德克萨斯州奥斯汀-独立总统候选人小罗伯特·F·肯尼迪在一周内饱受自我伤害言论的困扰，这使他不得不为自己的健康状况辩护，并在面临自己竞选团队的异议后匆忙修改自己在堕胎问题上的立场。
但在周一，他有一些值得庆祝的事情:他有望在德克萨斯州的选票上赢得一席之地，这是该州独立候选人的一次政变，迫使独立候选人从全州注册选民中收集至少11.3万个签名，比大多数州的要求多得多。该运动向德克萨斯州州务卿办公室递交了几箱签名，州务卿办公室的一名女发言人告诉ABC新闻，该运动的请愿书“正在审查中”。
肯尼迪在奥斯汀的一次集会上与他的竞选伙伴妮可·沙纳汉(Nicole Shanahan)一起宣传了这一成就，后者的出现本身就值得注意，因为这位加州律师自3月底被宣布为肯尼迪的竞选伙伴以来一直保持着隐居的竞选方式。
德克萨斯州是肯尼迪竞选团队表示已经达到投票标准的第14个州。签名要求也使它成为最艰苦的工作。
肯尼迪在奥斯汀的舞台上说:“如果你能在德克萨斯州取得成功，你就能在任何地方取得成功。”
然而，竞选团队在每个州获得选票仍面临障碍，肯尼迪和他的助手表示他们将实现这一目标。
他们已经面临着在内华达州从头开始签名的前景，因为他们提交的请愿书中没有副总统候选人的名字，违反了该州的规定。
民主党人可能会试图阻挠肯尼迪的进步，就像他们已经在夏威夷尝试过的那样。在夏威夷民主党质疑一个专门为肯尼迪成立的新政党的选票准入请愿书后，该州做出了不利于夏威夷民主党的裁决。
沙纳汉首次亮相，但一些肯尼迪选民仍持怀疑态度
本周末的焦点集中在沙纳汉身上，她周六在休斯顿的竞选活动中首次亮相，两天后陪同肯尼迪参加了奥斯汀的集会。
休斯顿的活动是一个亲密的小组式论坛，专注于刑事司法改革，让投入时间和金钱解决司法系统问题的沙纳汉展示了她最明显的特质:她的真实性和对她所关心的事情的热情。
在她向休斯顿的观众发表演讲之前，她转向每个小组成员，所有人都描述了与法律有关的疤痕经历，并逐一向他们表示感谢。随后，她在讨论“美国精神冷酷的遗产”时忍住了眼泪。
她甚至准备了一句心理学家卡尔·荣格的名言，读起来很有戏剧效果。
但在她德克萨斯州露面期间，她的演讲有时会与观众的愿望不协调，特别是奥斯汀集会的参与者，他们似乎更渴望注入活力，而不是一场完美编织的独白。
当沙纳汉被介绍时，大约800名观众大声欢呼，但很快就安静下来，这位候选人的出现标志着她首次公开活动之一，她在演讲开始时说，“我想谈谈土壤”，这引发了一个关于需要修复美国“基础”的长达一分钟的隐喻。
沙纳汉最终触及了民粹主义和反体制的主题，这些主题将肯尼迪的许多支持者联系在一起，他批评民主党人和共和党人，并将政客描绘成只顾自己。但是她的出现让一些肯尼迪的支持者仍然试图理解她。
“我不太了解她，”54岁的企业家塔米·马卡姆在离开活动后告诉ABC新闻。“所以我想更多地了解她。我只知道，当他宣布他将让她担任副总统时，我知道很多我们的支持者都喜欢，哇，好吧，这是谁?”
马卡姆说，她对沙纳汉在奥斯丁的演讲印象深刻，但是，她警告说，“我需要更多的基础和坚实的知识，而不仅仅是喧闹。”
一周的损害控制
尽管肯尼迪和沙纳汉在周一是统一战线，但他们上周似乎对肯尼迪的堕胎立场感到困惑。
肯尼迪在上周发布的一次采访中告诉播客主持人塞奇·斯蒂尔，“我们应该让女人”选择接受手术，“即使是足月的。”
当斯蒂尔在与沙纳汉的单独谈话中转述肯尼迪的立场时，这位竞选伙伴明显感到惊讶。
“我的理解是，他绝对相信对堕胎的限制，”她告诉斯蒂尔。“我们已经谈过这个了。我不知道那是从哪里来的。”
与此同时，肯尼迪的工作人员、反堕胎活动人士安吉拉·金(Angela King)在社交媒体上表达了她对肯尼迪“完整任期”评论的异议，这是她建议的候选人令人尴尬的公开脱衣服，导致肯尼迪周五晚上在一篇冗长的X帖子中收回了堕胎评论。
“我支持正在形成的共识，即堕胎在一定程度上应该不受限制，”他写道。"我认为这个时间点应该是婴儿在子宫外能够存活的时候."
肯尼迪还发现自己上周回应了一些被挖掘出来的评论声称一名医生告诉他，在他的大脑中发现了一种寄生虫十多年前。此外，他患有汞中毒——他说这两种疾病都给他带来了“认知问题”
肯尼迪保证，他已经从每一期节目中完全康复，甚至试图关注蠕虫问题，这引起了媒体的极大关注:周五在洛杉矶的一个喜剧节目中意外亮相，他开玩笑说:“我的大脑蠕虫为我写了一些笑话。”他上周还在X上开玩笑说，他将“提议再吃5条脑虫，但仍能在辩论中击败特朗普总统和拜登总统。”
周五，这位候选人在一个播客上承认，他在新冠肺炎疫情期间向他的孩子提供假疫苗卡，以便他们能上大学，这需要注射疫苗，但实际上没有得到疫苗(他说，他的孩子没有接受他的提议，因为“他们不想撒谎。”)
“在冠状病毒肺炎时期，强迫服从非法疫苗授权成了常态，”Kennedy在x上写道，“正如小马丁·路德·金(Martin Luther King Jr .)所观察到的，‘一个人有不服从不公正法律的道德责任。’我据此采取了行动。"
After trying week, RFK Jr. brings Nicole Shanahan on campaign trail for rare appearance
AUSTIN, Texas --Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spent a week dogged by self-damaging rhetoric, leaving him to defend the state of his health and scramble to rework his position on abortion after facing dissent from within his own campaign.
But on Monday, he had something to celebrate: the prospect that he had earned a spot on the ballot in Texas, a coup for an independent candidate in a state that forces independents to gather at least 113,000 signatures from registered voters across the state, a much larger haul than required in most states. The campaign delivered boxes of signatures to the Texas Secretary of State's Office, a spokeswoman for whom told ABC News the campaign's petition is "under review."
Kennedy touted the accomplishment at an Austin rally alongside his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, whose appearance itself was noteworthy, as the California lawyer had maintained a reclusive approach to the campaign trail since she was announced as Kennedy's running mate in late March.
Texas is the 14th state in which the Kennedy campaign says it has met the criteria for ballot access. The signature requirement also made it the most grueling.
"If you can get on in Texas, you can get on everywhere," Kennedy said on stage in Austin.
Yet the campaign still faces hurdles to gain ballot access in each state, a goal Kennedy and his aides say they will achieve.
Already, they face the prospect of starting their signature-gathering from scratch in Nevada after they submitted petition forms that lacked the name of a vice presidential candidate, violating the state's rules.
And Democrats will likely try to obstruct Kennedy's progress, as they already attempted in Hawaii, where the state ruled against the Hawaii Democratic Party after it challenged the ballot access petition of a new political party created just for Kennedy.
Shanahan makes trail debut, but some Kennedy voters still skeptical
Much of the spotlight this weekend was on Shanahan, who made her debut on the campaign trail in Houston on Saturday before accompanying Kennedy at the Austin rally two days later.
The Houston event was an intimate panel-like forum that focused on criminal justice reform and allowed Shanahan, who has invested time and money into addressing issues in the justice system, to showcase her most tangible attribute: her authenticity and passion for the things she cares about.
Before she addressed the audience in Houston, she turned to each panelist, all of whom had described scarring experiences with the law, and thanked them one by one. She then fought tears during her remarks as she discussed the "legacy of the ruthlessness of the American psyche."
She even came prepared with a quote from the psychologist Carl Jung, reading it with dramatic effect.
But at times during her Texas appearances, her delivery felt dissonant with the desires of her audience, especially among attendees of the Austin rally, who seemed more eager for an injection of energy than a perfectly woven soliloquy.
The crowd of about 800 cheered loudly when Shanahan was introduced, but soon fell quiet when the candidate, whose appearance marked one of her first public events, opened her speech by saying, "I want to talk about soil," prompting a minuteslong metaphor about the need to fix America's "foundation."
Shanahan eventually hit the populist and anti-establishment themes that tie together many of Kennedy's supporters, criticizing Democrats and Republicans and painting politicians as out for themselves. But her appearance left some Kennedy supporters still trying to figure her out.
"I don't know much about her," Tammy Markham, a 54-year-old entrepreneur, told ABC News after leaving the event. "So I want to find out more about her. I just know that when he announced that he was going to have her as vice president, I know a lot of us supporters were like, woah, OK, who is this?"
Markham said she was impressed with Shanahan's speech in Austin, but, she cautioned, "it takes more foundation and rock-solid knowledge for me to be impressed than just the brouhaha."
A week of damage control
Though they were a united front on Monday, Kennedy and Shanahan seemed confused last week about Kennedy's abortion stance.
Kennedy told podcast host Sage Steele in an interview released last week that "we should leave it to the woman" to choose to have the procedure, "even if it's full term."
When Steele relayed Kennedy's position in a separate conversation with Shanahan, the running mate appeared visibly surprised.
"My understanding is that he absolutely believes in the limits on abortion," she told Steele. "And we've talked about this. I don't know where that came from."
At the same time, Angela King, a Kennedy staffer and anti-abortion activist, aired her dissent to Kennedy's "full term" comments on social media, an embarrassingly public undressing of the candidate she advises, which led Kennedy to walk back the abortion comments in a lengthy X post Friday night.
"I support the emerging consensus that abortion should be unrestricted up until a certain point," he wrote, in part. "I believe that point should be when the baby is viable outside the womb."
Kennedy also found himself last week responding to unearthed comments where heclaimed a doctor told him that a parasitic worm was found in his brainmore than a decade ago. Also, that he suffered from mercury poisoning -- both of which he said gave him "cognitive problems."
Kennedy assured he has made a full recovery from each issue and even tried to lean into the worm issue, which garnered significant media attention: making a surprise appearance at a Los Angeles comedy show on Friday, he cracked, "My brain worm wrote some jokes for me." He also joked last week on X that he would "offer to eat 5 more brain worms and still beat President Trump and President Biden in a debate."
On Friday, the candidate issued an explanation for an admission he made on a podcast that he offered his children fake vaccine cards during the COVID-19 pandemic so they could attend universities, which required the shot without actually getting one (he said his children did not accept his offer since "they didn't want to lie.")
"Coercion to force submission to illegal vaccine mandates became the norm during Covid," Kennedy wrote on X. "As Martin Luther King, Jr. observed, 'One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.' I acted accordingly."
