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Shazam! star Zachary Levi endorses Donald Trump after RFK Jr suspends campaign

Actor stirred controversy in 2023 after sharing a tweet interpreted to have ‘anti-vaccine’ sentiments

Tom Murray
New York
Sunday 29 September 2024 13:31 EDT
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Shazam! star Zachary Levi has endorsed Republican candidate Donald Trump for president after his first choice, Robert F Kennedy Jr, dropped out of the race last month.

The DC actor appeared at a Donald Trump rally in Michigan on Saturday to throw his support behind the former president.

“I’m not gonna take too much time, but I did just wanna just give you a little context about why Shazam is sitting here talking to you about these various things,” said Levi, referencing his superhero character.

“I grew up in my family that was Christian conservative, that was pretty much the lane that we were in. My parents were Kennedy Democrats that then turned into Reagan Republicans, and they taught me to have a healthy level of distrust for the government and a healthy level of distrust for industry that runs amok.

“And for a long time, I was like, ‘Man, I really want to find a politician that represents all of the things that I want and I want to see in a presidential candidate.’ And this year, I found Bobby Kennedy, and I thought, ‘Man, this guy is it. He’s the real deal.’ And in a perfect world, whatever that would look like, perhaps I would have voted for Bobby. But we don’t live in a perfect world. In fact, we live in a very broken one, we live in a country that has been hijacked by a lot of people who want to take this place way off the cliff. And we want to stop that, right?”

Levi continued: “We’re here to make sure that we are going to take back this country, we are going to make it great again, we are going to make it healthy again. And so, I stand with Bobby, and I stand with Tulsi, and I stand with everyone else who is standing with President Trump. Because I do believe, of the two choices that we have, and we only have two, Donald Trump, President Trump is the man that can get us there. And he’s gonna get us there because he’s gonna have the backing and the support and the wisdom and the knowledge and the fight that exists in Robert Kennedy Jr and former representative Tulsi Gabbard.”

Zachary Levi said his first choice in the 2024 US presidential election was Robert F Kennedy Jr
Zachary Levi said his first choice in the 2024 US presidential election was Robert F Kennedy Jr (Getty Images)

Kennedy suspended his campaign last month, endorsing Trump and his running mate JD Vance.

Kennedy, who infamously revealed during his campaign that a parasitic worm had embedded itself in his brain and died there, blew through millions in cash to get to his present five percent share of the expected national vote in November. Polls showed that figure continuing to drop, and the rest of his own family fully disavowed his candidacy.

In January 2023, two months before the release of Shazam! Fury of the Gods, Levi shocked fans with his response to a tweet asking if Covid-19 vaccine maker Pfizer was “a real danger to the world”.

“Hardcore agree,” he wrote.

While the first Shazam! (2019) film was warmly received, the second was such a critical and financial bomb that the film’s director David F Sandberg has vowed to leave the world of superheroes behind.

Levi subsequently made a number of public statements decrying the treatment Fury of the Gods received from critics.

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