swearing to uphold the Constitution, President Biden and his White House opened up a portal and invited the CIA, the FBI, CISA -- a censorship agency, the DHS, the IRS, and other agencies to censor me and other political dissidents on social media.

Even today, users who try to post my campaign videos to Facebook or YouTube get messages that say, "This content violates community standards." Two days after Judge Oty rendered his decision this week, Facebook was still attaching warning labels to an online petition calling on ABC to include me in the upcoming debate. They said that it violates community standards—their community standards." The mainstream media, once the guardian of the First Amendment and democratic principles, has now joined this systemic attack on democracy. The media also justify their censorship on the grounds of combating misinformation. But governments and oppressors don’t censor lies—they don’t fear lies. They fear the truth, and that’s what they censor.

I don’t want any of this to sound like a personal complaint because it is not. For me, it is all part of the journey—a journey that I signed up for—but I need to make these observations because I think they are critical for us as citizens and for the preservation of democracy. We must assess where we are in this country and what our democracy still looks like. We need to examine the assumptions about U.S. leadership around the globe and ask ourselves: Are we still a role model for democracy, or have we made it a kind of a joke?

Here is the good news: While mainstream outlets denied me a critical platform, they didn’t shut down my ideas, which have especially flourished among young voters and independent voters, thanks to alternative media. Many months ago, I promised the American people that I would withdraw if I became a spoiler who could alter the outcome without any chance of winning. In my heart, I no longer believe I have a realistic path to electoral victory in the face of this relentless systemic censorship and media control. So I cannot, in good conscience, ask staff and volunteers to keep working long hours or ask donors to keep giving when I cannot tell them I have a real path to the White House.

Furthermore, our polling consistently showed that by staying on the ballot in battleground states, I would likely hand the election over to the Democrats, with whom I disagree on the most existential issues: censorship, war, and chronic disease. I want everyone to know that I’m not terminating my campaign. I am simply suspending it, not ending it. My name will remain on the ballot in most states. If you live in a blue state, you can vote for me without harming or helping President Trump or Vice President Harris. The same applies in red states. I encourage you to vote for me. And if enough of you do vote for me, and neither of the major party candidates wins 270 electoral votes—which is quite possible, as today shows a potential tie of 269 to 269, I could still conceivably end up in the White House in a contingent election.

[Cheering]

But, in about ten battleground states where my presence would be a spoiler, I’m going to remove my name, and I have started that process. I urge voters in those states not to vote for me. It is with a sense of victory, not defeat, that I am suspending my campaign activities. Not only did we do the impossible by collecting one million signatures, but we also changed the national political conversation forever. Chronic disease, free speech, government corruption, and breaking our addiction to war have now moved to the center of politics. I can say to all who have worked so hard over the last year and a half: Thank you for a job well done.

Three great causes drove me to enter this race in the first place, and these are the principal causes that persuaded me to leave the Democratic Party and run as an independent, and now to throw my support to President Trump. The causes were free speech, the war in Ukraine, and the war on our children.

I've already described some of my personal experiences and struggles with the government censorship-industrial complex. The military-industrial complex has provided us with a familiar comic book justification, as they do in every war, claiming this one is a noble effort to stop Vladimir Putin. Tiny Ukraine is a proxy in a geopolitical struggle initiated by the ambitions of U.S. neocons for American global hegemony.

I'm not excusing Putin for invading Ukraine; he had other options. The war is Russia's principal response to the reckless neocon project of extending NATO to encircle Russia, a hostile act. A credulous media rarely explains to Americans that we walked away from two nuclear weapons treaties with Russia and placed missile systems in Romania and Poland. This is a hostile, hostile act. The Biden White House repeatedly spurned Russia's offer to settle this war peacefully.

The Ukraine war began in 2014 when U.S. agencies overthrew the democratically elected government of Ukraine and installed a hand-picked pro-Western government that launched a deadly civil war against ethnic Russians in Ukraine. In 2019, America walked away from a peace treaty—the Minsk Agreement—that had been negotiated between Russia and Ukraine by European nations. In April 2022, we escalated the war. President Biden sent Boris Johnson to Ukraine to force President Zelenskyy to tear up a peace agreement that he and the Russians had already signed. The Russians were withdrawing troops from Kiev, Donbas, and Luhansk. That peace agreement would have brought peace to the region and would have allowed Donbas and Luhansk to remain part of Ukraine.

President Biden stated that month that his objective in the war was regime change in Russia. His defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, simultaneously explained that America’s purpose in the war was to exhaust the Russian army and degrade its capacity to fight anywhere else in the world. These objectives had nothing to do with what they were telling Americans about protecting Ukraine’s sovereignty. Ukraine is a victim in this war; it is a victim of the West.

Since tearing up the agreement, we have squandered the flower of Ukrainian youth— as many as 600,000 Ukrainian kids and over 100,000 Russian kids, all of whom we should be mourning, have died. Ukraine’s infrastructure is destroyed. The war has been a disaster for our country as well. We’ve squandered nearly $200 billion—badly needed dollars in our communities all over our country.

The Nord Stream pipeline sabotage and the sanctions have destroyed Europe’s industrial base, which formed the bulwark of U.S. national security. A strong Germany with a strong industry is a much stronger deterrent to Russia than a deindustrialized Germany turned into an extension of a U.S. military base. We have pushed Russia into a disastrous alliance with China and Iran, bringing us closer to the brink of nuclear exchange than at any time since 1962. The neocons in the White House don’t seem to care at all.

Our moral authority and our economy are in shambles. The war gave rise to the emergence of BRICS, which threatens to replace the dollar as the global reserve currency. This is a first-class calamity for our country.

Judging by her bellicose and belligerent speech last night in Chicago, we can assume President Harris will be an enthusiastic advocate for this and other neocon military adventures. President Trump says he will reopen negotiations with President Putin and end the war overnight as soon as he becomes president. This alone would justify my support for his campaign. Last summer, it looked like no candidate was willing to negotiate a quick end to the Ukraine war, protect free speech, uphold our constitutional freedoms, clean corporate influence out of our government, and defy the neocons and their agenda of endless military adventurism. But now, one of the two candidates has adopted these issues as his own to the point where he has asked to enlist me in his administration. I am, of course, speaking of Donald Trump.

Less than two hours after President Trump narrowly escaped assassination, Calley Means called me on my cell phone. I was in Las Vegas. Calley is the leading advocate for food safety, soil regeneration, and for ending the chronic disease epidemic that is destroying America’s health and ruining our economy. Calley has exposed the insidious corruption at the FDA, NIH, HHS, and USDA that has caused this epidemic. Calley had been working on these issues for my campaign and advising me on them since the beginning. These subjects have been my primary focus for the last 20 years.

I was delighted when Calley told me that day that he had been advising President Trump. He told me President Trump had been anxious to talk to me about chronic disease and other subjects, and to explore avenues of cooperation. He asked if I would take a call from the President. President Trump called me later that day. I met again with President Trump, his family members, and close advisors in Florida. In a series of long, intense discussions, I was surprised to discover that we are aligned on many key issues.

In those meetings, he suggested we join forces as a unity party. We talked about Abraham Lincoln’s "team of rivals." That arrangement would allow us to disagree publicly and privately, even fiercely if need be, on issues over which we differ while working together on the existential issues upon which we are in concordance. I was a ferocious critic of many of the policies during his first administration, and there are still issues and approaches upon which I continue to have very serious differences. However, we are aligned with each other on key issues like ending the Forever Wars, ending the childhood disease epidemics, securing the border, protecting freedom of speech, unraveling the corporate capture of our regulatory agencies, and getting the U.S. intelligence agencies out of the business of propagandizing, censoring, and surveilling Americans, as well as interfering in our elections.

Following the first discussion with President Trump, I tried unsuccessfully to open similar discussions with Vice President Harris. Vice President Harris declined to meet or even speak with me. Suspending my candidacy is a hard decision for me, but I’m convinced it is the best for ending the Ukraine war and ending the chronic disease epidemic that is eroding our nation’s vitality from the inside and for finally protecting free speech. I feel a moral obligation to use this opportunity to save millions of American children.

In case some of you don’t realize how dire the condition is regarding chronic disease, I would urge you to view Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with Calley Means and his sister, who was the top graduate of her class at Stanford Medical School. This is an issue that affects all of us more directly and urgently than any culture war issue and all the other issues that we obsess over, which are tearing apart our country. This is the most important issue. It has the potential to bring us together, so let me share a little bit about why I believe it is so urgent.

Today, we spend more on healthcare than any country on earth -- twice what they pay in Europe -- and yet we have the worst health outcomes of any nation. We rank around 79th in health outcomes, behind Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Mongolia, and other countries. Nobody has a chronic disease burden like we do. During the COVID epidemic, we had the highest body count of any country in the world. We accounted for 16% of the COVID deaths while only making up 4.2% of the world’s population. The CDC says this is because we have the sickest people on earth. We have the highest chronic disease rate on earth. The average American who died from COVID had 3.8 chronic diseases. These were people with immune system collapse and mitochondrial dysfunction, and no other country has anything like this.

Two-thirds of American adults and children suffer from chronic health issues. Fifty years ago, that number was less than 1%. We have gone from 1% to 66%. In America, 74% of Americans are now overweight or obese. Fifty percent of our children are overweight. 120 years ago, when someone was obese, they were sent to the circus; there were case reports—obesity was almost unknown. In Japan, the childhood obesity rate is 3%, compared to 50% here. Half of Americans have prediabetes or type 2 diabetes.

When my uncle was president, juvenile diabetes was effectively nonexistent. Today, one out of every three kids who walk through a doctor’s office door is diabetic or prediabetic. The mitochondrial disorder that causes diabetes is also causing Alzheimer’s, which is classified as diabetes and is costing this country more than our military budget every year. There has been an explosion of neurological illnesses that I never saw as a kid: ADD, ADHD, language delay, Tourette’s syndrome, narcolepsy, Asperger’s, autism. In the year 2000, the autism rate was one in 1,500. Now, autism rates in kids are one in 36 according to the CDC nationally. No one is talking about this. One out of every 22 kids in California has autism. This is a crisis: 77% of our kids are too disabled to serve in the United States military. What is happening to our country, and why isn’t this in the headlines every single day? No other country in the world is experiencing this, this is only happening in America.

About 18%—and by the way, there has been no change in diagnosis. The industry sometimes likes to say there has been no change in screening. This is a change in incidence. In my generation, among 70-year-old men, the autism rates are about one in 10,000. In my kids’ generation, it is one in 34. In California, it’s one in 22. Why are we letting this happen?

Why are we allowing this to happen to our children? These are the most precious assets we have in this country. How can we let this happen to them? About 18% of American teens have fatty liver disease. That is like one out of every five. That disease, when I was a kid, only affected late-stage alcoholics who were elderly. Cancer rates are skyrocketing in both the young and old. Ovarian cancers are up 79%. One in four American women is on antidepressant medication. Forty percent of teens have a mental health diagnosis, and 15% of high schoolers are on Adderall, with half a million children on SSRIs.

So, what is causing this suffering? I will name two culprits. First, and the worst, is ultra-processed food. About 70% of American children's diets are ultra-processed. That means industrial manufacturing. These foods consist primarily of processed sugar, ultra-processed grains, and seed oils. Laboratory scientists who previously worked for the cigarette industry—companies that purchased the big food corporations in the 1970s and 80s—deployed thousands of scientists to figure out chemicals to make foods more addictive. These ingredients did not exist 100 years ago, and humans are not biologically adapted to eat them. Hundreds of these chemicals are banned in Europe but are ubiquitous in American processed foods.

The second culprit is toxic chemicals in our food, medicine, and environment. Pesticides, food additives, pharmaceutical drugs, and toxic waste permeate every cell of our bodies. The impact on our children's hormones is relentless. Many of these chemicals increase estrogen. Because young children are ingesting so many of these hormone disruptors, America’s puberty rate is now occurring at ages 10 to 13—six years earlier than girls reached puberty in 1900. Our country has the earliest puberty rates of any continent onthe Earth. This is not because of better nutrition; this is not normal. Breast cancer, which is also estrogen-driven, now strikes one in eight women. We are mass-poisoning all of our children and adults.

Considering the grievous human toll from this tragic epidemic of chronic disease, it seems crass to mention the damage it does to our economy. But I will say it is crippling the nation’s finances. When my uncle was president, our country spent zero dollars on chronic disease. Today, government healthcare spending is almost entirely for chronic disease. It is double the military budget and is the fastest-growing item in the federal budget. Chronic disease costs the economy as a whole five times our military budget, creating a 20% drag on everything we do and aspire to.

Minority communities suffer disproportionately. People worry about DEI or bigotry of any kind, but this dwarfs those concerns. We are systematically poisoning minorities across this country. Industry lobbyists have ensured that most of the food in lunch programs, 70% of food stamps, and 70% of school lunches are processed foods. There are no vegetables—nothing you would want to eat. We are just poisoning poor citizens, and that is why they bear the highest chronic disease burden of any demographic in our country, and the highest in the world. The same food industry lobbied to ensure that nearly all agricultural subsidies go to commodity crops that are the feedstock for processed food. These policies are destroying small farms and our soils. We give about eight times as much in subsidies to tobacco as we do to fruits and vegetables. It makes no sense if we want a healthy country.

The good news is we can change all this, and we can change it quickly. America can get healthy again. To do that, we need to do three things. First, we need to root out the corruption in our health agencies. Second, we need to change the incentives in our healthcare system. Third, we need to inspire Americans to get healthy again. Eighty percent of NIH grants go to people with conflicts of interest. These are people from the processed food industry. They are deciding what Americans eat, what goes into our school lunch programs, and what foods are recommended in programs like WIC and food stamps. The people in control are corrupted and conflicted individuals working for giant for-profit corporations.

Seventy-five percent of FDA funding does not come from taxpayers; it comes from Big Pharma. Pharma executives, consultants, and lobbyists cycle in and out of these agencies. With President Trump’s backing, I’m going to change that. We are going to staff these agencies with doctors who are free from industry funding. We are going to make sure that decisions made for consumers, doctors, and patients are informed by unbiased science. A sick child is the best thing for the pharmaceutical industry because when adults develop chronic conditions, they are put on medication for life.

Imagine what will happen when Medicare starts paying for Ozempic, which costs $1,500 a month. It’s recommended for children as young as six for a condition—obesity—that is completely preventable and barely existed 100 years ago. Seventy-four percent of Americans are obese. If all of them took this prescription, it would cost $3 trillion a year. This drug is made by Novo Nordisk, the biggest company in Europe—a Danish company. The Danish government does not recommend it; they recommend diet changes and exercise to treat obesity. In our country, the recommendation is for children as young as six. Novo Nordisk’s entire value is based on its projections of what it will sell in America.

The food lobbyists have a bill in front of Congress today, backed by the White House, Vice President Harris, and President Biden, to allow this to happen. This $3 trillion cost is going to bankrupt our country. For a fraction of that amount, we could buy organic food for our families—three meals a day—and eliminate diabetes altogether. We are going to bring healthy food back to school lunches. We are going to stop subsidizing the worst foods with agricultural subsidies. We are going to get toxic chemicals out of our food. We are going to reform the entire food system.

We need new leadership in Washington. Both the Democratic and Republican parties are in bed with the big food producers, Big Pharma, and Big Ag, which are among the DNC’s major donors. Vice President Harris has expressed no interest in addressing this issue. Four more years of consolidating neocon power will cause our children to suffer the most.

I got involved with chronic disease 20 years ago, not because I chose to or wanted to, but because it was thrust upon me. It was an issue that should have been central to the environmental movement. I was a central leader at that time. It was widely ignored by all the institutions, including the NGOs who should have been protecting our kids against toxins. It was an orphaned issue, and I have a weakness for orphans. I watched generations of children get sicker and sicker. I have 11 siblings and seven kids myself, and I was always conscious of what was happening in their classrooms and to their friends. I watched these sick, damaged kids in that generation—almost all of them damaged. Nobody in power seemed to care or even notice.

For 19 years, I prayed every morning that God would put me in a position to end this calamity. The chronic disease crisis was one of the primary reasons for my running for president, along with ending censorship and the Ukraine war. It is the reason I made the heart-wrenching decision to suspend my campaign and support President Trump. This decision is agonizing for me because of the difficulties it will cause my wife, children, and friends. But I have the certainty that this is what I am meant to do. That certainty gives me eternal peace, even in storms.

If I am given the chance to fix the chronic disease crisis, I promise that within two years, we will watch the chronic disease burden lift dramatically. We will make Americans healthy again. Within four years, America will be a healthier country—stronger, more resilient, more optimistic, and happier. I will not fail in doing this.

Ultimately, the future, however it happens, is in God’s hands, in the hands of the American voters, and those of President Trump. If President Trump is elected and honors his word, the vast burden of chronic disease that demoralizes and bankrupts the country will disappear.

This is a spiritual journey for me. I reached my decision through deep prayer and hard-nosed logic. I asked myself what choices I must make to maximize my chances to save America’s children and restore national health. I felt that if I refused this opportunity, I would not be able to look myself in the mirror knowing I could have saved the lives of countless children. I am 70 years old. I might have a decade to be effective. I cannot imagine a President Harris allowing me or anyone to solve these dire problems. After eight years of President Harris, any opportunity for me to fix the problem will be out of my reach forever.

President Trump told me this is what he wants to be his legacy. I am choosing to believe that he will follow through. His son, his biggest donors, and his closest friends all support this objective. My joining the Trump campaign will be a difficult sacrifice for my wife and children, but if there is even a small chance of saving these kids, I must take it. Ultimately, the only thing that will save our country and our children is if we choose to love our kids more than we hate each other.

That is why I launched my campaign—to unify America. My dad and uncle made such an enduring mark on the character of our nation, not so much because of any particular policies they promoted, but because they were able to inspire profound love for our country and fortify our sense of ourselves as a national community held together by ideals. They were able to put their love into the hearts of ordinary Americans and to unify a national populist movement of Americans—blacks, whites, Hispanics, urban and rural Americans—with love, high hopes and a culture of kindness. That continued to radiate among Americans. That is the spirit with which I ran my campaign and I intend to bring into the campaign of President Trump, instead of vitriol and polarization -- the goals that we can achieve if only we are with each other. The most unifying theme for all Americans is that we all love our children. If we all unite around that issue now, we can finally give them the protection and health and the future that they deserve.