Robert Kennedy meets with the media for his big announcement today -- but his court filings stepped on his surprise. The Associated Press took a close look at his campaign's submission in Pennsylvania rather than in Arizona to discover what the RFK's plan for the election will be. 

And it's exactly what we thought:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign said in a Pennsylvania court filing Friday that he’s endorsing Donald Trump for president.

The campaign also requested that he be removed from the Pennsylvania ballot, though it wasn’t immediately clear that he was officially dropping out of the race. It came a day after he sought to be removed from Arizona’s ballot. He is running as an independent.

That takes some of the suspense out of the announcement in Phoenix, which still hasn't started despite its 2 ET schedule. While we're waiting to watch that presser, let's take a look at how this could impact the race. Newsweek reports that there is some level of excitement for Trump among RFK supporters already:

A number of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. supporters recently said on social media they will vote for Donald Trump if the independent presidential candidate drops out of the 2024 election and endorses the Republican nominee as a new poll found that if Kennedy Jr. leaves the race more of his supporters would lean towards backing the former president than Vice President Kamala Harris. ...

A number of self-described Kennedy Jr. supporters on X, formerly Twitter, said they are either open to switching their votes to Trump should the environmental campaigner and vaccine sceptic leave the contest, or had already decided to do so.

Click over to read the anecdotal submissions, but Newsweek has some polling data that also supports the theory that RFK's endorsement could lift Trump:

Meanwhile, a survey of 1,867 likely U.S. voters conducted by Outward Intelligence between August 18 and 22 and published on Thursday found that if Kennedy Jr. does drop out of the race, 59 percent of his voters would lean towards backing Trump against 41 percent for Harris. Overall, the poll gave Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, a six-point lead over Trump, with 50 percent of the vote against 44 percent, and had a margin of error of 2.3 percent.

Separately, an analysis of recent polling by election website RacetotheWH found that the exclusion of third-party candidates, of whom Kennedy Jr. is by far the highest polling, would flip North Carolina and Nevada from being a Harris win to one for Trump.

Well, perhaps, but Trump leads in North Carolina by five points already in the RCP aggregate tracking. 

Assuming that Kennedy sticks to this position in the presser -- and again, why do this in Phoenix otherwise? -- it pops the media balloon from Kamala Harris' speech last night. This will become the big discussion in the Sunday morning talk shows, for instance, as everyone tries to game out what impact this will have, if any. It also gives Trump a more legitimate claim to "unity" than Harris, given Kennedy's previous progressivism and perhaps especially Nicole Shanahan's, RFK's running mate.

Here's the video stream of RFK's presser. As of now, the world still awaits his statement.

Update: Here we go:

Kennedy lashed out at the Democrat Party for being the party of war, of censorship, and corruption. It is not his father's party any longer, Kennedy declared, and needs to be stopped. He paid tribute to his staffers, and said that he was endorsing Trump to "leverage" their achievements in the advancement of peace and prosperity. 

"Democracy has become little more than a slogan for our political institutions, for our media," Kennedy lamented, "and for the Democratic Party." Kennedy blasted Democrats for their "lawfare" against both his campaign and against Trump, while committing "a palace coup" against Biden after the "predictable" outcome of the debate. He also tore into Democrats for anointing Kamala Harris without any democratic process at all, "only smoke and mirrors ... at the Chicago circus." And he ripped the media for its complicity in covering up the coup and shrugging off the Harris strategy of hiding from reporters. 

Kennedy accused American media outlets of colluding with both the DNC and government agencies on censorship. It's a "naked exercise of executive power" against its political opponents, and told reporters in the room that they and their employers are responsible for the decline of American democracy as a result. 

"Governments don't censor lies," Kennedy observed. "They don't fear lies. They censor the truth."

Update: Kennedy is still talking, but he's not withdrawing from the ballot in all states. He's withdrawing in battleground states, however, and is at least suggesting that his supporters vote for Trump to stop Harris. 

In his remarks, RFK Jr. says that he cannot continue a race that he has no chance of winning (he claims this is due to a government-run conspiracy against him, for which he provided no evidence).

He encourages his supporters to vote for him if they live in blue states or red…

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) August 23, 2024

He encourages his supporters to vote for him if they live in blue states or red states, but says he is removing his name from ballots in swing states and discouraging voters from voting for him in swing states where it is too late to remove his name.

Instead, he says, they should vote for Trump.

Update: RFK says that there are going to be areas of "fierce" disagreement with Trump, but at least he's willing to talk. Harris refused to even engage, which is a driving factor in his decision to pull out of the battleground states and push his voters toward Trump. 

Fun fact: almost all of the US media outlets cut their live coverage after he accused them of participating in government censorship.