“We are not talking about the values that separate us, because we do not agree on everything, but about the values and issues that unite us,” said Kennedy Jr. shortly after ending his failed attempt to reach the White House, and support Trump.
However, he failed to mention that he and Trump have in common the same billionaire mega-donor, a reclusive heir to a Gilded Age fortune who has so far invested more than $165 million in the 2024 campaign, highlighted an article by the digital outlet Common Dreams.
Timothy Mellon, grandson of plutocrat Andrew Mellon, has invested tens of millions of dollars in the Trump and Kennedy campaigns, making the secretive billionaire the largest individual donor to both, it reported.
According to documents filed by the Federal Election Commission, last month Mellon “made a $50 million cash infusion to the pro-Trump super PAC Make America Great Again, Inc.”
The campaign finance watchdog OpenSecrets revealed the day before that “this brings his total contributions to the group to $125 million this election cycle, including a $50 million check he wrote to the super PAC the day after Trump was convicted of 34 felonies.”
According to OpenSecrets’ analysis, “Mellon’s latest $50 million contribution represents more than 90 percent of what MAGA, Inc. raised in July.”
But the same mega-donor gave Kennedy $25 million through the hybrid PAC American Values 2024 earlier this year.
For Robert Reich, former US Secretary of Labor, it is “no surprise” that Kennedy dropped out of the 2024 race and joined Trump because they shared the same top donor and claimed that “RFK Jr.’s campaign was always a MAGA spoiler.”
Mellon is a member of a powerful group known as “guardian angels,” a label “for big donors who contribute 40 percent or more of a committee’s funds and are the top contributors to a political group,” OpenSecrets argued.
Spending by super PACs and other outside groups has surpassed $1 billion this election cycle, with the biggest spender to date being MAGA, Inc., Common Dreams added.
But American billionaires, who are collectively wealthier than ever, are not exclusively backing pro-Trump groups, the publication added.
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has written huge checks to Democratic PACs, and groups backing Democratic candidate Kamala Harris. Common Dreams recalled that during his speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Tuesday, Senator Bernie Sanders condemned the outsized influence of billionaire “oligarchs” on the American political process, particularly in the wake of the 2010 Supreme Court ruling on Citizens United.
“Billionaires from both parties should not be able to buy elections,” said Sanders, who argued “for the sake of our democracy” for the need to “overturn the Supreme Court’s disastrous decision in the Citizens United case and move toward public financing of elections.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who ran for president of the United States as a Democrat and then turned independent, is the nephew of assassinated President John F. Kennedy (1963) and son of Robert F. Kennedy, who was running for president in 1968, when he was killed.
By endorsing Trump, Kennedy Jr. completely broke with family tradition. “Our brother Bobby’s decision to endorse Trump today is a betrayal of the values our father and family hold most dear. It’s a sad ending to a sad story,” his brothers reacted.
Local media report that Kennedy Jr., a lawyer known at the beginning of his political career for his environmental activism, later began spreading conspiracy theories against vaccines, taking a hard line against Palestinian rights and downplaying the climate crisis.
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