Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Suspends Campaign to Support Trump

Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has suspended his campaign and is shifting support to fellow crypto-friendly politician Donald Trump.

“I cannot in good conscience ask my staff and volunteers to keep working their long hours, or ask my donors to keep giving when I cannot honestly tell them that I have a real path to the White House,” the independent party candidate said on Friday.

Kennedy has been friendly toward the crypto industry over the past year. Most recently, he promised to issue several Bitcoin-related executive orders, including directing the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Marshals Service to transfer about 200,000 Bitcoin held by the U.S. government to the Department of Treasury to be held as a “strategic asset.”

Kennedy said he would remove his name in battleground states but stated that people can still vote for him in most states that are clearly Republican or Democrat.

“I want everyone to know that I am not terminating my campaign,” Kennedy added. “I am simply suspending it and not ending it.”

Support for Trump

Kennedy also announced on Friday that he would be backing Republican candidate and former president Trump. Both candidates spoke at the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville in July. Trump has made inroads with the crypto industry by selecting crypto-friendly J.D. Vance as his running mate and promised to advocate for bitcoin miners.

Trump recently named Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick to lead his transition team if he returns to the White House. Cantor Fitzgerald has been a custodian for Tether since late 2021, Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino previously told The Block.

On Thursday, Trump announced his endorsement of a crypto project called “The DeFiant Ones,” which is spearheaded by two of his sons. A Telegram channel called “The DeFiant Ones” stated that there would be a new DeFi platform to “cut out the corrupt, expensive and inefficient middlemen.”

“They [banks and financial institutions] shut people out, deny them loans, drown them in paperwork and kill them with legal and processing fees,” the message read. “Our entire family has experienced this firsthand… we’ve been de-banked, de-platformed and had every political game imaginable played on us. These banks and the elites who run them want absolute control but that ends now.”