The alliance between Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and former President Donald Trump, which was fortified Tuesday with Kennedy’s appointment to Trump’s transition team, is a sharp turnabout in a long-combative relationship.

Kennedy had spent the better part of a decade lobbing attacks at Trump, portraying him as a buffoonish, anti-democratic bully who led a feckless administration.

“In many ways, he’s discredited the American experiment with self-governance,” Kennedy said of Trump in early 2020.

Kennedy set aside his criticisms when he suspended his long-shot independent presidential campaign last Friday, saying that he was backing Trump because he was “choosing to believe” that “this time” Trump would bring him into his administration — something that did not happen for Kennedy the last time around, after they met in 2017. Kennedy, reached for comment, pointed to the remarks he made Friday.

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Kennedy acknowledged Friday that he and the former president “don’t agree on everything.” But he said that they had found common ground on certain issues, and he took a different, far more positive tone in front of a cheering crowd of Trump supporters in Glendale, Arizona.

“Don’t you want a president who’s going to protect America’s freedoms, and who’s going to protect us against totalitarianism?” Kennedy asked Friday.

Six years earlier, he had accused Trump of “systematically” supporting totalitarian governments around the world.

Here’s a look back at 12 times Kennedy ridiculed Trump and his policies.

July 2, 2024: “Donald Trump was a terrible president”

In an appearance on the “Breaking Points” podcast after the debate between Trump and President Joe Biden, Kennedy said Trump had turned the “government over to corporate pirates” during his presidency.

In calling Trump a “terrible president,” Kennedy argued that he had made some compelling promises but had not followed through on them. “I don’t think he’s capable of meeting the expectations and fulfilling the promises that he raises with his rhetoric.”

June 19, 2024: “Absurd and terrifying”

Kennedy said on social media that Trump had an “imperial plan” for American foreign policy.

“It is not an ‘America First’ strategy, nor will it make America great,” Kennedy wrote, calling the former president’s policies “absurd and terrifying.”

June 13, 2024: “He spent more money than all presidents”

Kennedy regularly targeted Trump’s stewardship of the economy, highlighting significant increases in the national debt between 2017 and 2021. He described the risk of further growth in the debt as “existential.”

“President Trump ran up $8 trillion — more money than every president in United States history from George Washington to George Bush,” Kennedy said on “Piers Morgan Uncensored.” (A calculation by the liberal Urban Institute in Washington found that deficit growth under Trump was the third-highest in U.S. history when measured as a share of the economy, behind increases under Bush and Abraham Lincoln.)

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June 11, 2024: “A weakness for swamp creatures”

During his campaign, Kennedy repeatedly suggested that Trump presided over a corrupt administration.

“Despite rhetoric to the contrary, President Trump has a weakness for swamp creatures, especially corporate monopolies, their lobbyists, and their money,” Kennedy wrote on social media in June. “After promising to drain the swamp, instead, he hired swamp creatures to regulate their own industries.”

May 24, 2024: “He didn’t stand up for the Constitution”

Addressing the Libertarian National Convention, Kennedy chastised Trump over his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, saying that he had presided over lockdowns that produced the “greatest restriction on individual liberties this country has ever known.”

“He didn’t stand up for the Constitution when it really mattered,” Kennedy said.

April 27, 2024: “A barely coherent barrage of wild and inaccurate claims”

Pushing to debate Trump in the spring, Kennedy unloaded on the former president, who had claimed that Democrats had planted Kennedy in the race to help their party.

“When frightened men take to social media they risk descending into vitriol, which makes them sound unhinged,” Kennedy wrote on social media. “President Trump’s rant against me is a barely coherent barrage of wild and inaccurate claims.”

April 1, 2024: “Appalling”

Appearing on CNN, Kennedy said Trump’s efforts to reverse the outcome of the 2020 election were “appalling.”

“I’m not going to defend President Trump on that,” Kennedy said. He added: “There’s many things that President Trump has done that are appalling.”

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Jan. 14, 2020: “He’s a bully”

Early in the 2020 election cycle, Kennedy told Yahoo Finance that Trump had “discredited” American democracy, calling him a “bully.”

“He’s a bully, and I don’t like bullies,” Kennedy said. “And I don’t think that that’s part of American tradition.”

May 17, 2018: “Buffoonery at a high level”

At a conference in Philadelphia a little over a year into Trump’s presidency, Kennedy said Trump was severely damaging the United States’ reputation abroad — and also bruising the idea of democracy itself.

“If you live in China today, and you’re looking at what’s happening in the United States, why would you ever say, we want to switch our system for that system, which can produce that kind of buffoonery at a high level?” Kennedy asked.

Kennedy said Trump was “purposefully and systematically” supporting “tyrannical” governance by other world leaders. “He is also encouraging it by the example of what a disaster democracy’s become,” Kennedy added.

Aug. 15, 2017: “I don’t like President Trump’s environmental policies”

In an interview with the science and medical news website Stat early in the Trump presidency, Kennedy said: “I don’t like President Trump’s environmental policies, and I would not endorse them.”

“I would say that President Trump’s administration is essentially destroying 30 years of my work on environmental issues,” said Kennedy, who began to work on efforts to preserve the environment the 1980s.

Still, Kennedy, an anti-vaccine activist, said in the interview that he had engaged in talks with the Trump White House about vaccine safety.

Aug. 5, 2016: “It’s scary”

Kennedy used those two words to describe Trump’s political rise, three months before Trump beat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.

In an interview with Larry King, Kennedy said that he was squarely behind Clinton and that Trump was tapping into an “atavistic urge for a leader who is kind of a man on horseback who’s decisive, who’s violent.” He added: “It’s scary.”

March 15, 2005: “We need some positive role models”

More than a decade before Trump rode down the golden Trump Tower escalator and into presidential politics, Kennedy had publicly criticized the New York real estate mogul.

In an interview with The Boston Globe, Kennedy cast Trump’s flashy life as a poor example for Americans to follow.

“At this point we’re being sold role models like Donald Trump — television is saying this is a guy that we ought to be apprenticing for and modeling our lives after,” Kennedy told The Globe. “I think we need some positive role models as well, that stress what’s important about life — that we’re not just materialistic beings, we are spiritual beings as well.”

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Tim Balk/Adriana Zehbrauskas
c. 2024 The New York Times Company