How the ‘Unthinkable’ Alliance Between RFK Jr. and Donald Trump Came to Be

It was July 2024, and independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign appeared to be losing momentum.

With the election approaching, Kennedy — a scion of one of America’s most storied Democratic families, a prominent anti-vaccine activist, and a vocal critic at the time of both Donald Trump and Joe Biden — was struggling to raise funds and land mainstream media attention.

As the opening scene of the new documentary The Rise of RFK Jr. explores, then came an event that would set in motion a dramatic change to Kennedy’s trajectory and his political fortunes: the assassination attempt on Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on July 13.

“We all saw this image of Trump standing with the American flag blowing behind him and blood running down his face. I don’t know how you beat that image,” Del Bigtree, a podcaster, vaccine critic, close Kennedy friend, and Kennedy campaign communications director, says in the documentary. “Let me speak for myself — I just thought, ‘He just won the presidency of the United States of America.’”

For those close to Kennedy — whose childhood was marked by the assassinations of his uncle, John F. Kennedy, and his father, Robert F. Kennedy — the act of political violence felt like a disturbing echo of history.

“I felt a spiritual urge to call Bobby and put on his radar that this might be the time to call President Trump,” Kennedy campaign adviser Calley Means tells FRONTLINE. “And Bobby, after some reflection, thought that was a good idea. And I worked with Tucker Carlson, who connected Bobby to President Trump as he was leaving the hospital.”

What happened next unfolds in the excerpt embedded above — including Trump telling Kennedy that they should work together.

“We were all sort of shocked,” Bigtree says. “We just thought it was going to be a condolences, you know, call to wish everyone well, but it really sunk deep into Bobby. And we’re like, wait a minute, are you — you’re actually considering joining President Trump? And he said, ‘I don’t know.’ Which meant, to all of us, ‘Oh, my God; he’s thinking about this.’”

He was indeed. As The Rise of RFK Jr. goes on to explore, in an alliance some media outlets said would’ve once seemed “unthinkable,” Kennedy broke with his family and their Democratic legacy and endorsed Trump, became a star in the MAGA movement — and is now one of the most powerful members of the new administration, overseeing controversial actions that are reshaping American government and public health, from vaccine and food and drug policy to disease outbreaks and research.

“He’s already had a period in his life when he was an addict, he publicly had a fall from grace, rehabilitated himself, he became a vaccine skeptic, fell from mainstream grace,” Clare Malone of The New Yorker says in the excerpt. “Now he’s been rehabilitated by a powerful sector of American society. He’s kind of becoming a Kennedy again in that glamorous Camelot way, but within the Trump movement.”

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The Rise of RFK Jr.

October 21, 2025

Premiering Tues., Oct. 21, 2025, on PBS and online, The Rise of RFK Jr. examines how he got there — and the sweeping influence his alliance with President Trump has allowed him to exert. The two-hour film traces Kennedy’s life from a childhood in the public eye to tragedy and scandal and conspiracy theories, to his position now leading agencies he railed against for years.

Dr. Daniel Jernigan, one of several top Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials who resigned under Kennedy, speaks out in the film: “If he continues in the current approach, it will make decisions to get vaccinated more difficult,” Jernigan says. “As you see an erosion of people’s trust, you’ll see the numbers of people getting vaccinated going down, and you’ll start to see the numbers of illnesses coming back up. And that’s an awful thing to think about in a country that has put so much into protecting Americans with vaccines so far.”

But Kennedy’s die-hard supporters, especially from the anti-vaccine movement, welcome the changes he is bringing to America’s health system.

“He’s trying to triage the worst health situation this country has ever found itself in,” Bigtree says in the documentary. “You don’t have time to have disagreement around you. Get someone in here who agrees with where we’re going, and let’s do this.”

Timely and gripping, The Rise of RFK Jr. is a must-watch documentary on one of the most prominent and controversial people in U.S. politics right now, and his impact on the country.