Aaron Rodgers might be coming to a campaign stop near you — not as a surrogate but as a candidate.
The New York Times reported that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. approached the New York Jets quarterback about serving as his vice president on a third-party ticket.
Vice President Aaron Rodgers?
Keep in mind Rodgers will ostensibly be a quarterback for an NFL team paying him tens of millions of dollars during the height of campaign season — and that team has planned its entire window around him being healthy and available.
Rodgers has yet to finish an entire offensive series since his trade from the Packers last spring. He tore his Achilles on the fourth play of the 2023 season and was lost for the year.
What’s more, this news comes just two months after Rodgers lectured his Jets’ teammates about letting distractions get in the way of success.
“Anything that doesn’t have anything to do with winning needs to be assessed,” Rodgers said in January.
“So anything in this building that we’re doing individually or collectively that has nothing to do with real winning needs to be assessed … It’s not a half-the-time thing, it’s not a sometimes thing, it’s not a most-of-the-time thing, it’s an every-time thing.
“If you want to be a winning organization and to put yourself in position to win championships and be competitive, everything that you do matters, and the bull—- that has nothing to do with winning needs to get out of the building. So, that’ll be the focus moving forward.”
Errrr … maybe.
Even entertaining the idea of a vanity run — no third-party candidate has ever won the presidency and Kennedy is running a distant, distant third behind Donald Trump and Joe Biden in an average of recent polls — is a distraction.
But Rodgers has never met a microphone he hasn’t loved, and Kennedy are kindred spirits.
Both are vaccine skeptics and conspiracy theorists.
Politically, they fit.
And Rodgers has been an effective — if not divisive — advocate for many of the priorities the two men share.
Rodgers and ex-Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura — a former professional wrestler — are reportedly on Kennedy’s shortlist.
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Rodgers, per the New York Times, has spoken with Kennedy “pretty continuously” for the past month and has been open to the VP overtures.
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